Integrating Chapter 1

This chapter discussed the importance of Differentiated Instruction and Understanding by Design. Each of these instructions are seen as going side by side. Differentiated instruction focuses on the students, the classroom, and our methods of teaching. The goal of Differentiated Instruction is to ensure that teachers focus on methods that are effective for the students. It is important to have a quality curriculum that depends students’ understandings, so that they are able to apply it to the outside world. Using axioms, several examples were given to demonstrate different approaches of these methods.

We all connected to the reading through the axioms and corollaries. They helped us gain tips and ideas to use in the classroom. One, for instance, is to have students come up with their own questions about how the curriculum affects them. This will help them remember the material more because it would be something they were interested in. The chapter said one important aspect of a quality curriculum was a lesson that would help the student relate the material learned to the outside world, which was something we related to. We feel that in general we can learn a lot from this book, but it might be hard reaching different types of learners (like those you would see in AP level courses), with “standard” styles of teaching.