MY EYE FOR DI

As a teacher, I’ve always faced a lot of challenges. Each day I glance into my world, I observe a sea of eyes filled with determination and few others filled with defiance to learn. Rooms filled with diverse personalities begging to be noticed. Absolutely convinced, that this is the biggest mistake in the past centuries of teaching that students had been treated as if they were variants of individual with the same abilities, interest and learning needs. Hence, no other method is the best to reach each student than Differentiated Instruction. Differentiated Instruction was introduced as the effective method that adheres to the learner-centered principle of the new curriculum during Mass training for K-12. It certainly focuses the learners, DI intends to maximize each student’s growth and success based on his readiness, interest and learning style. The teacher differentiating the instruction may use same material to all students but is required to use different strategies and to deliver the lessons at varying levels of difficulty suited the ability of each student. Admittedly, it appears to others that DI is somewhat harder to implement especially in heterogeneous classroom. It requires more work during the lesson planning and extra time in pro filling the learners. True it may sound , but as for me I’ve never counted how much work and time I put into it. And what matters the most is I effectively address my students learning preferences and effectively satisfy their learning needs through differentiated instruction- one size of clothing does not fit at all.

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The author is SST I at Betis High School