Accommodation of Students Diversity in Classroom

Students diversity is natural and common issue among all schools. Undoubtedly, it has a big positive impact in the learning process and the environment of the classroom. But, on the other hand, it seems as a challenging task for the teachers to adapt their instructions to meet the needs of their multicultural students. 

As teachers, we need first to accept the diversity fact of students, then we need to know more about the students’ characters, and to make an assessment at the start of each class to know what our students already know and what they need to know. Later, we can choose the most suitable teaching strategies that can fit our student’s different backgrounds, abilities, needs, and learning styles. For example, we can incorporate more open- ended questions in the lessons to attract the students’ attention and to enhance involvement in the class, we can offer more wait time for low achieving students, we can utilize visualizing, auditory, written, drawing, or practicing methods technological tools or even we can relate the content to real world situations, so that can cover all the variety of learning styles.  We have to add extra objectives or complex problem- solving tasks to satisfy the curiosity of the fast and high achieving students. Sometimes we have to use grouping strategies, so students can learn from each other and help each other and they will become more motivated and they will be challenged to do their best. In regards to the assessment, we need to provide the students sample exams, and we need to teach them the test-taking strategies, our language should be clear for all, and we have to make special provisions for non-native English speakers. Regarding the grading, we should align the grades with the learning objectives, and we have to maximize the criterion reference of grading to avoid competitions between the students.

Finally, differentiating instructions is essential for effective teaching. And we can do our best to adapt our instructions so it can meet the learning needs of my students.