Criteria: Extensive data pool of 288 primary school teachers aimed at evaluating helpful and hindering factors for implementing differentiated instruction; insights are applicable to professional teacher development within the field of differentiated instruction and more generalizable to teacher training activities at large
Key Takeaway: Elevate your differentiated instruction (DI) capabilities through the power of experience, practical application, and supportive communities. This powerful study emphasizes that teachers with 3+ years experience find more success with DI strategies, demonstrating that practical exposure and training could boost DI proficiency among less experienced educators.
Nurturing healthy teacher relationships and facilitating access to academic coaches can also empower educators to create effective DI strategies and better identify student needs.
Summation and Insights: Differentiation, or tailoring learning practices and instruction to meet different students’ needs, is a vital aspect of education that helps teachers to reach a broader number of students and facilitate overall student success. This Dutch study involved 288 primary school teachers who implemented DI strategies in mathematics and asked them to evaluate what factors helped or hindered their ability to implement DI effectively. It also related these findings to potential professional development activities aimed at assisting teachers with their classroom implementation of DI strategies and objectives.
One finding, in keeping with previous studies on DI, is that teaching experience matters. Experienced teachers (3+ years of teaching) reported having more success with implementing DI practices than inexperienced teachers (0 to 3 years of teaching). In keeping with that finding, many teachers listed “gaining experience” as one of the most important factors related to their own ability to create and implement effective DI practices in the classroom.
Another significant finding in this study was that many teachers experienced professional development opportunities that gave them extensive theory and knowledge about DI, however; they did not feel that their training helped them to transform their newfound knowledge into concrete practice. This suggests that facilitating teacher training with a larger emphasis on concrete activities, opportunities, and or suggestions for practice would be beneficial for teachers looking to implement DI initiatives. Other factors related to teachers’ ability to implement DI strategies were directly tied to the school community at large and teachers’ relationships with other teachers. For example, the ability to fruitfully observe other teachers and informal conversations about teaching were rated as particularly helpful for creating differentiated instruction and tasks in the classroom. Conversely, “ineffective support from colleagues” was often selected as a hindering factor for developing one’s ability to identify student educational needs. At the same time, teachers who had access and relationships with academic coaches felt that they were much better equipped to identify and evaluate student educational needs.
In summary, this study suggests that professional development opportunities related to DI should attempt to create real opportunities for practice and provide concrete suggestions for transforming theory about differentiated instruction into real-world classroom applications. Given that many teachers indicated that they benefited the most from experience teaching and experience implementing DI in the classroom, teacher training with an experiential component may be particularly beneficial. Congenial teacher relationships and access to academic coaches also seem to play a vital role in teachers’ ability to create and sustain effective DI strategies inside and outside of the classroom. These recommendations are potential building blocks for teacher success in the implementation of differentiated instruction.
Resource: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2667320722000069
Year: 2022
Author: Marieke van Geel, Trynke Keuning, Ilen Safar
Primary Author: Marieke van Geel: https://people.utwente.nl/marieke.vangeel