Tips for Teaching a Variety of Middle School Learners
Every student deserves an appropriately personalized education, but providing that experience in large and diverse classrooms sometimes feels like juggling half a dozen bowling balls or keeping 10 plates spinning on long sticks above your head.
Still, differentiated instruction doesn’t have to be a novelty act. With a little effort and flexibility, you can tailor your teaching to meet each student’s needs in your middle school classroom.
Start with a Flexible Mindset
“Be flexible,” says Glenn Kessinger, an instructional facilitator in the Yakima School District in Yakima, WA. “Adjust your pacing and your use of strategies to focus on the learning needs of different students. Make changes that help all students meet high expectations — different timelines, different products, different learning environments, etc.”
Pacing is critical in mixed-ability classrooms. Having kids mark out due dates for themselves on calendars or planners, knowing in advance that some kids will need more time than others, is not only helpful to you, but it reduces anxiety for your students.
One of the most helpful things to do is to set up classroom management procedures so kids can become more independent. For example, one procedure could show students how to get supplies, ask for help or start new work, without waiting for you. In a highly differentiated classroom, procedures like these are essential because different kids are doing different work at different paces — and you need them to learn to manage that process as well as they can.
Another powerful tool is choice. Given a small range of reasonable options, middle schoolers tend to choose the things they do best. This helps them focus on their work and discover their own ability levels, sometimes more accurately than teachers can. Then you and your students can work together to identify and work on developmental needs.
Use the Right Technology
“One of the big advantages of technology is that its capabilities allow instructional products to be developed that adjust on the fly to the performance level of the student,” says Karen Mahon, president and founder of Balefire Labs in Boston, a company that specializes in analyzing the effectiveness of educational applications. “Adaptive learning is very engaging for students. In real time, the curriculum adjusts to the appropriate level, making it just challenging enough without being frustratingly difficult.”
Sometimes as teachers, we have to rely on our districts to provide large learning systems with adaptive technology. But if you use classroom tablets, you may not have to wait. Many iPad and Android apps have adaptive learning capabilities built in. Look for review sites like Balefire Labs that have evaluation models to show which apps do and which don’t.
Get to Know Your Students
“Large class sizes can make it difficult to get to know every student well,” says Ashley Hurley, a professional development specialist in the secondary grades from Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District in Charlotte, NC. “But this is non-negotiable. Relationships are the foundation for learning and growth.”
Kessinger makes an effort to learn as much as possible about his students so he can understand what makes them tick. “Know your students — their likes and dislikes, and as much data about them as you can gather, like ELL status, special education status, their IEP if they have one, their reading level, etc.”
One of the quickest and easiest ways to get to know your students is to do interest inventories in each class at the beginning of the year. Ask kids to write down what they like, what they do for fun, what they care about and what they’re curious about. Gather and sort these lists by commonalities and use this simple survey data throughout the year to connect kids’ different interests to your common curriculum.
Focus on Your Role
As any teacher with a diverse class will tell you, there is no easy path to serving the individual needs of every middle school student. There are days when you wish every kid would walk into your class, sit down quietly, take out a pencil and get an A+ on the test you just laid on their desks.
But if every student were the same, and every kid mastered all the material we taught, why would teachers even be necessary? As challenging as it is to meet the needs of many different learners, this is the very reason why we need so many talented and deeply committed people like you.
Steve Peha is the founder of Teaching That Makes Sense, Inc., a North Carolina–based consultancy specializing in innovative approaches to educational change. In addition to working in hundreds of schools and teaching in thousands of classrooms, he is also an award-winning writer and educational software developer. Follow Steve on Google+.
