In high school, did you have teachers that only knew how to teach the material one way? Sadly, if you didn’t learn the material the way that they taught it, you probably ended up receiving a poor grade or having to repeat the course. This wouldn’t have happened if your teachers knew how to differentiate instruction in to meet the needs of all learners.

For all of the teacher out there who find it hard to differentiate instruction, you have no excuse, as there are over 13 different teaching approaches and styles. This means you have at least 13 ways to differentiate instruction at all times. In this piece, we will discuss 13 of them.

Analytic Teaching: A method of monitoring and evaluating students’ literacy progress that recognizes, respects, and appreciates the students’ abilities.

Assumptive Teaching: A type of instruction resulting from teachers’ inaccurate assumptions about students’ abilities, which leads to discord between the teaching program and the learner.

Deductive Teaching: A didactic style of instruction in which a teacher presents a generality or rule with the expectation that students will apply it to specific scenarios.

Didactic Teaching: A style of teaching in which a teacher transmits content to students with the expectation that they will simply learn it.

Discovery Teaching: A teaching style which provides students with an environment that encourages them to find general patterns for themselves. It is also called inductive teaching.

Non-Directive Teaching: A teaching model that uses facilitated teaching and focuses on helping students set personal goals.

Reciprocal Teaching: An interactive learning strategy aimed at teaching students to summarize portions of text, predict potential questions, and clarify the complex text. At first, students observe the teacher as he or she models ideal behaviors; then, they gradually take on the teacher’s instructional role.

Direct Approach: A method of teaching thinking skills in which the skill is presented and then examples of its use are given.

Intentional Teaching: Teaching that happens when an educator is focused on creating a plan to instruct students with a specific learning goal or developmental outcome in mind.

Readiness Training: Instruction that equips students with foundational skills and background knowledge to prepare them for subsequent formal teaching. 

Tiered Instruction: The instructional method of creating the best lesson possible on a topic and then extrapolating from the base lesson to make it more challenging for students who are ready for advanced work and less challenging for students who are not ready for the requirements of the base lesson.

Activity-Based Approach: An approach to instruction that makes teachable moments out of naturally occurring, everyday activities.

Guided Comprehension Model: An instruction process based on explaining, demonstrating, guiding, practicing, and reflecting that can scaffold comprehension.

What did we miss?