Friday, September 21, 2018

Differentiated Teaching and Learning

           
Human race is one of the most distinctive specie on the planet. Among all the other living organisms we as humans are unique in our creation, our qualities, abilities, faces, and various other aspects. Learning is an innate human desire, to succeed consequently. Hence, the question arises that since we are all so distinctively diverse from each other, so how come we learn and taught through a uniform method? Well, the answer is simple NO.

Likewise, we survive and succeed differently from each other too. Learning is closely attached to age factor. At different stages of age, we have different thought processes, hence we should be taught and trained according to our age, mental level, our interests & motivation, and above all our learning profiles.                                                                                     

             Education is not about transfer of knowledge information, rather it is all about personality development with integration of character formation. However, we are short of this feature in our educational systems, particularly teaching methods. Curtailing the quench of learning, the dimension of differentiation among learners must not be overlooked. Targeting a new era of designing differentiated teaching methods is the need of the hour.

     Differentiation is not confined to any particular culture, ethnicity, nor to geographical boundary, rather it is global at its core. Everywhere people are distinctively unique and different from each other, irrespective of their genders. No two women, nor two men could be similar in every respect anywhere in the whole world, they are meant to be extremely different from each other, and its a living reality.


            Undoubtedly, designing a teaching plan that could facilitate and address each student's diversity is close to impossible. However, differentiated model of teaching and learning has been designed and created to fulfill this teaching/learning challenge. Unfortunately, teachers believe in teaching students the way they were taught, feel reluctant to apply new teaching strategies in their classrooms. Therefore, there is a need to change the mindsets of teachers particularly and educational administrators generally to cater the need of differentiated instruction in their teaching and learning programs.                                                                   

            Certainly, there are various useful differentiated teaching models, unique line of activities inside & outside classrooms that could prove extremely beneficial for diverse learners. Fundamentally speaking, the diversity and uniqueness of learners must be kept in mind in each industry, whether corporate, education, construction, aviation or any other. Differentiated teaching and learning methods would profoundly perform as catalyst for change at global level, and social media is one of the most vital ingredient in this journey towards accepting our diversity and uniqueness.