Module 2 Summary

Videos: The goal for differentiated instruction is to get to know your students and assess their biggest needs to reach them at their instructional level. It's important to find the best way to approach your students to make learning fun and engaging for them. 

Differentiation came about from Tomlinson being a young teacher and using different activities with different students. It evolved in her middle school classroom. She had students who were four years under grade level and students on grade level so she had to use different approaches for these groups of students. You have to look at your class as a whole to see the big picture and the different variables to best teach your students and make sense of your classroom. 

Presentations: The challenges we face in learning literacy is not following the simple rules laid out for years before us but being innovative in finding ways to create problem-solving skills in our students. It's using new and exciting ways to engage students to help progress as learners. Strategic reading sessions are teacher-guided with purposeful, planned out purposes. It's a way to guide students through the reading process on how to build background knowledge, engage in the pre-reading, and reflects on what they have learned and to reread when they are done. It's important to get students engaged and excited about what they are reading so they can find purpose in reading. The teacher must plan ahead to figure out what is needed before reading for students to be able to dive into the text. 

Content area reading is much more difficult for students and must be scaffolded to get the most out of the text. The teacher must analyze the text beforehand for readability level to get students prepared for the task that could at times seem impossible. Teachers should modify if the text is too high and allow for focusing in on only a few vocabulary words. It's important for teachers to point out the different patterns you see in the different content area texts so that students can associate organization to each of these. Also using different strategies of teaching before, during, and after reading. 

Reading has a scaffolding process that goes from "I do you watch" to "You do I watch" through the steps of "I do you help" and "You do I help" to get students from the read aloud stage to the independently reading their choice of books stage. 

Bloom's Taxonomy was developed with many people to show the different stages of questioning development with students. There are different verbs that apply to the six stages. When you are questioning your students in small guided reading groups you should use Bloom's as a guideline for the results you are trying to achieve.