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.
