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| Strategies for responding to different needs |
Most teachers agree about the need to have high expectations of each pupil and to try to treat each pupil as an individual. But they may feel doubtful about how to do this with a class of 30 or more children. There is no one simple solution, but in this post we consider some ways m which teachers can respond practically to pupils individual needs in a class. We will look at three different teaching strategies differentiating activities, peer tutoring, group teaching.
Differentiating
If you have the freedom to design your own curriculum, then it may be easier for you to respond and plan for individual needs. However if you are following a given curriculum, you need to keep m mind the goals that all pupils are supposed to achieve.
Anne Covery and Do Coyle suggest that teachers can consider
- core work for all pupils
- reinforcement work for more intensive practice
- extension work for helping to move pupils further on and to challenge them
This will enable teachers to match work to pupils' needs, interests and abilities.
We can match activities to pupils, needs through differentiating in various ways. Here we will focus on differentiating according to type of support. This means that we expect all pupils to do the same activity, but we give more support to the slower learners. Support can be given in different ways, eg through giving more pictures or visuals to make the meaning clearer, giving clues, providing a framework (fill m the blanks) and so on. On the following pages there is an example of a writing activity from a Malaysian textbook. A group of teachers considered it to be difficult for many pupils in Class 5 (11 to 12-year-olds). So they developed a range of other activities to suit different ability groups in their classes. The original activity m the textbook is given first.