It’s About Differentiation Instruction :)

As usual we were divided into groups to do a jigsaw via presentation on each group. My group got Differentiation Instruction to be discussed. To the point, it means as a teacher we are make a differentiation of pace, level, or kind of instruction to provide  a response toward our students learner’s need, interest, or learning style. There are four ways to do this instruction, rigorous, relevant, flexible & varied, and complex. Rigorous means we provide challenging instruction to push our students’ motivation in learning. Relevant means we focus on essential learning, not side trips learning. Flexible and varied mean we provide choices and more opportunities about how our students will learn. Complex means we challenge students’ thinking and engage them in deep and bread content.

As a teacher, learning this instruction is important. It’s because we should know and recognize our students’ capability and the differentiation of learning style each of them. So, we can provide more choices and opportunities to make them learn in different ways.

There are two steps to do this instruction. First is analyze the variety in our current instructional plans and second is modify, adapt, or design new approaches to instruction in response to students’ needs, interest, and learning preference. When we aware of the difference that can exist, we would be better to differentiate our instruction to reach as many students as possible.

There also seven factors that we should aware when we want to enable this instruction, cognitive abilities, learning style, socioeconomic and family factor, readiness, learning pace, gender influence, cultural or ethnic influence. Those factors can influence how our students learn and their capability in learning. Obviously, we can’t aware all of those. It’s an impossible thing to do. We can’t be a perfect teacher who can differentiate all our students. However, by learning this instruction, at least we can mineralize belief that students are all the same. If so, we can provide more choices and opportunities for students to enjoy the learning process.