Noticing Differentiation Everywhere

It should come as no surprise that differentiation is everywhere, not just at school. For me, learning about differentiation in our Education classes has opened my eyes to noticing it all around me. The more I study about nutrition and conditioning to make myself more of an asset to the schools I will be applying to, the more I notice differentiation in its many forms, not just in the classroom.

In my experience coaching and conditioning differentiation is known as modification, but has exactly the same goals. A word bank for a graphic organizer is the equivalent of dropping to your knees for added support in doing push-ups. Sounds weird right? Think about it. A word bank is used to assist students filling out a graphic organizer who might not have the same auditory cues when listening to a lecture or taking notes during a movie. Here is an example of a organizer I used when teaching a lesson about Bayard Rustin close to the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday:

The word bank can be used to assist students mentally just as modification can be used to assist athletes (or anyone for that matter) physically. A simple exercise that comes to mind is a push up:

Differentiated push-ups (Easier to most challenging)

Both these methods have the same goal. To build the person's confidence and ability for the overall purpose of pushing them to the next level and removing scaffolds. In the case of the student the scaffold would be the word bank, with the athlete, the removal of knees when doing a push-up