Differentiated+Instruction

Individualized Instruction In Planning for Reading Improvement.

During a past session we met at East Liberty and shared some experiences that may be useful when designing lessons to help improve our effectiveness with our students. One of the topics was individualized instruction used to help improve reading. We brainstormed and arrived at some of the following ideas. 1. Individualizing instruction to accomodate different learning needs. For at risk students, consideration must be given to social needs besides the cognitive ability of the student for increased learning success. It may be advantageous to place a student in a group where they may function better socially with the help of a peer tutor or study buddy rather than only by academic level.

2. During whole group instruction of a reading assignment, have the students write down any words they do not know to make a list. From these individual lists the teacher collects, a follow up lesson may involve an assignment learning the new words during small group instruction.

3. Individualized instruction may involve the use of frequent and various means of assessment. Besides paper and pencil quizzes, alternative forms of assessment such as an oral quiz, or student paraphrasing the highlights of the lesson may be useful determining student learning.

4. We teachers need to develop knowledge about learning and apply it to our students to know them well enough to meet varied student readiness, interests, and learning profiles. Simply said, know your kids.

While these points are not conclusive about individualized instruction hopefully they may generate ideas to try in your classroom to improve student reading.