Important
Session
Information:
Most classrooms these days are impressively diverse. Students represent multiple cultures, language groups, economic backgrounds, academic entry points, interests, approaches to learning, and adult support systems. In reality, that diversity offers great richness to teachers, schools, and students. At the same time, it poses a real challenge for teachers. The image of teaching as a teacher covering information for students as though they were essentially alike as learners no longer works (if it ever did). Effective classrooms today call on teachers to balance the need to lead students to shared goals and the imperative to take into account students’ varied learning needs along the way. In this session, David Sousa and Carol Tomlinson will explore key elements, principles, and practices of differentiation—a model designed to support teachers in creating responsive classrooms. They’ll also explore how new findings in brain science support those key principles and practices of differentiation. The goal of the session to help teachers understand how and why differentiation and neuroscience align to inform high quality teaching that keeps students at the center of instructional planning. Sousa and Tomlinson will use classroom videos, teacher lesson plans, evidence and explanations from neuroscience, and small group and whole group discussion to illustrate how learner-friendly classrooms might look and why they matter.