How to Provide Support in a Diverse Classroom

As a rule, students have different functional, subject specific and cognitive prerequisites. Some students need to deal with the subject matter in an active way in order to understand something in the literal sense, others can draw simple conclusions, e.g. from the experiments in the videos, and still others can also see through complex relationships and make connections with content outside the narrowly defined topic.

Learning progress is possible at all learning levels. Weaker learners need more support and feedback (on learning strategies and learning successes), especially at the beginning. This support can be slowly reduced as they become more proficient. Support or tip cards, for example, which explain a method in more detail or give hints on how to solve a problem can be helpful here. In addition to graduated support when working on identical tasks, the teacher can set tasks with different levels of difficulty and abstraction, vary the number of tasks, and provide optional tasks in addition to compulsory tasks, which open up different learning paths or thematic focuses. It is important for the success of learning processes that the content of the tasks and the level of abstraction match the individual learning conditions.

Students come to school with very different language skills, either because they or their parents have a migration background or because they come from an educationally disadvantaged home and received little support in their early childhood. Too much text quickly overwhelms these children. Activity-orientated approaches such as those in the experiment videos are more suitable here. Language then tends to take place orally and has many deictic elements (‘Give me that.’). From there, the (oral) everyday language can develop further, also in conversation and when acting with the learning partner.

Other students cope well with educational language with its more abstract terms, passive forms and more complex sentence structure or can be introduced to it with little help. Educational language is more orientated towards written language. Teachers can differentiate here by, for example, providing text modules for formulations, putting up subject-specific word fields as posters in the classroom, providing frequent verbs and their conjugations on index cards, etc.

Specialist school language is characterised by the use of technical terms, technical phrases, passive forms and a more abstract level. A glossary can be helpful here, for example, in which important terms are explained or translations for technical terms into educational and/or everyday language are given.

Some students like to work alone on a topic, but most prefer to work cooperatively with partners or in a group. Differentiation can take place by allowing the children to choose their preferred social form themselves. Cooperative work promotes social and communication skills and can be organised in different ways. For example, students at the same cognitive and/or linguistic level can work together. Pairs of students working at the same pace can be set up. Children who finish an individual task at roughly the same time continue working together. The pairings are not fixed from the outset, instead, students who have already finished make this clear, e.g. by putting up a sign, and the next ones look for a learning partner from this offer.

Fixed learning partnerships in which the performance level is different, can also be formed. It must be ensured that the support provided by the stronger students does not consist of simply announcing the solution, but in helping the other to learn independently. This form of learning, also known as peer tutoring, not only benefits the lower-performing students but also the higher-performing ones, as they deepen their knowledge and skills and strengthen their social competencies.

The last social form to be mentioned is group work, which can be based on the division of labour or on equal work. When working in groups, it is important to ensure that each member takes on a task and can achieve learning progress.

David Kolb developed a theory of learning styles ¹, i.e. the preferred way in which people learn. He differentiated between four learning styles:

• Diverging (feel and watch),
• Assimilating (think and watch),
• Converging (think and do),
• Accomodating (feel and do).

These styles rarely occur in their pure form, but there is usually one or more preferences. Ideally, lessons should be organised in such a way that all preferred learning styles are taken into account.

The concept of learning types ² assumes that there are preferred learning methods and distinguishes between

• visual learning (by looking),
• auditory learning (by listening),
• reading and writing (learning by processing texts),
• kinaesthetic learning (learning through hands-on action and movement).

Whether these learning types exist as manifest personality traits is disputed in research. What is undisputed, however, is that when several channels are activated, more neurons are active, increasing the likelihood that something will be memorised. The effect is intensified when positive emotions are associated with the absorption and processing of information. Access to scientific topics through experimentation and investigation offers a good starting point here.