Differentiation for students with learning disabilities:

• Frequent checks that students understand instruction

• Providing overviews of lessons in chart form
• Varying the mode of presentation (oral, visual, activity-based)
• Cueing students to listen to, or make notes about, important points
• Relating material to students’ lives
• Making directions short and reinforcing oral instructions with visual cues
• Clarifying definitions and ensuring understanding by having students repeat
definitions
• Breaking a large topic or task down into manageable parts
• Using collaborative and co-operative learning approaches
• Preparing study guides of key words and concepts so students have clear notes from
which to study
• Colour-coded materials for organization
• Partially filled in tasks to guide students
• Tiered assignments and tasks that differ in reading demands
• Teaching concepts to the whole class and providing extra practice for those who
need it
• Advance organization and give explicit practice
• Teach more intensely to a small group of students
• Embed strategy instruction into large-group teaching
• Enhance content instruction for all students

Differentiation for ELL students:

• Providing opportunities for co-operative learning
o Brainstorming, think-pair-share, small group discussions, jigsaw
• Challenging concepts should be diagrammed or supported with pictures.
• And modeling the steps of a process or showing students what a finished product
should look like can go a long way toward helping students understand
• Make it visual
• Pre-teach whenever possible
• Sentence frames
• Activate background knowledge
• Explicit and contextualized vocabulary
• Many opportunities for practice and repetition of new vocabulary words
• Restate, paraphrase, and repeat instructions multiple times
• Pre-view and review key information
• Hands on learning
• Plan for a range of questions that promote strategic, critical thinking
• Create assignments that require students to think critically
• Frequent feedback
Differentiation for students with ADHD:
• Externalize forms of information (i.e. putting up steps to follow)
• Externalize time and structures needed for timeline
o Deadlines for daily progress toward assignment completion
• Externalize source of motivation
o Brain breaks at set times
• Make key information clear through bolding, colour-coding, or highlighting

Differentiation for deaf students:

• Pre-teach new vocabulary
• Periods of intense concentration interspersed with less demanding activities
• Providing vocabulary lists
• Post an outline of the class agenda
• Provide an outline of the topics and kind of work done in each unit and over the
term
• Provide an outline of a typical school day
• Use visuals in handouts
• Ensure that only one person is speaking at a time