Differentiated Instruction at Sequoia Alternative Program

The Students populating classrooms today are a diverse lot. They come from differing cultures and have different learning styles. They arrive at school with differing levels of emotional and social maturity. Their interests differ greatly, both in topic and intensity. At any given time, they reflect differing levels of academic readiness in various subjects, and in various facets of a single subject. And to complicate things even further, readiness and interest can vary for a given student over time and depending on the subject matter.

At Sequoia Alternative Program, the teachers acknowledge that students learn at different speeds and that they differ widely in their ability to think abstractly or understand complex ideas. To do so, is similar to acknowledging that students at any given age are not all the same height. To accommodate this reality, the teachers of Sequoia Alternative Program have created a "user-friendly" environment, one in which they can flexibly adapt pacing, approaches to learning, and channels for expressing learning in response to their students' differing needs.

By Differentiating the Instruction, Sequoia Alternative Program is providing its students with learning environments that address the diversity typical of all classrooms.