Meeting individual needs

The article “Meeting individual needs with young learners”, written by Peter Westwood and Wendy Arnold, talk about differentiation defined as “an adaptive approach to teaching that is responsive to individual differences among learners”.

I want to focus on “approaches to differentiation” point. They show us eight strategies that teachers could use in their classrooms to try to get the individual differences of each student. I am going to comment the strategies that I found more interesting.

The first one is working in whole-group activities. This means that students can participate in a shared experience practical work. All children are active agents in the work and contribute with the best of their individual talents.

The second one is small-group activities. The aim of this strategy is to provide opportunities for children to work in a smaller group, where they can feel more comfortable and confident. One kind of activity that I like it to much about this strategy is a teacher from Portugal that what he/she does is rotate groups through different activities, but only one of these activities need the attention of the teacher. This provides children an individual guidance.

The next one is projects work. It involves that children decide based on their interests, what they want to work. I’ve been working in a school that uses that methodology in their classes and children learn and enjoy it a lot. They feel the protagonists of their learning. I think it is a good option, because they can work in whole-group or in small-groups and thus can work with the two approaches that have been discussed above.

The last one, learning styles and preferences it’s about taking into account the individual differences, create in the school day methods and activities varied and motivating.

To conclude, we must recognize that it is not an easy work for a teacher to meet the individual needs of all their students because of the large class size, rigid curricula, prescribed textbooks, lack of time for preparation… But it is not impossible. As teachers, we can only try to improve the learning of our students bearing in mind their individual needs.