Chapter 6: Responsive Teaching with UBD in Academically Diverse Classrooms

This chapter was about how to teach to a group of academically diverse students. All students need practice thinking at high levels and real life applications. A lot of the time, teachers are caught up teaching the basic skills and never allow the students to use those skills in a real life situation. A way to help implement this idea is to share the goal of the unit with your students. Classroom elements such as time, space, resources, student groupings, and others when used in a flexible way will help your quest as a teacher to differentiate. Another suggestion to ease the differentiating process in your classroom is to group the needs of different learners in to categories to be addressed more efficiently. Also stable classroom management is key to differentiated learning, as the teacher will be spending more time with individuals and small groups. The end note of this chapter was that today is the day to start differentiating in the classroom. This impacts me as a teacher to model the different functions of being a teacher, direct instructor, facilitator, and coach. I will start teaching in a differentiated style that way I will not have to change over later in my career. This will impact my student by increasing the depth of their learning and will have a positive impact on their success later in life.