The Overview of Training Needs on Differentiated Instruction for Early Childhood Teachers

DOI

10.2991/icece-16.2017.13How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Teacher training needs, Differentiated Instruction, Kindergarten

Abstract

How a kindergarten teacher can make the all of the students grasp the learning materials and remain enthusiastic even though they have varied ability and diverse background, is a classic problem faced by many teachers, including early childhood teachers. It appeared that teachers had problems in adjusting instruction that is able to fulfill the educational need of all pupils with varying abilities. The impact of teacher inability to differentiate instruction was especially for 'less able' students. They did not understand the lesson. A previous study revealed that some of kindergarten teachers use teacher-directed approach and didactic teaching. Early childhood educator expert noted that preschool classes and kindergartens have begun to look more like traditional 1st grade classes: young children are expected to sit quietly while they listen to whole-class instruction. Differentiated instruction is the process of identifying students' individual learning strengths, needs, and interests and adapting lessons to match them. However, in applying differentiated instructions is not as easy as it seems. Therefore, before implementing differentiated instructions, a training need analysis should be conducted to regards teachers' current ability. The purpose of this study was to describe the kindergarten teachers' perspectives of their training needs on differentiated instruction. A kindergarten school which used the Beyond Centre and Circle Time (BCCT) approach was chosen as the venue for this study. A qualitative study with in-depth interview was conducted with early childhood teachers and headmaster as the participants. The data from interview was analysed using thematic analysis. The results revealed that teachers tended to differentiate the activities and teaching aids, however they hardly set different learning goals for varied ability, and rarely structured the lesson in a particular way to accommodate student differences. Teachers tried to vary the method and seating arrangement. Meanwhile, the tasks weren't modified to accommodate students with additional learning needs. The suggestion for future differentiated instruction training will be developed based on teachers' needs.

Copyright

© 2017, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Suryatni Handayani
AU  - Aniva Kartika
AU  - Srisiuni Sugoto
PY  - 2016/11
DA  - 2016/11
TI  - The Overview of Training Needs on Differentiated Instruction for Early Childhood Teachers
BT  - Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Early Childhood Education (ICECE 2016)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 75
EP  - 83
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/icece-16.2017.13
DO  - 10.2991/icece-16.2017.13
ID  - Handayani2016/11
ER  -