Course Instructor:                                 Bernadette Herman  Ph.D.

Participants build on their understandings of neuro-education and curriculum to design differentiated instructional units that incorporate appropriate research-based practices, that are sensitive to developmental needs of learners, and that differentiate learning elements, content, process, and product.

Course Overview

This course gives planning-implementation structure and a strengthened theoretical base to the ground work developed in the prerequisite course, Brain Research Implications.  Participants explore the literature in order to establish a grounded understanding of what is implied when educators take on the challenges of differentiating instruction.   This investigation requires examining related myths and scoping out realistic goals and plans for accommodating a range of developmental appropriate diverse learner needs.

Differentiation requires sensitivity to the individual needs of learners, superimposed within the social construct of the learning environment.  Thus, critical elements of creating an effective and sensitive learning environment are investigated.   These include elements such as communication networks, cultural sensitivity, environmental style accommodations, routines, transitions, pacing, spiraling, support systems.  As well, critical dimensions of accommodating and stretching individual preferences and needs are explored, building on the prerequisite understandings of intelligences and styles.   Such an exploration leads the participants to understand, examine and plan for the variances required when one seeks to differentiate for content, process, and product.   Careful decisions need to be made in order to select instructional practices that maximize learning and are supported by formative and summative assessments that show learning results in the light of the learner outcomes.

While the prerequisite course modeled some of these dimensions of differentiation, the content was too broad and new for participants to be able to focus on their own design, accommodation, and implementation of differentiated plans.  This course affords the participants with an opportunity to spiral their understandings from the prerequisite investigation, broaden their theoretical groundings, and acquire design constructs that support their implementation efforts with classrooms of learners.