Differentiation

Currently Listening To: a preview of Lenka's new CD on itunes! (If you've never heard of Lenka, start with these. They're my faves.) (p.s. I saw her in concert my first year of college, before I'd actually ever heard of her. It cost $3. I'm pretty sure she's charging more than that now...)

Differentiation is one of our buzz words in the Ed School. (along with other words like “scaffolding” and “Bloom’s Taxonomy”) It essentially means knowing all your students and their individual strengths and weaknesses and being able to tailor your lesson plan to meet all of them. It’s what, as a teacher, you should be striving for.

Right now, I’m working on an assignment dealing with all of this – taking a lesson plan, creating ‘student profiles’ for three made up students with individualized needs (por ejemplo, one of mine is an English language learner, one is below grade level in reading, etc.) and then marking how you would change (excuse me, differentiate) the lesson plan to meet all these needs.

But the ‘student profile’ is made up of things like multiple intelligences (based on Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences) and learning styles and all that, and before I knew that(/while I was tring to figure out what 'student profile' means and googling things like “differentiating instruction student profile example”), I of course came across all these tests to discover what intelligence I have and what’s my learning style and just personality tests in general.

So of course I took them.

And although maybe I wasn’t quite so efficient in getting my work done, I really feel like I've searched my soul and learned a lot about myself tonight:

• Intelligences: Language (linguistic), followed by social (interpersonal) and body movement (kinesthetic)
• Learning style: Kinesthetic
• Temperament: NF (idealist) (…and because my parents are somewhat obsessed with Myers-Briggs, I already know that I’m an ENFP.)

…What are yours?? (The links above all go to the tests. That's right, I made it that easy for you.)

Slash does anyone else find this as interesting as I do? Maybe this is why I’m in the Ed School and you (probably) aren't...

p.s. I made chili tonight! And it was GOOD.



[image via We Heart It]