Differentiated Instruction

During my first full week of teaching I noticed students were choosing to talk rather than listen to the material being presented in the PowerPoint Presentation. This raised a red flag and as I reflected on the presentation at the end of the school day; I remembered a research paper I completed pertaining to ADHD. The information presented in the paper pertained to assisting individual students in a blended environment stay calm in the classroom, while helping them stay active without moving from their seat.

The study done showed students who have ADHD can remain in their seat without disrupting the class as long as he/she had access to colorful highlighters and/or colorful sticky notes and has the ability to use them throughout the lesson being presented. The study showed that students who had this colorful collection of material had the ability to remain in one seat and was not disruptive to the classroom educational process.

As I re-read the paper; I began seeing some of the students I was teaching. I decided to modify my lesson plans to reflect a more colorful display of information to test my theory. While presenting the newly modified PowerPoint to the class the next day; I notice how quite the room had become. The students where listening to my instruction, but were also looking at the yellows, blues, reds, greens and oranges in the PowerPoint Presentation. I again tested this theory the following class with other colors and notice the same type of behavior. Realizing that this philosophy of colors assists in appropriate classroom behavior; I modified all of my PowerPoint Presentations to accommodate a wide range of colors for the students to view.