Corporate Warriors

Abstract

The ultimate goal of teachers in classroom is students’ learning. Teachers are considered successful if they are able to make students effectively learn what are taught inside the classroom. Without students’ learning, it is time that teachers look for alternative ways or approaches to ensure classroom learning. One of the important reasons why students do not effectively learn inside the classroom is their inability to follow or catch up with teaching instruction. Some teachers forget the fact that students are different in many aspects such as in their learning skills, previously acquired knowledge, interests, motivation as well as needs in the classroom. Students particularly when they are grouped inside the classroom, have their own distinctiveness, specificities, or peculiarities. It is then the duty of teachers to recognize and identify these distinctiveness, specificities, or peculiarities and adjust their teachings according to students’ different or distinctive levels of skills, previously acquired knowledge, behavior, interests, motivation and needs. Differentiated instruction (DI) is essentially what this is all about. It is a pedagogical approach whereby teaching is adapted to each of the specific characteristics students have inside the classroom. Differentiated learning is tailoring the way teaching is delivered to students. It is applied particularly to instructional contents, process, and product, used by teachers, so that educational services are effectively delivered to meet the diverse needs of students (Tomlinson, August, 2000). Differentiated instruction, which in turn allows differentiated learning, hence is about recognizing differences among students. Since teachers’ ultimate goal in classroom is learning, DI is one way of making sure that students would catch up, adapt, be interested and hence learn what they are taught, given their own individual specific characteristics.

Keywords: Differentiated instruction, contents, process, product, skills, knowledge, behavior, motivation, needs.