Differentiated Instruction, Professional Development, and Teacher Efficacy

TLDR

Teachers often struggle to provide all students access to specific learning activities that work best for them, and differentiating instruction offers different paths to understanding content, process, and products tailored to each child’s strengths, interests, and styles. The study examined teacher efficacy as a factor explaining teachers’ willingness to differentiate instruction. Greater professional development hours in differentiation were positively associated with teacher efficacy and efficacy beliefs, and teacher efficacy was found to be an important dimension in implementing differentiation across elementary, middle, and high school levels; implications and future research directions were discussed.

Abstract

Teachers often struggle to provide all students access to specific learning activities that work best for them—and what works best for some students will not work for others. Differentiating instruction makes sense because it offers different paths to understanding content, process, and products, considering what is appropriate given a child’s profile of strengths, interests, and styles. This study focused on teacher efficacy as a way to explain teacher willingness to differentiate instruction. We found that a greater number of professional development hours in differentiation of instruction was positively associated with both teacher efficacy and the teacher’s sense of efficacy beliefs. This study demonstrated that teacher efficacy is an important dimension in implementing the process of differentiation regardless of what level or what content area the teacher taught (elementary, middle, or high school). Implications and future directions for research are also discussed.