Use Differentiated Instructions to Engage Every Student

Chaoran Yao

TE 894

1. Motivation I teach five different grades, some are daily program and some are twice a week. I need to face the reality that my kids are intellectually different (different grades) and have different language ability (some have learnt Chinese for one year, daily or twice a week; some for two year, twice a week and some are beginners). I cannot expect one activity can fit for every grade. But even in one classroom setting, the kids learn things through different ways and are interest in different things. In many cases, when I capture some students, some students are not fully engaged.

2. Description of the situation Take my kindergarten for example, I have some naughty kids from the first beginning. They kept talking and playing with their neighbors and even moved their seats to other places. I think they are bodily-kinesthetic learners. So I designed activities liketo engage them at the beginning and at the end of the class. But some can only focus on these parts and refuse to learn others. Some are still distracted.

Kids likes competitions, stickers, stories and to be the teacher. Some are excited in showing off, like to make short dialogues and perform. I try to engage these active kids first because if they keep distracted and talking with others, I cannot continue with my lessons.

It was not until I played the video 1234567, did these kids paid full attention. These active kids were fully engaged and learnt the song by heart and learn very quickly. So did everybody fully engaged? No. As I mention before, I tried to engage the active kids first. At the meanwhile, I have some very quiet learner. Some even seem to be very low in my class. I have a kid who refuses to talk and refuses to get stickers. And another kid is only interested in stickers but refused to take part in any activity. The two kids sit very well, criss-crossed, but look at the ground and lean their faces on their hands. In one lesson, I havent find ways to attract every kid. When I captured some heart, I lose some.

3. Interpretation of the situation One of my issues about the classroom management is that I did not engage the whole class. The above problems further illustrate the emergent task for me is how to engage the class as a whole.

My first hypothesis for the above issue is that my activities did not fully cover their different learning styles. Reflecting how I teach the language, mostly I use flashcards and body movement. My teaching is better for students who are word, number, pictures and body smart, which, I think, suit my own learning style. However, my kids are diverse. Some are good at writing, some drawing, some speaking. I havent fully tapped ways for those music, people, self and nature smart kids. Some kids do not usually shout out the language as others, but they are introspected and learn quietly. Is every quiet learner is learning? Are they all introspected? No, of course. Exceptions please see the above examples. I think its because I havent find their learning style. Thats what I want to figure out during my following lessons.

My second hypothesis lies in different personality. Some kids are willing to show off and present what they have learnt to the teacher, the classmates and outside, like show in the Chinese restaurant. However, there are also some kids who are not willing to show off if they have acquired the language point. They just want to keep it in mind and do something else. Sometime, it may cause another type of classroom management because they feel boring. There is also a type of kids who just shy and do not want to speak, but actually they have acquired the language. The latter two types may create an illustration that they are not engaged.

My third hypothesis is for lacking incorporate learning. From the aspect of their learning style, my lessons ignored their interpersonal intelligence. As my principle pointed out, my lesson is lecture-liked way. I think about it every carefully, and try to fully understand what does that mean. When thinking about my own teaching, I found my teaching style is deeply influenced by how I was taught in China. The teacher, I, always leads the way. The activities are most about how I interact with my students, for example, the ask-and-answer mode, even when I ask the kids to be the teacher, its still the ask-and-answer mode. The student-to-student learning method is hardly touched. When learning the songs, I ask them to present as group or individually. They do not have many opportunities learning with peers. The activities ignored incorporate learning and communicating their friends. Especially in the kindergarten, I thought they were too young to learning from peers.

My fourth hypothesis is that my lesson plan is not so strongly related to life, which affected my kids motivation. Language learning should be set under meaningful language background. So far, I taught the family members, colors and some animals. My purpose is to make connection with their life. But I do not think thats enough. For those self-motivated kids, they may feel

proud to tell others what they learnt in the Chinese class or what certain words are in Chinese. However, in many cases, they are not contextually meaningful. Based on the above four hypothesis, its beneficial that I improve my teaching in the following directions: 1) To study my students different learning strengths and different personalities. 2) To explore more ways for incorporate learning and encourage they communicate with peers. 3) To make the language learning more meaningful by provide adequate meaningful context and making connections with their life.

4. The stakes: Who did/could gain or lose what? Try different ways to teach the whole class and engage everybody benefit in different ways. The first is helpful in classroom management. The second is to help build the kids confidence. The kids who are naturally good at language learning are easily to build their confidence. Some kids need to learn language in their own way. If so, they have the opportunity to gain extra points. The second benefit lead to the third---- Motivation.

5. Deliberation on Alternatives

I considered two main approaches to better engage the students; one is to apply a wide variety of ways to teach, the other is to make the content more related to the students life.

1) Applying different ways to teach the same content Using multiple ways to teach appeals the students different learning styles. When the students find they can learn through some of the activities, they make a success, which make them want

to learn more. According to the MI theory, the students are especially good at some aspects. In my class, some kids are always very energetic and would not stop touching each other. I need to find opportunities for them to move. Some kids like to see whats in the teachers hands. Some kids really like to repeat what I said and kept saying that. Some like murmur in their seats. Some only pay attention when its time to sing. The list goes on and on. Also, some kids preferred introspective learning and some prefer to learn in groups. Take performance for example, when I asked my kids to introduce themselves or sing the song. Some like to do presentations by themselves. Some feel comfortable when they are with a group of kids. Also, when doing a project, some cannot fold the papers on their own, they need to be in group. So as a teacher, I need to adjust my lessons to their different learning styles to make sure everybody succeed in learning. 2) Making the content more related to the students life

If the kids feel the learning irrelevant and feel helpless to use the language, they are distracted. The learning needs to be relevant to students life experiences and reflect students culture. To start with, the students are more interested. The most exciting themes for them are the selfintroduction and family members. They are proud to introduce themselves in Chinese and willing to tell others that they have a big brother in their family. More importantly, they are more willing to use it, because its meaningful. The classroom expression, such as I need to go party Stand up and line up, can best represent this type. Last but not least, frequently use makes it less likely to forget it. I need to bring the kindergartener to my classroom and bring them back after the Chinese class. Their classroom teachers used to let them wear the seatbelt in the hall way. Then I ask them to say that in Chinese when I lead them. They pick it very well.

Comparison of the two alternatives

When I looked at the two choices, I found both of them were very important to better engage every student. The first one talks about the form of instruction while the latter talks about the content of the instruction. Its important to decide what to teach as well as how to teach. However, when looking into the two matters, you will find mastering how to teach makes an efficient teacher while what to teach is already decided in the curriculum. Moreover, one significant benefit behind employing different teaching methods is repetition, which strengthens the memory of the knowledge. As the saying goes, Practice makes perfect. The importance of repetition in language learning is needless to say. When we are talking about the same themes and even the same vocabulary, the children still enjoy it in different games. Meanwhile, they will have a deep comprehension of the words when used in different situations. After several different ways of reviewing, the students will have a better understanding of the knowledge. So does that mean I will abandon the trying of make the language connected to the students life? No. The merits of making the content related to the students life are listed above. While I am making effort toward different methodologies, I need to consider making the learning more meaningful.

6. Develop a Plan

To accomplish my project, I need to make improvement in the following three aspects, i.e., materials preparation (before learning), usage of different teaching methods (during learning) and sum-up (after the learning). My first move would be providing a wide variety of visual, auditory and tactile learning

materials. I am more used to the flash cards, which appeals to visual kids. But I can consider about bringing real things into my class. When I teach the school stationary, instead of showing the pictures, I can bring the pencil, sharpener and books into the class, which are easily found in school. The kids can hold it, feel it and even use it when learning. When teaching the daily routines, I can ask them to move the bodies to present the action. I can also show them the videos and pick up the expressions from the videos.

My second move would be applying more songs, rhythm, story-telling, videos, role play and performances during my teaching. Students learn new things in different ways. For example, when I teach the 7 days of the week to my first graders, its hard for them to remember but easy to forget. So when teaching the 12 months, I plan to use simple songs to help them. The kids have a nature to show off and want to be confirmed. I would give them more chances to present themselves. Besides, its boring and meaningless to have the kids just read after me and repeat for several times. Even if they remember that for short time, they cannot really know how to use the words. To make the vocabulary meaningful to the kids, I need to put them into content.

My third move would be helping the kids to create their own personalized learning materials. This might be not so helpful for my kindergarten and 1st graders, because that might be hard for them, but will be beneficial to my higher elementary kids. First, we all a have sense of accomplishment, so do our kids. The kids will be proud of themselves when they can make a book after a topic. For example, I want them to design their own farm after we learn the farm animals.

Concerning about my assessment, I would use informal assessment mostly. How the kids are assessed is the same as how the kids learn. I would use different ways to assess the kids

productions. I cannot expect the kid have the same performance during one activity. They can present their learning by doing presentations, move their bodies, draw the pictures or read the books.

7. Implementation

After I set up the plan, I carried it out though out my classes. I used the song, Two Tigers, to help my 3rd graders to use and properlylearnt the measure word which appeared a lot in the sentences like (I have 2 dogs), and also reviewed the body parts. I asked my 4th graders to draw their families, pets and friends, and then accomplishing tasks by using making dialogs, role play and presentations to practice (This is my ). I designed many tasks, competitions and games for my 5th graders to learn the school supplies. But here, I want to, particularly, talk about how it goes when the 1st graders learnt shapes (triangle, rectangle, square and circle).

As I mentioned in Section 6, my plan goes in three aspects. First, before they learn, I prepare different types of learning materials, including die card (big laminated cards with Chinese characters and pinyin on one side) and colorful plastic shapes (borrowed from one of the classroom teachers).

Second, during the instructions, I teach in multiple ways. These are what we did in learning shapes. 1) They took risks to spell the pinyin after I showed the die cards. Then they repeated twice after me. 2) They were asked to find the characters that they already knew. They found very easily. Then they were encouraged to find the same characters in the four shapes and guess

the meaning. They found in the four shapes and guesses it means shape. They were asked to find the character appears on the blackboard. It took them some time to find . (They had line points on the blackboard and I recorded the points with .) I explained the meaning of . 3) They were encouraged to find the shapes in their lives. A lot of them said when we talked about . was the food we just learnt. 4) I asked them to work in pairs and made the shapes with their arms. 5) I asked them to make the shapes by themselves. After several times, they needed to close their eyes and did it individually. I gave some hint if I found that many kids needed help. 6) The kids used the rulers, which had the shapes model on, to draw the shapes after I gave command. 7) After they got familiar with the pronunciations, they worked together to have a competition. One kid from each line held a box of plastic shapes, waiting for orders. I showed the shapes to the rest of the class, they needed to say the names of the shapes. The four kids holding the shape box needed to get out the shapes when they heard the peers command.

Third, after they had a good sense of the new knowledge, they were helped to build their own learning materials. 1) After they got familiar with the names of the shapes. I asked them t draw the shapes on a piece of paper first according to my instructions. They were given a set of characters and pinyin. They first identify the characters and pinyin. Then they glued the names next to their drawings. They had a book of shapes. 2) We made Christmas trees and a snowman by using the shapes we have learnt. I taught the Christmas tree and snowman first. I then took out a and let them to identify the shape. I pasted the one the white paper. Then I pasted another two to make a germ of the Christmas tree. I also used 2 to make a snowman. Then they all made the trees and

snowman by themselves. They felt the shapes by touching. They also had a sense of how the can be made of or .

Throughout the process of learning the shapes, I used different ways to engage the students. The topic of shapes is combined with numbers, colors. Also, we kept reviewing shapes when we moved onto other topics. When we write Chinese characters, they were encouraged to find the shapes inside, such as in and in .

8. Assessment

How to engage the students is something that every teacher concerned. Looking back in my hypothesis in Section 3, I reassure about that my lessons need to be diverse to meet the kids different learning style. Im also sure that pair work can have expected effect in learning. They can help each other and learn more efficiently. However, I did not see the personality really mattered. As long as the kids learn in a safe and comfortable situation and learn in their own way, they are engaged.

After carrying out the plan, I can tell that some kids are building more confidence. They may be not good at one thing, but they will be good at something else. Meanwhile, they are motivated to use the language and find more things related. For example, they are eager to find the shapes in their lives.

In Section 5, I decided to apply different ways to teach the same content and I did this in my teaching in shapes. When teaching this topicshapes, I applied different activities and appeals

to different learning habits. According to the Multiple Intelligence Theory, kids have different strength in learning, namely, visual, auditory, body movement, interpersonal, intrapersonal, musical, logical and naturalistic. The flash cards appear to the visual learners. Making shapes with arms and fingers benefit for the interpersonal learners who are good at body movement. The crafts of the Christmas tree and snowman appear to the naturalistic, kinetic and intrapersonal learners. The characters trained the logical learners. When having a review of the process of learning shapes, I missed the musical learners. However, I tried different methods in teaching the same content.

This works well to engage the students. The kids learn through different ways and they are engaged by the changing of different activities in the same theme.

As a result, even if this topic is not as interesting as family members and fruits, they learn it well. They were eager to identify the shapes around them. They can identify the shapes with just the characters.