Ed Brandao - Instructional Strategies for Differentiation

Scenario#1: High school/ Middle School Math (grades 7-12) classroom: 25 students

1. Student is hearing impaired: Learning environment– Student should have an unobstructed view and access to essential learning materials, provided in visual and/or tactile form as much as possible. Teacher should learn as much as possible about a fairly common condition (arguably a cultural minority) and, if necessary, learn at least rudimentary ASL.

2. Student has ADHD: Process – Lessons should engaging, not sedate. Student should have access to many different instances of the same information, ideally using different media. The idea is orienting the student's distraction.

3. Student has a reading disability: Learning environment – teacher and other students should point their browsers to http://geon.github.io/programming/2016/03/03/dsxyliea to experience how it is like to be dyslexic. Using a dyslexic-friendly font in learning materials may also help.

4. ELL Students - 1 at the Speech Emergent Stage, 2 at the Intermediate Fluency Stage, and 2 at the Advanced Fluency Stage: Product - An effort should be made to distinguish language ability from the knowledge of the topic. This is of course quite difficult, and more so for subjects in which there's significant overlap. A few ideas: questions should be simply phrased; diagrams and drawings should be provided whenever possible; if necessary, answers in the student's native language should be considered (employing a translator if necessary), as well as answers in non-language specific different formats (or less language-reliant).