Knowing Your Learners | Differentiation in the Inclusive Classroom

Trends Across Groups

Sort the need, not the diagnosis

Tap each domain.

Every child is different, and no two children with the same diagnosis need the same thing. That said, once you have looked at enough children you start to notice patterns. Children with similar profiles often need similar kinds of support, and those patterns are what make planning possible.

So it helps to stop sorting children by diagnosis and start sorting the need itself. Most of what a child needs falls into one of four areas.

1

Cognitive needs

How a child takes in, processes, understands, remembers and applies information. Thinking and reasoning, memory, attention, and the academic skills built on top of those things.

In the classroom: The child who cannot hold a three-step instruction, who reads the words but not the meaning, or who needs the concrete object before the written method makes sense.

The Thing Worth Saying Out Loud

The domains are not separate compartments

A cognitive need that goes unmet for long enough usually turns up later as an emotional one, and then as a behavioural one. The child who cannot blend sounds in Grade 1 becomes the child who hates writing in Grade 2 and refuses to start in Grade 3. It is the same need the whole way through. It just changed clothes.

Which Domain?

Name the need

Underneath Everything

Executive functioning and emotional regulation

Underneath all four domains sit two capacities that decide whether a child can use anything you have planned.

Both are skills rather than traits, both develop at very different rates in a primary classroom, and both explain a great deal of what looks like a child who will not, but is actually a child who cannot.

Cannot, Not Will Not

Read the cause underneath

Take It Away

Pick one child. What is their biggest need in each of the four domains?

Which domain do you find easiest to spot, and which do you tend to miss?

Name a child whose need you have been reading as behaviour. What might be underneath it?

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