In Service Teachers' Diffrentiated Instructional Strategy and Students' Reflective Thinking and Empowered Learning
Every educational program aims at the comprehensive growth and development of learners. Education policymakers and teachers who are part of any education system have a pivotal role in providing an environment that empowers learners. Thinking pervades all spheres of human action and the ability to think reflectively differentiates man from other animals. Psychological theories have proved that, in a classroom, each learner is unique and has different learning profiles, i.e., learning style, intelligence preference, culture and gender. Therefore, one- sized curriculum doesn't fit all. This research was conducted to measure the influence of differentiated instructional strategy of in-service- teachers as a pedagogy on students' reflective thinking and empowered learning. The researcher developed and standardized a module of 16 lesson plans on English grammar and poetry integrating essential components of reflective thinking and empowered learning into differentiated instruction. Randomly selected samples of this research consisted of 100 students of standard 9, boys and girls, from an English medium ICSE school in the urban district of Bangalore. After a try-out of a few lessons on 25 samples, the researcher taught the lessons through differentiated instruction within 3 months. Through control and experimental groups, pre-test and post-test design, data were collected through 2 measuring tools (1) a questionnaire to measure the level of reflective thinking and (2) Learner empowerment measure. Data analysis of the pre and post-test scores of the experiment group shows a significant impact of differentiated instruction on all four components of reflective thinking of students, i.e., Habitual Action, Understanding, Reflection and Critical Reflection; and on the components of empowered learning of students, i.e., Meaningfulness, Competence, Impact and Choice irrespective of the difference in the gender. The results indicate that differentiated instruction could be implemented in schools as an instructional method to include all types of students and respect their diversity.