Differentiated Instruction and Universal Design for Learning Reflection

I went to grad school for two main reasons. The first was so that I could add technology to my classes to make my instruction better and help my students to reach further than they previously had. The second was because I wanted to give myself career options. I wanted to be able to have the option to look for a technology job within a school district or even look at a job with an online high school or community college. This class had the most immediate impact on both of those reasons.

While I have implemented many ideas from my other classes, many of those changes were small or gradual. This class happened to come right at the transition between semesters at school which seemed like a perfect time to create a Universal Design in my classroom and use that design to differentiate instruction. I also got the wonderful news (slight sarcasm) that instead of my expected classes for the semester, I would be getting repeater classes and not just any repeater classes but repeaters for year-long algebra and year-long geometry which meant that my students did not even pass the first half of either algebra or geometry. I knew that if I taught these classes they way I teach my other classes almost every student would get left behind. I couldn’t afford to go in with this mindset so I greatly modified my normal teaching approach and decided that each student would work at their own pace. I would have every student make progress instead of leaving students behind who have been left behind several times previously in their math careers.

Technology has been a great help in the differentiation of these classes. Because I have twenty students who are all at different places in the curriculum I can’t teach a regular lesson. On days when I am unable to use the computer lab (3 days a week) I run myself ragged trying to help every student and teach twenty different lessons. It is much more difficult that I thought it would be, especially since I thought I would only have fifteen or fewer students. When we are in the computer lab students are much more capable of learning without my help using the learning options I have created online using the math curriculum software Odyssey or online tutorials managed by Moodle course management system. This leaves me free to focus on certain individuals each day or bring students together in small groups to focus in on a topic that will be useful for all of them.

I have had differing amounts of success with this approach in class. Many students are working well in the system I have created for them while some struggle with the freedom that they have to work at their own pace while still pushing themselves. One of my two classes needs much more guidance so I have to take the time to tell them every day what they need to work on and finish that day. If I don’t many of them will not do the work. My other class is much more independent. If I touch base with most of those students once a week they are fine to continue working on their own.

So it is obvious that my in class adjustments have been huge with the implementation of differentiated instruction. The impact on my other career options has been equally important. Much of what I would like to do, especially if I found a job at an online high school would be working with a classroom management system like Moodle and having students who worked at their own pace throughout a course. In my current classes I have been able to design online classes and see how students work through them, but since my students are all in the computer lab, I can still interact with them face to face as well.

The one part of the class that did not have much of an impact was the social networking we were supposed to do as part of the class. It isn’t that this would not be a useful area to look into, but using Google groups and having some issues with Google docs, the social network for this course never really got off the ground. Instead it became more of a dumping ground for required classwork. In previous courses wikis had been used to accomplish the same basic tasks that were completed in this class. In fact, one of my group members created a wiki when we were first having trouble with Google. In the future, if I wanted to have a place to share ideas I would feel more comfortable using a wiki. This summer I am probably going to teach a technology course for teachers at a summer math institute and I recently talked to one of the organizers about using a wiki to share ideas for that class. We will use this wiki as our social network and technology tools respository.