SUMMER 2010 'DIFFERENTIATION OF INSTRUCTION'

TIDE GALLERY MAIN PAGE The DuPage County IL Regional Office of Education offers Teacher Inservice for DuPage Educators (TIDE) in partnership with National-Louis University, Benedictine University and Aurora University.

In the summer of 2010 I had the honor of teaching a graduate course for TIDE though Aurora University called "Differentiation of Instruction" for inservice K-12 teachers.

For their final assessment in the course teachers created the differentiated lessons, units and activities on display in this gallery. Many used Dr. Carol Ann Tomlinson's Differentiated Lesson Plan (DLP) - highlighted in her book The Differentiated Classroom: Responding to the Needs of all Learners (1999)- to craft their lessons. Others chose to work on further differentiating units or lessons in formats they had already developed.

The following questions were given to students as guidelines for their projects:
1. Does your work allow students to "uncover" content? In other words, have you avoided direct instruction and made learning student centered?
2. Does your work connect to the class/presentations/readings?
3. Does your project show evidence that you got some cool ideas from the class/presentations/readings?
4. Is this work useful to you and and usable in your classroom next fall?
5. Did you avoid the trap of differentiating by ability level and find ways to craft instruction that takes into account personality types, learning style, gender, temperament, culture, multiple intelligence profiles and student interests?
6. Did you differentiate content, product, process and cultures?

If any of the lessons below sounds interesting to you, feel free to contact the author via the Ning. I'm sure these creative folks would love to talk more with you about their work. Also, don't hesitate to make comments under their lessons - grown-ups LOVE FEEDBACK!

Should you want to use some of these materials in your classroom, please follow best practice and cite/credit the author and their work as your source or inspiration should you use/rewrite their materials. These projects represent a lot of blood, sweat, tears and hysterical laughter that must be respected.

We hope you enjoy this gallery of fascinating works by the educational artists that participated in the summer 2010 course.

Again, feel free to add comments and ideas to the projects - especially if you dig it! - RRG:)

P.S. - Don't forget to check out the documents (PDFs and/or Word docs) attached to each post!

ELEMENTARY LESSONS

LESSON PLAN: Differentiated Second Grade Lesson on Citizenship
by Patricia Allison

LESSON PLAN: Differentiated Unit - The Treasure in Each First Grade Child
by Mercedes Draftz, Cindy Kusswurm & Donna Pope

LESSON PLAN: Charlotte's Web Third Grade Differentiated Lesson Plan
by Beth Hoffman

LESSON PLAN: Differentiated Kindergarten Unit on Colors
by Kyla Salavator

LESSON PLAN: First Grade Self Contained School Awareness
by Sherry Snyder & Sue Venchus

MIDDLE SCHOOL LESSONS

LESSON PLAN: Discovering Bacteria in a Differentiated Middle School Classroom
by Melissa Barron

LESSON PLAN: ¡Mi Viaje A...! Travel and Explore Culture in a Differentiated Foreign Language Classroom
by Cindy Harris

LESSON PLAN: Discovering Applications of Mathematics in the Real World
by Jean Maxstadt

UNIT PLAN: Engaging the Five Themes of Geography for 7th Grade Social Science
by Joseph J. Wechman

HIGH SCHOOL LESSONS

LESSON PLAN: Differentiated Freshman Summer Reading Project
by Alice McLoughlin Doro

LESSON PLAN: "Introducing the Four Disciplines of Earth Science" - Differentiated Style
by Terri Grams

LESSON PLAN: Understanding Changing Population Size
by Sheila Liss

UNIT PLAN: A Raisin in the Sun (Differentiated)
by Donald Miller