Research into Differentiated Instruction informs us that it is important to make a personal connection with our students and learn about their learning goals, strengths, needs and passions. This indeed is one of the things that helps us create "community" in our classrooms. (Gregory, Kaufeldt, 2012), (Doubet, Hockett 2010)
One of the easier things the authors talk about is doing quick one or two sentence fun surveys to learn personally about our students: "Who is your favorite cartoon character?" "What is your favorite ice cream?" "Are you a Red Sox or Yankee fan?" A fun way to add movement to this activity is to have students move to the area that represents their choice: one corner is vanilla, another corner is chocolate. This allows the classroom teacher to create tiering scenarios to group students by interest if that is the goal.
A little more refined is to know our student's learning strengths and profiles around the major modalities of instruction. This is the work of Howard Gardner: mathematical-logical, verbal-linguistic, visual-spatial, and bodily-kinesthetic, to name a few. Here's a link to a visual of Gardner's work. This link is to Laura Candler's MI Survey for Elementary Students (click here).
