Differentiation for students with learning disabilities:

 Frequent checks that students understand instruction

 Providing overviews of lessons in chart form
 Varying the mode of presentation (oral, visual, activity-based)
 Cueing students to listen to, or make notes about, important points
 Relating material to students’ lives
 Making directions short and reinforcing oral instructions with visual cues
 Clarifying definitions and ensuring understanding by having students repeat
definitions
 Breaking a large topic or task down into manageable parts
 Using collaborative and co-operative learning approaches
 Preparing study guides of key words and concepts so students have clear notes from
which to study
 Colour-coded materials for organization
 Partially filled in tasks to guide students
 Tiered assignments and tasks that differ in reading demands
 Teaching concepts to the whole class and providing extra practice for those who
need it
 Advance organization and give explicit practice
 Teach more intensely to a small group of students
 Embed strategy instruction into large-group teaching
 Enhance content instruction for all students

Differentiation for ELL students:

 Providing opportunities for co-operative learning
o Brainstorming, think-pair-share, small group discussions, jigsaw
 Challenging concepts should be diagrammed or supported with pictures.
 And modeling the steps of a process or showing students what a finished product
should look like can go a long way toward helping students understand
 Make it visual
 Pre-teach whenever possible
 Sentence frames
 Activate background knowledge
 Explicit and contextualized vocabulary
 Many opportunities for practice and repetition of new vocabulary words
 Restate, paraphrase, and repeat instructions multiple times
 Pre-view and review key information
 Hands on learning
 Plan for a range of questions that promote strategic, critical thinking
 Create assignments that require students to think critically
 Frequent feedback
Differentiation for students with ADHD:
 Externalize forms of information (i.e. putting up steps to follow)
 Externalize time and structures needed for timeline
o Deadlines for daily progress toward assignment completion
 Externalize source of motivation
o Brain breaks at set times
 Make key information clear through bolding, colour-coding, or highlighting

Differentiation for deaf students:

 Pre-teach new vocabulary
 Periods of intense concentration interspersed with less demanding activities
 Providing vocabulary lists
 Post an outline of the class agenda
 Provide an outline of the topics and kind of work done in each unit and over the
term
 Provide an outline of a typical school day
 Use visuals in handouts
 Ensure that only one person is speaking at a time