Journal of Education, Society and Behavioural Science

In the context of continuously increasing social changes and demands the urgent need to seek for effective alternative teaching methods emerges. To this end, it seems that differentiated teaching may have positive results as far as the aforementioned situation is concerned, which leads to the existence of students of mixed abilities. The applicable functionalism of differentiated teaching provides the learning context with the multilevel activation of the psychospiritual potential of each student, their active involvement in the teaching process and the development of incentives to build the newly acquired knowledge while at the same time it takes into account the level of preparedness of each student, the specific individual interests and the learning profile. On this basis, the purpose of this paper is to present an indicative teaching example with the implementation of differentiated instruction at the fifth class of elementary school in which 20 students of mixed abilities participated. The results of the teaching scenario concerning the application of differentiated instruction showed maximization at learning results and gave the chance of considering an alternative way of teaching. The results of the experimental group of students that had received differentiated instruction were compared by graded difficulty worksheets and a questionnaire for the participation and cooperation demonstrated by the students during the scenario with the results of the control group at the other fifth class at the same school that had not received differentiated instruction. The main conclusion showed that differentiated instruction has the potential to treat students equally while functioning as a mean for students’ activation, substantial participation during teaching in order to better acquire knowledge.