differentiating and anticipating student needs

Next year I’ll be teaching business studies for the first time in my life. I will be at a new school, with new administrators, and different students than I am used to (I have worked mostly with native Chinese-speaking students who are learning English as a second language, but the school I will teach for next year is a true international school where Chinese passport holders would not be allowed admission.)  With all of this uncertainty, it is a good idea to plan out some objectives and both formative and summative assessments for lessons taught according to those objectives.  In my previous post you can read about that. While I don’t yet know which challenges I might have with my students, I do anticipate needed to integrate differentiation strategies in my teaching. Today I’ll discuss that focus.

Because this is a new school for me, I do not know for sure what challenges my students might have. However I anticipate that there will be some students with mild to medium learning disabilities like dyslexia or ADD/ADHD. I also anticipate some (but not all) students will be English language learners.

To accommodate for these students with learning disabilities, I plan to use multiple visual aids, speak slowly when necessary, repeat instructions, use non-verbal signals, and be as expressive as possible.

For the ELLs, I will allow and encourage language dictionaries or apps in class, and include instructions on the PPT so students can read instructions after I give them orally.

I also plan to have the students work together for the majority of the project. Their goal will be to understand several aspects of innovation and entrepreneurship well enough to be able to effectively analyze a business situation and give a presentation to the class about the best ways for a small business to adapt a new technology. This will require a deep level understanding of innovation, the barriers to adaption, and the enterprising elements that help overcome those barriers. I will group the students so that students with disabilities or language barriers will be able to work together with stronger students in order to learn from each other.

I will also be monitoring and providing feedback to individuals and to groups throughout the project. If I find that some students understand the material very quickly while other students really struggle with it, I will ask stronger students to take a leadership role inside the groups. Each member will need to present, so groups will need to work together and teach each other in order to succeed.

Resources I will make available to students include: language dictionaries, emailing the PPT to students to be able to review on their own, access to my personal Wechat account to ask questions after class, and partners within the peer groups who can teach/explain concepts and debate ideas in new ways.