Differentiated Instruction (food) vs. Lesson Plans(the spoons)

As an educator of the 21st century, I have a firm belief that education should meet individual learner’s need. It means differentiated instruction needs to be a pivotal tool to make sure that learners are genuinely learning, not seem to learn. In the past knowingly or unknowingly educators had to stick to the lesson plan supremacy. A few years back, an educator as long as she/he completed what is in the lesson plan, did an excellent job. She /he got praised by the principals or superintendents. Well, how good is that to the learners? For me, it was like trying to get washed our clothes as quickly as possible before the sunset. At least, this was very common in my country a decade or five years ago. Of course, today it is different. People use washing machines to take care of their outfit stuff. Going back to the point of my today’s short opinion, I do not mean that lesson plans are not necessary. Lesson plans are essential to delivering an excellent instruction. However, educators should not assume that what planned on their lesson plans have to be completed every 45min or 1hr and 30mins when they go to classes to teach their learners. If this is the case, which I cannot agree with knowing various factors that could force the teachers from not doing so, I say lesson plans are meaningless. We, as educators of the 21st century, need to consider one of those many factors that violet our lesson plans. Hope you see where I am getting at in this particular case. I am trying to talk about the different learning styles. Our learners are very much diverse from a learning point of view. I believe it is needless for me mentioning what learning styles are in the teaching-learning process because we all know what they mean and how important they are to deliver instructions successfully. Thereof, I strongly argue that our lesson plans should be useful to the point where we can confidently say at the end of the day: - “ Yes, today all my students have learned most of (if not all) the important concepts or skills and so on.” I believe that should be our desired goal: making sure our learner has understood the delivered lesson. Thus, I argue that differentiation has to be a critical tool to provide instruction efficiently. Of course, we still need to set lesson plans. For me, lesson plans are the spoons whereas the differentiated teaching is the kind of food we are trying to feed our students.