Differentiation in the Language Classroom

Language students come from a wide variety of backgrounds. As a result, students within a class have many different needs. This course explores many strategies that allow teachers to meet a wide variety of student needs, including an effective feedback loop, collaborative organization, understanding how students learn, creating more equitable assessments, giving students opportunities for choice, and creating scaffolded tasks to work towards proficiency. Teachers will come away with effective strategies and have designed activities and assessments that they can use immediately in their classes. 

This course would be a great way for both novice and experienced teachers to connect with other teachers, collaborate on activities, and reflect deeply on how and why they teach. There will be many opportunities for creating lessons and brainstorming activities. The lessons, assignments, discussion topics, and writing prompts of this course can easily be modified to fit any language class at the middle, secondary, or university level.  The course will rely heavily on the performance descriptors, sample performance indicators and sample progress indicators included in the revised ACTFL Standards for Intercultural Competence.