Coming up with a Problem

Hi all!  Last week when our team met we began to discuss possible topics for our action research.  We had difficulty coming up with a theme universal to all content areas, seeing that we all teach very different subjects.  With that being said, we decided to go with differentiated instruction as our main idea.  Of course, we are going to have to break this vague topic down to specific types of DI.

Differentiated instruction is something that all teachers must incorporate into their lessons, no matter what subject you teach.  Students are all unique and learn in a variety of ways, therefore, one type of instruction is not going to reach all of your students equally.

As our research team discussed DI further, we came up with a few questions that we hope to answer with our action research.  These questions include:

• Is there a functional way to differentiate the assignments given to students?
• Does this differentiation affect students' self-efficacy? If so, how?
• When forming groups, is it better to pair students of the same level, or to pair high-performing students with low-performing students?

We will keep you updated as we explore these questions further!