We all know that our students come to us with a range of skills, interests, abilities and social and emotional concepts and issues.

Focussing on the differences allows us to better connect with them as individuals not just as groups.

What strategies can we use? What is it that good teachers do to reach all learners?

AITSL standard 1 covers the knowledge, skills and strategies teachers need to be able to teach their students successfully. It ranges from graduate to lead teachers and there is a self assessment tool on the AITSL website to allow teachers to check their understanding.
http://www.selfassessment.aitsl.edu.au/

Hattie's Visible Learning outlines some of the things that teachers need to pay attention to for successful and effective teaching of a variety of learners in their classrooms.

Using strategies like Direct Teaching, displaying lesson intentions and pre-teaching.

Students need to see what success looks like in order to achieve it. Using rubrics, giving examples, discussing outcomes are all valuable here.

Multiple Intelligences, Blooms, Williams taxonomies etc.

Assessment and data collection is crucial. This can be anecdotal, interviews and informal chats with families as well as more formal tests, exams and performances.

Students need to know how they have performed and the feedback needs to be clear, targeted and specific.

We should be able to see learning occurring. Purposeful, engaged classrooms are on e measure of this.

What students should be able to see.

They should be able to clearly articulate these in their own words and understand how to achieve them.

The work in a classroom needs to be challenging enough for students.

They should be able to approach a task with a range of strategies in their learning toolbox.

Students should be meta cognitive and be able to analyse their own learning.

They should actively ask for feedback because they care about how they are progressing.

Independent learning.

Teacher knowledge of students is vitally important.

On a variety of measures.

Our knowledge of what they know and are able to do allows us to make connections with the learning they need.

We need to know their backgrounds in order to connect.

And we need to be sensitive to their needs.

Any blocks they may have need to be understood by us in order to try to find solutions.

Some strategies. There are many more. We will use action research to trial them in our classrooms.

This is essential, but we need to use it wisely in order to develop good learning skills.

Setting up areas for different learning activities allows for choice. While not always feasible, it is a worthwhile strategy.

Some questions for us to consider and find answers.