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Differentiated Teaching Module – Primary

This was an EU Comenius 2.1 project No. 118096-CP-1-2004-1-MT-COMENIUS-C21. The project team ( 'Contact Us') was made up of teacher educators from seven EU countries: the Universities of Malta (Coordinator), Amsterdam (Nederlands), Dalarna (Sweden), Leipzig (Germany), Manchester (UK), Marijampole (Lithuania), and the NGO Motivace-zivotni styl (Czech Republic). Partners came from different disciplines: only one had an inclusive education background; one specialized in differentiated teaching; three in educational psychology; two from the field of learning disability and special education; one from the pedagogy of mathematics; one from the pedagogy of language learning; one from the area of socio-emotional development. There were two common threads: all members were all engaged in teacher education and all were concerned about social justice in education.

The aim of the project was first of all to produce multicultural and multimedia teacher education materials for online and face-to-face courses on responding to pupil diversity. The project group held six meetings with open democratic discussion of aims, concerns and ideas. The actual collection of the materials was done in pairs of partners, with each member being a writer and a critical friend to his or her colleague. An editors’ meeting was held by three team members to review all materials to ensure coherence leading to the piloting of the materials with groups of pre-service and/or in-service teachers in each partner country in January-June 2006.

Shared understanding of each one’s different education systems and concerns was achieved through an initial qualitative study of how teachers from each participating country tried to reach out to all their pupils. The analysis of interviews held with five teachers from each partner country became the basis of the content of the handbook (see Bartolo et al., 2005 http://www.atee2005.nl/download/papers/04_ac.pdf; Humphrey et al., 2006). Excerpts from the teacher interviews are quoted throughout the handbook.

The diversity of partners and teacher-interview material led to a combination of a rather unusually wide variety of issues that members of the team related to inclusive education and differentiated teaching. The handbook has six chapters: (1) It starts by focusing on action research as a tool for professional development particularly in relation to responding to diversity. (2) It has an important chapter dedicated to understanding and respecting student diversity, particularly culture, language, gender and exceptionality, and the application of inclusive education principles. (3) It considers the personal and social growth of individuals within a caring and supportive environment, with a focus on holistic education, teacher-student and student-student relationships, as well as inter-staff and staff-parent and community collaboration. (4) It has an important basic focus on understanding student diverse characteristics, with foci on constructivist approaches, on multiple intelligences and learning styles, on emotional intelligence, as well as on attributional styles. (5) This is complemented by another basic wide focus on diversifying the curriculum and teaching and learning organisation, with foci on diversifying curriculum content, the learning process – including use of different modalities, the creation of independent working time, as well as cooperative learning and group work, and on learning product, including issues of assessment for learning and use of portfolios. (6) Finally, it also has a focus on a reflective application of all the previous principles holistically during actual teaching practice.

The materials had initially been produced as an online course (refer to paul.a.bartolo@um.edu.mt) and then revised after the pilot for hard copy production for use in face-to-face delivery. The materials were also evaluated twice by teacher education experts, namely Prof Teresa Medeiros from the University of the Azores and Prof David Rodriguez from the Technical University of Lisbon, and later by Prof Mel Ainscow from the University of Manchester. The materials were launched at an International Conference in MALTA on 14-16th June 2007 http://www.educ.um.edu.mt/dtmp/. The conference proceedings, Responding to student diversity: Teacher education and classroom practice can be downloaded free from the left side of this page.