Supporting Individual Learners in Classrooms with Diversity

Kathleen McKinney, Cross Chair in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and Professor of Sociology
Illinois State University

What follows is a list of strategies, organized into several categories, to help individual students maximize their learning given diverse demographics, backgrounds, needs, and learning styles.*

Knowing Your Students and Providing Individual Opportunities

• hold instructor meetings (live and virtual) with individual students
• encourage serious self-reflection on learning by individual students (e.g., have them keep journals on learning, use one-minute papers frequently that ask about how they learn...)
• involve students in collaborative work grouping them homogeneously by background knowledge and work pace to "individualize" the groups
• have part of the course requirements via individual learning contracts
• give a first day survey on "who are your students"
• give a pre-test to assess students' beginning knowledge of the subject
• encourage appropriate causal attributions for academic work by individual students
• provide frequent, meaningful, individualized formative feedback

Diversity in Design, Structure, and Strategies of the Course

• use several and diverse forms of evaluation/grading (oral exams, take-home exams, essay exams, portfolios, projects, group work, journals, group quizzes, performances, presentations, creative writing, poster sessions, etc. etc.)
• give your students an inventory of learning styles and adjust the class to who they are or provide more options based on the diversity of styles
• give students background knowledge tests (pretests) and adjust material or provide alternative learning sequences
• use multimedia (broadly defined!) - text, audio, video, overheads, computers, discussion, group work, lecture, poetry, art, touch...to present and learn material
• present verbal material in more than one way and use multiple examples
• make use of technology as another mode of learning and for asynchronous learning
• recommend or require diverse out-of-class learning opportunities (co-curricular, extra-curricular, campus culture)

Offer Students Control and Choice

• give students options and choices in planning the course, in assignments, in ways to demonstrate their learning, and in how they are evaluated
• allow students to pursue their own questions and interests whenever possible (in discussion, on projects, for paper topics...)

Other Strategies to Support Learning

• use peers to offer support and feedback
• value and give credit to students' contributions
• use assignments that are broken into stages
• allow pre-drafts of work for formative assessment
• use midterm course evaluations
• give a detailed syllabus
• do not grade competitively
• do not grade based on a normal distribution
• don't focus on what you, the teacher, need to cover but on what your students actually learn (less is more)
• use/recommend relevant campus resources (e.g., learning centers)

*These suggestions came from a panel session at the March 1999 National Meetings of the American Association of Higher Education and/or from my own teaching experience. They have been paraphrased and organized.