Differentiated Instruction for English Language Learners as "variations on a theme"

This article, written by 4 teachers for the Middle School Journal, talks a lot about how to reach ELL students.  They start out with a stat provided by the National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisistion that by 2025 1 out of 4 students will be an ELL student.  But the surprising note there is that most of them are going to be native-born, multi-generational US citizens.

As teacher-candidates, we all know we must differentiate instruction.  What I really enjoyed about this article is that differentiation does not mean "dumbing down".  They do make a distinction between 'sheltering' and 'differentiation'.  Sheltering is used in a whole-class setting, making it easier to connect with students where they are but differentiation is used to tailor to specific sub-groups of students.

The main point between the two is that differentiation and sheltering work to provide more opportunities to become more focused on language development within the CONTENT lesson.

They come up with a list of 10 principles that should be applied when working to differentiate a lesson: (keep in mind, this is an article geared towards ELL's and not the general population)

1: Know your students! - Get to know where the student's are at and don't be fooled by oral proficiency

2: Set common content objectives but differentiate the language objective - they should be working towards the same goal in content, but need new roads to reach it!

3: Make it manageable for teacher - a base activity w/ small variations for individuals make it easier to assess their learning

4: Make learning manageable for students - don't water down the objectives! just be aware of their language capabilities

5: Identify a base for higher-level students and tier downward: This allows for differentiation to happen and allows to all students to be challenged; always move towards same goal though!

6: Allow similar groups to work together - they will help each other out

7: Be flexible in grouping though!  Break it up at times to allow ELLs and HL learners to interact

8: Offer a choice of activities to students

9: Know language proficiency is related to cognitive complexity: if they don't know the words - they can't tell you!

10: Allow same number of minutes for differentiated tasks!