Planning for  Differentiated Instruction

In my classroom, units generally follow the structure of starting with structured exploration and practice, moving to a formative assessment to check progress and begin to apply skills, and ending with a summative project that builds in complexity and opens up student choices to demonstrate mastery. These value scales are the formative practice for a unit covering value and collage: students cut out pieces of magazine pages, sorted them based on where they fell on the value scale, and then glued them into boxes to create a collage value scale. After students completed this activity, which demonstrated their ability to correctly identify value in images, students moved on to render light and shadow in a collage still life---a task which adds in new layers of complexity and new challenges. 

To scaffold learning for students to help them meet the objective of identifying values, this activity provided a number of supports and opportunities for additional challenge. Students could start with the 3-step scale, collaging the highlight (closest to white), midtone (middle of light and dark), and shadow (darkest, closest to black) only, where the differences between each step on the scale are easier to identify. Students could also choose to work in grayscale first, where the differences in value are easier to see. More advanced students could start with the more nuanced, complex 5-step scale or work in color, which is more challenging. This demonstrates performance indicator 3M, which states that the competent teacher, "develops plans based on student responses and provides for different pathways based on student needs." This activity laid out multiple different pathways and a variety of supports that students can choose from and combine in different ways to meet their zone of proximal development. 

This handout breaks down, in written form, a demo that I also gave to the class on blending with oil pastels. It was designed for a student with autism, who does not process spoken instructions and modeling as well as written examples that they could follow. The handout keeps the 4-step structure that the rest of the class was learning, but with additional information and instructions to break the steps down further using images of what each step, each change, each mark would look like. It also includes a troubleshooting tip to solve a common problem that artists encounter when using pastels, as this student needed support to work through frustration and overcome problems.

This demonstrates performance indicator 3J, which states that the competent teacher, "uses data to plan for differentiated instruction to allow for variations in individual learning needs." The student's IEP, following the research on learning strategies for students with autism, suggests this style of breaking down instruction and providing written copies of instruction to meet student needs. Based on my interactions with this student in the classroom, I also recognized their individual need for additional support with troubleshooting, and using clear, concrete language with clear instructions and images to show how the technique is successfully used.