differentiated instruction

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Differentiated instruction is simply when you adapt a particular lesson to fit the needs of a particular student. Not all people learn the same way. I do not have ProQuest but I simply googled differentiated instruction and I find many many resources. Differentiated instruction, you could say, is essentially at the heart of special education. Before mandated inclusion, students with special needs were placed into special classes that addressed those needs. Theoretically, those students were going to be "mainstreamed" into regular classes. Unfortunately, this rately happened.

For example, in my Title One program classes, I taught students who could not read above a certain level. I had small class sizes so it was easy to differentiate instruction to fit their needs. I tested formally and informally to see their growth, and chose instructional materials to fit their needs. My colleague, in the room next store to me, had all learning disabled students. As a matter of fact, we shared most of our students. I had another colleague, down the hall, who taught students whose reading levels were a little bit higher than mine. The problem was that students who were taught in these segregated classrooms tended to stay with the same set of classmates for all the time they were in high school. They were not segregated intentionally - the testing we used, the observations we made, all showed that they had special needs that, we felt, were best addressed in special classes.

I might also add, anecdotally, that all students did know what classes the other students were taking. All the special education classes were in the basement, so they referred to our classes as "basement" classes. They were "basement students," you could say, and many of them saw themselves as such, destined for the basement for the rest of their academic lives.

The theory then was that when the students were able to read or do math above a certain level, above the lowest rung of the ladder for a certain class, they would be "mainstreamed" into the general population of students, and they would be expected to learn just as any others. During that time, special education teachers were available to help such students when they needed help in this more challenging environment, and reading resource rooms remained open for anyone who needed special attention in reading.

It was easy for me then to differentiate instruction. It is much more difficult now. In theory, a student can be put into a math class intended for, say, 10th grade students, who has been tested at the 40th percentile. That means 60% of all students in the norming population (let's say in the US) are above that student's math skills. Or maybe the student shows an IQ of 80 or below. Proponents of inclusion would say that ALL students can be taught in the same classroom simply by using differentiated instruction.

I think that might be possible but it is very ...