Differentiation and Marzano

Differentiation in instruction appears to be one of the buzz words in education, but, just what does it mean to differentiate your instruction? Many people are already familiar with Classroom Instruction that Works by Robert Marzano, but if you are not familiar with the material, then I am going to give you a crash course over the next couple of weeks to help you as you plan new lessons for next year.

In a nutshell, Marzano details 9 differnent instructional strategies. But why did Marzano use these 9...because based on a study undertaken by McRel, these strategies seemed to demonstrate the strategies that had the most impact on student learning and for that reason, I will generalize them for you over the next several days. They include the following:

• Identifying Similarities and Differences
• Summarizing and Note Taking
  Reinforcing Effort and Providing Recognition
• Homework and Practice
• Nonlinguistic Representations
• Cooperative Learning
• Setting Objectives and Providing Feedback
• Generating and Testing Hypotheses
• Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizers

I promise to stay general, but if you read anything that you like, then I encourage you to explore a couple new tricks to put in your tool box for next year.