How to Differentiate Learning Centers
Learning centers are an excellent way for teachers to make sure that students are actively engaged in their learning, especially while teachers are working with small groups or individual students. Because most classes have a wide range of abilities, however, teachers must make sure that the centers are appropriate for all students. Differentiating the activities at each center requires preparation and attention to detail.
Instructions
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Differentiate Centers
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Organize your students. Group students by ability (such as emergent readers, developing readers and readers), preferably coordinating with reading groups or math groups you already have.
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Write your goals. Develop learning goals for each group for each quarter (or however long you use each set of learning centers). For example, an emergent reader group might be working on memorizing long vowel sounds. One math group may be working on addition facts through 10, another may be working on facts through 20. One writing group might be working one writing a paragraph, another might be working on how to write conversations.
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Determine skills to be reviewed. Along with a learning goal, each of your groups should have skills to be practiced. Coordinate the review skills for your top group with the learning goal of your next highest group; coordinate the review skills of the second highest group with the learning goal of the third highest group, and so on.
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Choose learning centers. Go through your learning centers and choose those that can meet either learning goals or review skills for your groups. For example, a group working on multiplication facts and a group working on division facts would both benefit from a learning center that required students to write and solve their own word problems.
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Adjust the directions. For each learning center, create directions for each group and place them into color-coded folders(or ones with different animal drawings, or however you want to differentiate your groups). If you had a learning center that had students using vocabulary words in sentences, you could put different vocabulary lists in each folder. If you had a learning center that dealt with fact families, you could have some groups do addition fact families and others do multiplication fact families.
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Tips & Warnings
Make sure to teach students how to do each learning center and the procedures for turning in their work before allowing them to do learning centers while you work with small groups. Students who don't understand the centers very well will not benefit from them.
Some people might fuss about students knowing which color group they are in or knowing that some groups have more challenging work than others. The truth is that kids will know who's good at reading and who's not whether you color-coordinate folders or have ability groups or not. So instead, make sure your classroom is a place where everyone is respected and treated with kindness, regardless of ability.
