Lesson 3

Selecting and Using a Variety of Teaching Methods

3.1 Differentiated Instruction

Objectives

After working on this module, you should be able to:

1. explain differentiated instruction (DI)
2. provide activities for Differentiated Instruction
3. make plans on how to transform the classroom into a DI classroom

4. recognize the importance of DI in responding to individual differences of students

5. recognize the importance of learning the different teaching methods, strategies and
activities of each component in the development of the lessons; and
6. appreciate the value of the module in enhancing the teaching skills.

In this section, you will learn that teaching method are determined by many factors
like the intended specific outcome or purpose, size of group and learners’ preference for
learning. You will also learn that the content sometimes dictates the method and requires
preparation in selecting the right “tool” for the right “job”.

Each one of us has different learning styles. With this knowledge, it is about time that
we should accept that using a one-size-fits- all method of teaching will not make our
students learn best. We should be able to find ways to make the students learn the most
that they can in the classroom.

This session shall pave the way to improving and facilitating learning considering the
individual differences of the learners.

In the later part of the lesson, localization and contextualization shall be tackled. Lack
of facilities and equipment will not be a problem since everything will be suited to the
context of the local community.

Activity
 1. How do you feel about the picture? Why? (use at least 50 words)
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2. Was the task in the picture congruent to learners’ strengths or talents?

Discuss your answer
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1. How do you feel about the picture? Why (use at least 50 words)?
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2. Was the task in the picture congruent to learners’ strengths or talents?

Discuss your answer
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Analysis
1. How did you interpret the pictures?
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2. What difficulties did you encounter while analyzing the pictures?

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3. What did you discover about yourself? About others?

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4. What is it telling us about addressing individual needs?

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5. What insights have you gained from the activity?
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Abstraction
Since you will be dealing with high school or elementary students sooner or later, it is
just but proper to adopt the trend, Dep.Ed is using, the differentiated instruction. During our
K-12 National Training of Trainers/Teachers in Teacher’s Camp, Baguio City, our speaker
discussed that D.I. (Differentiated Instruction) is a systematic approach to planning the
curriculum and instruction for academically diverse students. It is also a way of thinking
about the classroom with the dual goals of honoring each student‘s learning capacity.
A teacher practically plans varied approaches to what students need to learn, how
they will learn it and how they will express what they have learned. A teaching philosophy
based on the premise that teachers should adapt instruction to students’ differences.
Through DI you can also plan for a variety of ways to “get in” and express learning.
5 Major Principles of Differentiated Instruction ( O’Brien – Guinney, 2001)
• 1. Every child can learn and every teacher can learn.
• 2. All children have the right to high quality education.
• 3. Progress for all will be expected, recognized, and rewarded.
• 4. Learners in a classroom have common needs, distinct needs and individual needs.
• 5. Products: (Ways students will demonstrate their knowledge or understanding of a
topic).
Dep Ed had identified GOALS of Differentiated Instruction which are:
1. Every student will make continuous progress no matter how old she is or what levels
her knowledge and skills are as she begins the unit.
2. Every student will become a lifelong learner.
The following flow charts are the processes where differentiation can used.
CONTENT
What is taught and how all students are provided access to the program of study.

PROCESS
How students develop the knowledge, understanding and skills to master the
learning outcomes.
PRODUCT
How the learner is able to demonstrate what he/she knows, understands and is able
to do as a result of learning.
 ENVIRONMENT
(Where of teaching)
“He who wishes to teach, teaches everywhere, in the open air.
Socrates taught in the public street,
Plato in the gardens of the Academy,
Even Christ among the mountains and lakes.”
-Jose P. Rizal
To get started, the following tips are set for easier implementation.
• Do a diagnostic/formative assessment
• Create an individual profile of each of your student in each class you are handling.
• Using the result of the assessment, you can modify/differentiate content, process or
product, (even environment) along with the learning area.
Sample Differentiated Instruction used by DepEd and other Colleges and Universities
Tiering Instruction
1. Identify the standards, concepts, or generalizations you want the students to learn.
2. Decide if students have the background necessary to be successful with the lesson.
3. Assess the students’ readiness, interests, and learning profiles.
4. Create an activity or project that is clearly focused on the standard, concept or
generalization of the lesson.
5. Adjust the activity to provide different levels or tiers of difficulty that will lead all
students to an understanding.
6. Develop an assessment component for the lesson. Remember, it is on-going!

What can be tiered

• Processes, content and products
• Assignments
• Homework
• Learning stations
• Assessments
• Writing prompts
• Anchor activities
• Materials
What can be adjusted
 • Level of complexity
• Amount of structure
• Pacing
• Materials
• Concrete to abstract
• Options based on student interests
• Options based on learning styles
Tic Tac Toe
• Students complete 3 activities of their choice in a straight row, creating a
winning tic tac toe (project)

Written Visual Oral

FREE Poster Speech

Persuasive FREE Debate

Essay

Editorial Campaign FREE

Poster

Note: Tic Tac Toe can be arranged to written, visual and oral respectively or
you may jumble the title for a more challenging activity.
 Evelina Maclang-Vicencio, PhD Dean, College of Education, University of the East
Allan V. Roncesvalles, Polangui General Comprehensive High School, Region V (Bicol)

Application
Now let’s see how you can be able to translate these data into something that
can be utilized when you will be deployed as student-teachers or as real teachers.

1. For 10 minutes , conceptualize what competency or lesson you will cover.

2. Create a step-by-step lesson plan to make a specific lesson following a DI format. You
are free to choose a particular lesson that you think most students will have difficulty
in.

Lesson 3
Selecting and Using a Variety of Teaching Methods

Lesson 3.2
Localization and Contextualization
Objectives

At the end of the lesson, the students should be able to:

1. gain functional and operational understanding of localization and
contextualization in the Basic Education Program;
2. identify ways on how the curriculum and/or subject could be
localized/contextualized;
3. express appreciation of the need to adapt to the learners’ diversity
through contextualization.
 4. acquire the skills in preparing instructional materials needed in the development of
the lesson;
5. recognize the importance of learning the different teaching methods, strategies and
activities of each component in the development of the lessons; and
6. appreciate the value of the module in enhancing the teaching skills.

To teach with all the materials on hand makes the life of a teacher
easy. What if you are in the far flung barangay and no sports equipment,
internet, dance materials, musical instruments, health apparatus and art
materials available? How will you make your teaching effective? How
prepared are we to face the challenge?

This session will introduce you to some very important features of the
curriculum where even materials are not available you will still be as
effective as the teacher in the urban places where materials are available.

Activity
The students shall watch the viral videos
1. BUWIS-BUHAY Kahanga-hanga ang mga Guro na nagsisilbi sa ganito kahirap na
daan
2. TV Patrol: Guro, tinuturuan ang mga batang nakatira sa sementeryo

Analysis
1. How did you find the video clips?
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2. How did you react to what you’ve watched?

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3. What difficulties would you find if you were to be deployed there?

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4. How would you treat those difficulties?

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 5. What more do you need to address these difficulties and be able to deliver the
lesson effectively?

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6. What is this telling us about the way lessons should be taught?

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7. How is this similar to teaching in the classroom?

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8. What have you realized after watching the video?

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Abstraction
Localization is to localize, identify, indigenize and establish by activating prior
knowledge to make learning interesting. Adapting the curriculum to local realities relating to
the contextualization of the curriculum and the process of teaching and learning in the local
environment will surely help the learners achieve fun and concretize learning. Localization
and contextualization can be done in all subject areas. Localization maximizes materials that
are locally available just be creative enough and surely your teaching will be as fun as
planned. Your students will surely still enjoy your activity even if actual materials are not
available.
To contextualize, teachers use authentic materials, activities, interests, issues, and
needs from learners’ lives. You should create rooms for students to pose problems and
issues and develop strategies together to address them. Contextualization in another term is
making the learning process, relevant, important and meaningful to the learner/child.
Making the learning process meaningful, important and helpful to the learner/child. The
localized or contextualized curriculum is based on local needs and relevance for the learners
where there is flexibility and creativity in the lessons.
Authentic Materials are materials such as facts, data, procedures that are readily
available in the community/city/municipality or province
• Examples:
• Police Reports or Data as to number of crimes
• Hospital Data
• Tourism Data
• Local Procedures on how to make local products or delicacies.
3 basic tips to consider in localizing and contextualizing lessons
1. Tailor-fit the lesson
2. Build on what they already have
3. Accommodate and respect cultural, linguistic, and racial diversity
In designing activities in the classroom using authentic materials, it is
important to set the purpose first.
 • Helpful questions
o How will students interact with the material?
o What will students learn?
o Why will they learn it?

Application
Imagine that you are assigned in a far flung school where there is no cellphone
signal, the mode of transportation are horseback riding, powerful sports single motorcycle
and handling multi grade students. How will you teach your lesson without any equipment?
This time, you are tasked to localize and conceptualize your topic.
Focusing on your subject area, continue the following sentence prompts:
3. Students will (How will the students interact with the material?)
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2. In order to (what will the students learn)

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3. So they can (why will they learn it?)

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Lesson 3
Selecting and Using a Variety of Teaching Methods

Lesson 3.3
Interactive Teaching
Objectives

At the end of the lesson, the students must be able to:

1. analyze each strategy in order to suit lessons to varied students learning style;
2. utilize the different interactive teaching methods for a more dynamic classroom;
3. comprehend the depths of each interactive teaching strategies.
4. recognize the importance of learning the different teaching methods, strategies and
activities of each component in the development of the lessons; and
5. appreciate the value of the module in enhancing the teaching skills.

Great teachers are nimble, observant, and responsive, always keeping an open mind
about how to best engage their students and get them excited about learning—and that
means considering trying out different interactive teaching styles in the classroom.

In this session, you will come to realize that interactive learning encourages student’s
participation, use questions that stimulate response, discussion, and a hands-on experience.
Use teaching aids that press for answers, and capture/hold the student’s attention. You will
also know that you can set up a workgroup environment and you can involve yourself as well
as the student.

Activity
Discuss the most creative and interactive teaching strategy your teacher
presented when you were in the elementary grade, junior high school or even during your
senior years.
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Analysis
1. How did you find the activity? Why?
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2. What new information or knowledge did you learn from the activity?
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3. How will these help you perform your roles as future teachers?
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4. What have you realized from the activity?
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Abstraction
 Interactive teaching styles are designed around a simple principle: without practical
application, students often fail to comprehend the depths of the study material. Interactive
teaching is also beneficial for you as the teacher in a number of ways, including:

 Measurable student accomplishments: Teachers making use of interactive teaching

styles are better equipped to assess how well students master a given subject
material.

 Flexibility in teaching: Applying training methods that involve two-way

communications will enable you to make quick adjustments in processes and
approaches.

 Practice makes perfect: Interactive instruction enhances the learning process.

 Student motivation: Two-way teaching dispels student passivity, and when more
students are engaged, you’ll have much more fun too.

Wikipedia by Ruben Knapen — Jun 13, 2018

Interactive teaching is all about instructing the students in a way they are actively involved
with their learning process. There are different ways to create an involvement like this. Most
of the time it’s through

 teacher-student interaction

 student-student interaction

 the use of audio, visuals, video

 hands-on demonstrations and exercises

You encourage your students to be active members of your class, thinking on their own,
using their brains, resulting in long-term memory retention. Not only the students'
knowledge will improve, but their interest, strength, knowledge, team spirit and freedom of
expression will increase as well.

3 Effective interactive teaching strategies to encourage speech in your classroom

First, I want to put some activities in the spotlight. The following interactive student
activities are three of the most effective ways to encourage more speech in your classroom.

1. Think, pair and share

Set a problem or a question around a certain topic, and pair up your students. Give

each pair of students enough time so they can reach a proper conclusion, and permit the
kids to share their conclusion in their voice. You can also request that one student explain a
concept while the other student evaluates what is being learned. Apply different variations
of the process—your students will be engaged, communicating, and retaining more
information before your eyes.
2. Brainstorming

Interactive brainstorming is mostly performed in group sessions. The process is

useful for generating creative thoughts and ideas. Brainstorming helps students learn to
work together, and above all, learn from each other. Interactive brainstorming is typically
performed in group sessions. The process is useful for generating creative thoughts and
ideas. Brainstorming helps students learn to pull together. Types of interactive brainstorming
include:

 Structured and unstructured

 Reverse or negative thinking

 Nominal group relationships

 Online interaction such as chat, forums and email

 Team-idea mapping

 Group passing

 Individual brainstorming

3. Buzz session

Participants come together in session groups that focus on a single topic. Within
each group, every student contributes thoughts and ideas. Encourage discussion and
collaboration among the students within each group. Everyone should learn from each
other’s input and experiences. As a teacher, you could give your students some keywords to
spark the conversation.

Of course, there are many other interactive teaching ideas as well. I split up the activities in
different categories:

 Individual student activities

 Student pair activities

 Student group activities

 Interactive game activities

Individual student activities

4. Exit slips

These are best used at the end of the class session. You’ll ask the students to
write for one minute on a specific question. It might be generalized to “what was the most
important thing you learned today”. Then, you can decide if you are going to open up a
conversation about it in your next class. You can ask them if they still remember what they
wrote down. Need a digital exit slip template? Try this one from BookWidgets and learn more
about the possibilities of an exit slip.

5. Misconception check

Discover students' misconceptions. See if students can identify what is the

correct answer when given a false fact. It’s useful when going over a previous lesson. It
encourages students to think deeply and wager all the possibilities.

6. Circle the questions

Make a worksheet or a survey that has a list of questions (make them specific)
about your topic, and ask students to circle (or check) the ones they don’t know the answers
to. Then, let them turn in the paper.

Create corners concerning different questions that were circled. Let your students work on
the extra exercises and explanation in the corners, individually. As your students will all have
circled different questions, you have to give each student a different and personalized order
to visit the corners.

7. Ask the winner

Ask students to silently solve a problem on the board. After revealing the
answer, instruct those who got it right to raise their hands (and keep them raised). Then, all
other students have to talk to someone with a raised hand to better understand the question
and how to solve it next time.

Student pair activities

8. Pair-share-repeat
 After a Think-pair-share experience, which I’ve written about in the first
interactive learning lesson idea, you can also ask students to find a new partner and share
the wisdom of the old partnership to this new partner.

9. Teacher and student

Let students brainstorm the main points of the last lesson. Then, pair up your
students and assign them 2 roles. One of them is the teacher, and the other the student.
The teacher’s job is to sketch the main points, while the student’s job is to cross off points
on his list as they are mentioned and come up with 2 to 3 points that the teacher missed.

10. Wisdom from another

After an individual brainstorm or creative activity, pair students to share their

results. Then, call for volunteers who found their partner’s work to be interesting or
exemplary. Students are often more willing to share the work of fellow students publicly than
their work. Of course, you can always encourage sharing their objectives as well.

11. Forced debate

Let students debate in pairs. Students must defend the opposite side of their
personal opinion. It encourages them to step away from their own beliefs and teaches them
to look through a different colored glass once in a while.

Variation: one half of the class takes one position, the other half takes the other position.
Students line up and face each other. Each student may only speak once so that all students
on both sides can engage the issue.

12. Optimist/Pessimist
 In pairs, students take opposite emotional sides of a case study, statement, or
topic. Encourage them to be empathic and truly “live” the case study. You’ll discover some
good solution proposals and your students will learn some exceptional social skills.

13. Peer review writing task

To assist students with a writing assignment, encourage them to exchange drafts

with a partner. The partner reads the essay and writes a three-paragraph response: the first
paragraph outlines the strengths of the essay, the second paragraph discusses the essay’s
problems, and the third paragraph is a description of what the partner would focus on in
revision if it were her essay. Students can learn a lot from each other and themselves as
well! Here are 10 more creative self-assessment ideas.

Student group activities

14. Board rotation

This interactive learning strategy is even more interactive than others! Divide
your class into different groups of students and assign them to each of the boards you’ve set
up in the room. Assign one topic/question per board. After each group writes an answer, they
rotate to the next board. Here, they write their answer below the first answer of the previous
group. Let them go around the room until all the groups have covered all the boards. Not
that many boards in your classroom? Try using tablets and BookWidgets' interactive
whiteboard.

15. Pick the Winner

Divide the class into groups and let them work on the same topic/problem. Let
them record an answer/strategy on paper or digitally. Then, ask the groups to switch with a
nearby group and let them evaluate their answer. After a few minutes, allow each set of
groups to merge and ask them to select the best answer from the two choices, which will be
presented to the complete class.
16. Movie Application

In groups, students discuss examples of movies that made use of a concept or

event discussed in class, trying to identify at least one way the movie makers got it right,
and one way they got it wrong. Think about movies showing historical facts, geographical
facts, biographies of famous people, …

Interactive game activities

Create an interactive classroom full of interactive learning games. Games are so much fun
for students since it doesn’t feel like learning. With BookWidgets, you can make interactive
learning games like crossword puzzles, pair matching games, bingo games, jigsaw puzzles,
memory games, and many more in minutes (and there’s a Google Classroom integration as
well).

17. Crossword puzzle

The crossword game is perfect to use as repetition activity. Choose a list of

words and their description, and BookWidgets creates an interactive crossword for you. The
crossword game transforms these boring lessons into a fun experience. Here you can read
more about how to create them and for which topics you can use them (not only for teaching
languages)!

18. Scrabble

Use the chapter (or course) title as the pool of letters from which to make words
(e.g., mitochondrial DNA), and allow teams to brainstorm as many words relevant to the
topic as possible. You can also actually play scrabble and ask students to form words from
the newly learned vocabulary.

19. Who/what am I?
 Tape a term or name on the back of each student. You can also tape it on their
forehead. Each student walks around the room, asking “yes or no” questions to the other
students in an effort to guess the term. Of course, the term has something to do with your
lesson topic.

20. Bingo

Bingo is a fun game that can be used for all sorts of exercises: language
exercises, introductory games, math exercises, etc. Take a look at this blog post with all the
different bingo possibilities here. You’ll be surprised about how many interactive lesson
activities you can do with just one game.

21. Incident process

This teaching style involves a case study format, but the process is not so rigid as a full case
study training session. The focus is on learning how to solve real problems that
involve real people—preparing your students for life beyond your classroom. Provide small
groups of students with details from actual incidents and then ask them to develop a
workable solution.

22. Q&A sessions

On the heels of every topic introduction, but prior to formal lecturing, ask your students to
jot down questions pertaining to the subject matter on 3×5 index cards. After you collect the
cards, mix them up and read and answer the student-generated questions.

Whereas students often lose interest during lecture-style teaching, interactive teaching
styles promote an atmosphere of attention and participation. Make it interesting. Make it
exciting. Make it fun. As you well know, telling is not teaching and listening is not learning.

Application

 Imagine that you are in a grade 7 section 8 class. Come up of an activity using any of
the interactive learning strategies on the topic courtship.
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