Fair isn’t everybody getting the same thing.. Fair is everybody getting what they need in order to be successful.
Just as everyone has a unique fingerprint, every student has an individual learning style. A classroom is an environment- bringing together students from different backgrounds with various abilities and personalities and producing a beautiful garden in making. Being an effective teacher, therefore, requires an implementation of creative and innovative teaching strategies to meet students’ individual needs. Keeping this in mind, a workshop on Marginal Differences : Indicators and Strategies was taken up in the school by Ms. Anshu and Mr. Surya Prakash from Sunshine School for Special Needs. The objective of the workshop was to enhance differential classroom practices and more importantly to identify the special needs required by our children. As a teacher, there is no “one size fits all” solution, range of effective teaching strategies can inspire classroom practices. Being an effective teacher is a challenge because every student is unique, however, by using a combination of teaching strategies we can address students’ varying learning styles and academic capabilities as well as make our classroom environment motivational for students. The session helped us as teachers to identify, modify, analyse and reinforce various strategies in order to provide motivation to students to become lifelong learners. The session also highlighted that while integrating scaffolding strategies is centered around the class as a whole, providing structures to clarify learning objectives, differentiated instruction provides individual students with specific steps towards taking control of their learning experience.
The session was an enriching experience for all the teachers as it provided a platform for them to ask questions and identify resolutions to various circumstances in their everyday classrooms.
