World Language Differentiation Scenarios

Scenario A: Señorita Smith’s Spanish I class has 20 students. They are currently learning how to describe people and places. An exit ticket with 5 questions that was collected yields the following results:

 8 students answered all questions correctly, including the more challenging extra credit question.  6 students could not answer 3 of the 5 questions. For the 2 they did answer, there were many mistakes in adjective-noun agreement. Based on inventories Mrs. Smith has done with the students, 4 of the 6 students are visual learners and 2 are kinesthetic learners  6 students got 4-5 questions correct, but sometimes had some spelling errors.

Scenario B: Mr. Jones teaches a 7th grade French class with 20 students. They are working on being able to talk about what they are planning to do using the close future tense. The instruction he has done so far on this topic has been direct, whole group instruction. Based on a classwork assignment he collected yesterday, 10 students have mastered the skill, and 10 have not. An interest inventory Mr. Jones gave at the beginning of the year yielded the following information,

 the 10 students who have mastered the skill have interests in sports and reading  the 10 students who have not yet mastered the skill have interests in movies and solving puzzles

Scenario C: Ms. Williams teaches 6th grade Chinese to a class of 20 students. They are currently working on talking about places around their town. She introduced the concept yesterday in class and is designing an independent activity for today’s lesson. Here’s what she knows about the learning preferences of her class:

 5 students are visual/spatial learners  5 students are logical/mathematical learners  5 students are kinesthetic learners  5 students are verbal/linguistic learners

Scenario D: Mr. Miller teaches German I to a class of 20 students. The next objective they will explore is describing what someone is wearing in German. He administered a pre-test to the class today and here are the results:

 7 students scored a perfect score on the pre-test.  9 students scored well on the questions clothing vocabulary, but not the questions that involved descriptors.  4 students attempted the pre-test, but with no correct answers.