One size does not fit all!

Day 3 Session 1 (Friday, 10 October 2014, 8.30 - 10 am)

ENGLISH LANGUAGE LESSON: ENGINEERING

Trainer: Carole Allsop

In today’s lesson, the trainer; Carole, demonstrated how to implement differentiation in our lesson. The topic chosen was an engineering topic; Hand Biometrics Technology. In this lesson, I could see how differentiation was carried out: the differentiated learning outcomes and differentiated tasks.

First and foremost, the lesson’s learning outcomes were differentiated for more able learners. Yes, this is something that goes missing in most lessons, I suppose. Teachers would normally set ONE general aim for their lessons without much consideration on ‘differentiation’ – oops, sorry! I must not say that in general.

Okay, I admit that I have never thought of ‘differentiation’ – not until it was brought up my home tutor, Ms. Katie, during our first session last week. Now I learnt that there should be a number of aims to be set for the students as there a number of differences between the students: language proficiency, ability to understand and work on the given content, learning styles and preferences, and their pace at which they learn.

It is understood that ALL students will be able to achieve ONE general aim set for the lesson, however, other students might achieve higher than the general aim due to their proficiency and ability.

Thus, differentiation in task would also be one of the aspects which should be taken into consideration. In this lesson, Carole provided CHOICES to the trainees. The trainees were asked to determine their own personal hand geometry code. In doing so, trainees were given two sets of instructions to choose from: a complex and a simpler instruction.

This was an example of differentiation that one could carry out. In this instance, students can choose between the two sets of instructions in order to determine their hand geometry code. As for classroom practice, a teacher may assign different sets of instructions to different students i.e. the complex instructions set assigned to more able students while the simpler instructions set would be given to the less able students. Hmm, during the lesson, most of the trainees chose the simpler task – easy, quick and simple, I suppose!

In short, I learnt that differentiation is the key in a CLIL lesson or should I say any lessons. Learners are different, so, do them justice by having a variety of activities, materials, learning support that can facilitate them towards achieving the differentiated goals set for them. Remember, ONE SIZE DOES NOT FIT ALL! 

Written by,

Masniza Mansor

Port Dickson Polytechnic

Negeri Sembilan

p/s: Oh, here is a link to a sample lesson on ‘teachingenglish’ website that I found as I conducted my web search. I hope that it would be useful to all readers when planning lessons.

http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/clil-citizenship-recycling