The key underpinnings of differentiated instruction that I embraced into my own teaching practices are that each student has the capability to be successful in his/her own way and its up to me as the teacher to try my hardest to bring that own in my students. Differentiated instruction isn't just remediation, its also enrichment and core instruction which can often be forgotten by teachers. I strive to differentiate as often as possible for my students to allow them to receive the most out of their time in my classroom.
Another thing that stuck with me this semester was people first language which is something I had never had thought of before when it came to students with disabilities, both learning and physical. This relates to differentiating instruction because we can sometimes forget that a student is not their disability but also a person with so much more to them.
The struggle I have with differentiated instruction is creating the assignments or planning for the lessons using the best possible strategies for my students. I struggle and worry that I won't be able to fully help my students to receive the best learning possible and that when I do differentiate I won't do it properly. The line between too much support and not enough can be a fine line, as a teacher you want students to be highly successful and not want to watch them struggle. This can bring up the problem of giving the student too much assistance and they never grow.
A few questions arose this semester when learning about DI, such as how do you accommodate a student who has not been diagnosed with a specific disability? How can you make students aware that everyone is different and has their own plans without creating a stigma?
Some of the benefits from my personal experience were learning specific strategies that would accommodate my students in the best possible manner but a challenge from that is discovering that creating lessons with differentiation is very time consuming. This was shown in creating a tic-tac-toe board for the students using a social studies concept.