Abstract:Today, teachers are responsible not only for meeting the diverse needs of all students but also for ensuring improved educational outcomes. Accordingly, school personnel are seeking proven ways to strengthen traditional classroom practices. Beginning with the plight of two teachers--one general and one special education--the authors offer a rationale for differentiating instruction. Then they review the literature on differentiated instruction, highlighting the myths, models, and evidence to support it. The authors draw on the accumulated research to provide a framework for differentiating instruction. Using REACH as a mnemonic, the framework they developed includes a comprehensive inventory and several practical strategies for using it. They revisit the case vignette to illustrate the application of the REACH framework. Keywords: classroom practices, differentiated instruction, general education, research-based methods, special education Article:Things do not change; we change. (Thoreau, 1949, p. 319) Ms. Grody has taught third grade for 10 years in a high-poverty, urban elementary school. After a 3-week summer course, she started the year with a renewed enthusiasm. However, because her class has been especially challenging, that enthusiasm slowly diminished. She has 26 students whose reading ability ranges from prekindergarten to seventh grade. Ms. Grody has 14 students performing at grade level, 3 students performing above grade level, who attend the district's program for gifted and talented students, and 9 students performing below grade level. One of the 9 students performing below grade level is not English proficient; the other 8 students are children with disabilities who are not making progress.Ms. Grody has known for some time that third-grade work is too difficult for many of her students. She has tried to make accommodations for students with individualized education programs (IEPs) by using lower grade-level books and offering a reduced number of tasks on grade-level assignments in math, spelling, and vocabulary. However, nothing she has done has worked. Frustrated by their repeated failure, a number of students have started to act out, behave disrespectfully toward her, and disrupt instruction. Ms. Grody has sent the same students to in-school suspension at least once in the last 2 weeks. Not surprisingly, these students are falling further behind their classmates in most subject areas.In need of assistance, Ms. Grody approached Ms. Ent, the special education teacher assigned to her school. However, Ms. Ent has problems of her own. She has to serve 54 students with IEPs in Grades K-5. Although Ms. Ent has a good understanding of basic strategies to meet the needs of students with broad learning needs in the general education classroom, because of her present case load, she is not able to meet regularly with Ms. Grody. For both teachers, a rigorous schedule impinges on coplanning time, while paperwork consumes what little planning time is available. Limited support, scant resources, and...

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The study compared the effects of repeated readings versus paraphrasing cognitive strategy instruction. Main idea comprehension skills of rural fifth, sixth, and seventh grade learning disabled students with moderate levels of decoding fluency (100 words per minute), and high levels of decoding accuracy (97%) were used. The study also investigated the relative power of combining the two procedures. Results indicated that paraphrasing instruction was superior to the repeated readings procedures. Pairing repeated readings with the paraphrasing strategy was no more effective than teaching the paraphrasing strategy alone. Instructional implications are discussed.

In part because learning strategies are often taught in isolated resource settings outside of the contexts in which students with learning disabilities are expected to apply this knowledge, generalization has been a significant challenge to educators. To address this problem, an instructional model is proposed for integrating cognitive strategy instruction and content area instruction when teaching students in content area classes. Teacher-directed instructional procedures, cooperative learning, and direct explanation and dialectical strategy instruction are integrated into four key instructional processes: orienting, framing, applying, and extending. In this model, teacher-mediated instructional devices and routines used to teach content area subjects serve as a basis for teaching students to self-mediate parallel cognitive strategies and processes. The model is discussed in terms of its theoretical and philosophical orientations as manifested in its knowledge and instructional bases. A scenario is provided that depicts a social studies teacher implementing many of the principles and methods associated with the model.