To the educator, students should be more than just their performance in class. Each student has his or her own family, culture, community, talents, preferences, skills, and interests that make him the individual that he is. In order to help each individual student grow as a learner, the educator must have a clear understanding of each student’s diverse strengths, existing knowledge bases, and potentials. The educator can then use this knowledge to differentiate lessons, accommodate students with special needs, and incorporate diversity into the course content. Ultimately, through the understanding and recognition of learner differences, teachers can design more effective lessons and create a stronger sense of classroom community.
I adhere to this standard by using flexible grouping. By placing students into smaller groups, I can better understand each student as an individual and observe more closely how they interact with the content and with each other. Group work in my classroom can range from assigned partners to random groupings or groups based on mixed abilities.
I further implement this professional standard into my teaching through the creation of a text set and accompanying unit plan for Margot Lee Shetterly’s Hidden Figures. No matter the content they teach, every educator must recognize that students in the classroom read at varying levels. By accommodating these differences in reading ability with alternative texts that allow students to access the content no matter their reading ability, teachers can more effectively engage each student and tailor instruction to their needs.
I further implement this professional standard with the 
Zine Project, the the culminating assessment of my Transcendentalism unit. Zines are mini-magazines often written by one individual and photocopied for cheap distribution. Zines tend to have a radical or offbeat message. Students worked in small groups to publish one zine of their own, centered around a Transcendentalist theme of their choosing like nonconformity, self-reliance, individualism, connection to nature, civil disobedience, or anti-materialism. Each group member made five contributions to the zine. Learners could demonstrate their learning in different ways because contributions could be poetry, prose, comic strips, drawings, photography, or some other creative interpretation of ideas explored throughout the unit. The projects were put on display at Hidden Valley High School’s Titan 21 Night.
For more information about my perspective on this professional standard, please see my reflections on learner differences.