Also see: Part One: Differentiate This! Why?
(Cross-posted in In Practice)
OK, we agree (or most of us do anyway) that we need to tailor our instruction to the students in our classroom.
We cannot teach effectively by planning lessons in isolation without considering the interaction between what we’ve planned and the students in our room, without being truly present in the classroom to assess students’ reactions and understanding, and to appeal to diverse learning styles as we begin to observe them in our students.
How Do We Differentiate?
One misconception about differentiation is that a teacher must come up with an entirely different curriculum for each student or type of student in a classroom. That would be great but it’s not possible. In fact the very thought of it is overwhelming and it’s the reason that many teachers do not attempt to differentiate because they think it’s too much work.
The number one way we can begin to differentiate our lessons is to stop relying on worksheets for so much of our instruction. Not everything that involves a photocopy is necessarily bad but it is a lot harder to differentiate instruction by giving every student the same paper and having everyone fill in the same blanks. (And giving different levels of students different levels of worksheets isn’t much better).
Let’s replace some of our worksheets with activities that all students can participate in at whatever level they’re at. Some examples:
- Writer’s Workshop
A time of day in which all students write on topics of their own choosing while the teacher conferences with students and guides them in their writing, discussing individual student needs. - Discussion and persuasion
Rather than having students answer yes or no questions, have students formulate ideas, communicate those ideas, and justify them by talking to peers. - Inquiry and research
Every student is curious if we allow them to be. Let them form their own questions and research their own answers. We guide them on this journey but they choose the journey. - Project based learning
Let’s have students brainstorm and concentrate on problem solving of real world issues and hands on learning. - Create
The highest level of Bloom’s revised taxonomy. Have students create a play, a movie, a song, a poem, a painting, anything to demonstrate content knowledge or to communicate their own dreams and wishes.
……but when are we going to practice for “the” test? Just kidding, great ideas–keep them coming.
My current excursion into differentiating is simply taking something I already do and letting those students extend it on their own. I have my entire math class journal everyday after class to help them maintain the concepts covered. I have two students who blog instead of keep a journal. I chose to let them blog so that they would have an avenue to further express themselves. The students will also be allowed to work ahead in the math books. They will identify one problem a week that they think their classmates will struggle with once they get to that page. From there, they will create a problem-solving video, sketchcast, or voicethread, to tutor their classmates through how to solve the problem.
I was introduced to the pyramid plan during my mainstreaming (special education) class.
I found it helpful because the tendency with lower kids (where ELLs, Special Ed, or just behind) if they are not capable of learning the grade level standard as it is written, is to not bother trying to meet a learning objective for them. This lets you plan for the minimum level of mastery for all students (and if they learn more, great).
@ Steven,
Thanks for you comment. My only concern is that what I see happen a lot is that only the “gifted” students are given access to technology while the lower students get further behind academically and in terms of twenty first century skills. I’m not saying this is necessarily happening in your classroom but it’s something I think we should be careful of.
I wish we could change the paradigm from “finish your regular work and get to do something cool” to “let’s all do something cool but the work we produce may look different from different students.”
So that in my class, every student got to complete a movie based on their writing even as all their writing was different. If I had waited for “Tommy” to finish his regular writing before he made a movie, we’d still be waiting on Tommy. But when Tommy was writing for the purpose of making a movie, that was the day he finished his writing.
@Alice
I think that idea is helpful because it has built in extension.
How does this work in practice? The students who start the year with a low level of skills, how much do they improve under this regime, rather than under some alternative? The students who start the year with a high level of skills, how much do they improve rather than under some alternative? How about the students who start the year somewhere in the middle?
If the teacher works with every child individually, as in your writing skills workshop, how much does each child’s performance improve as opposed to a lesson in which the teacher works with groups of 6 to 7 students at the same level of skills?
What happens if every single student, in their creative project, demonstrates that they haven’t learnt content knowledge? What does the poor teacher do then?
How does the teacher, if confronted with a multiple arrays of plays, movies, songs, poems, paintings, teach each student how to better communicate their own dreams and wishes? Plays, poems and paintings are completely different art forms (movies are of course different to plays and songs to poems, but they’re a bit closer than say paintings are to poems). How can one single teacher improve students’ skills in using those three disciplines all at once? If you want kids to be able to use a play, a song and a painting to be able to communicate their own dreams and wishes, surely it makes sense to teach how playwrights communicate ideas in one lesson, how song-writers communicate ideas in another lesson, and how painters communicate ideas in a third lesson? (And this is leaving aside that people spend *years* studying even just one of those areas, what if a teacher is not an expert in painting?)
So what does the teacher do if half of the students’ justifications are totally bogus? What does the teacher do about the cool kid who the other kids will never criticise?
How does the teacher guide 30 kids going different directions?
What’s the evidence that kids learn better by this method than by any other? What if they don’t manage to solve the real world issues? What if they want to study something that’s not doable for hands-on learning (like outer space, or dinosaurs).
You have some great ideas, but you don’t provide any evidence that they lead to kids learning more, and you appear to be requiring an awful amount of teachers. How many teachers are experts in all of plays, movies, songs, poems and paintings?
@Tracy
There’s a lot here, I’ll respond to a few points.
I don’t subscribe to your paradigm of teacher as expert and don’t expect that the teacher will be or has to be an expert in everything. Instead teacher is facilitator and supporter of students in seeking and finding knowledge. Anyone can do this.
The writer’s workshop model involves students working with each other, in small groups, and individually—not just individually. Students in my classroom improved greatly in this model to the point where my all of my English Language Development students had moved one level (as is expected) or two levels by the end of the year and students’ writing scores improved on all levels. The idea of writer’s workshop vs. worksheets is that a student can be exposed to quotation marks on a worksheet but they will not learn to use quotation marks until the day they’re writing a story that uses dialogue and they have a need for it.
The idea of every single student not being successful in a presentation is just not possible when you have scaffolded the instruction along the way. For the couple who still don’t get it then that is what you use independent work time for.
The research I’ve conducted through a two year study at Antioch University on the impact of reader’s theater and writer’s workshop as well as my experiences a teacher working at both low and high achieving schools is what I am drawing from. You haven’t presented any research either. However, I think you’ve turned my post into an argument for differentiation when this is a post about how to make differentiation work. Most of my colleagues here on “In Practice” I’m sure did not choose our students. Arguing about the best placement for them isn’t helpful. It’s about figuring out how to teach the students who show up in our rooms.
I agree that differentiation asks a lot of teachers. However, as I’ve said, there will never be a room in which every student has the same instructional needs and a teacher will be able to teach the same thing to everyone and do it effectively. (Read Mel Levine of Sparking Different Minds). I say this having worked with classrooms of “gifted clusters” as well.
Differentiation is teaching.
Mathew,
Thanks for reminding me about having the kids find a real world problem to solve. My next unit is about having the kids budget for the adult world. Maybe I could have them make a movie of some sort about the apartment, the neigbourhood, the car, bike, furniture, etc they choose as once they finish school and have a job. Thanks for the inspiration.
Mathew, I think this is great information and helpful for dealing with reality where there are all kinds and it takes all kinds and it is not up to us to decide who gets to be taught or where. I also agree about worksheets. Way overdone, way useless. I don’t remember one worksheet I filled out in school, but I do remember most of the hands on learning together experiences that I had with all my peers. At least the ones that were allowed to be together way back when…You are offering great resources on a subject that is hard to find help with and I for one appreciate it greatly, am also inspired and encouraged. thanks
Matt, I’m probably the only teacher here who has worked at an elementary school that did tracking of students based on CST scores, so I’ll chime in about that…
1. Matt’s point that all kids even in a leveled class are not the same is dead-on. Having taught a leveled class really shows how little a test score can tell you about a child.
2. I was a big fan of leveling students as we started doing it but slowly changed my mind. My favorite year teaching was when I finally got a non-leveled class and had a mix of students.
3. It just didn’t bring up the lowest students. They had no models for how to behave as students, and they knew they were in the low class (which did not make them happy to be there). By upper elementary, students who had been Basic (just below grade-level) either went up, or down, those at grade-level stayed there, BUT the low kids either went down or never got out of the cellar. It create a bi-modal distribution of students and at a young age. You either were passing, or failing, there were no “C’s”
4. If you really want to help your low students, you need to have your other students working independently for some period of time. The most effective way to reach those students is in very small groups. While you do that, your other students need engaging activities that don’t require you immediate attention. These projects have a better chance of that than giving them a worksheet.
5. It seems hard I know, but my most successful, pleasant and ultimately easiest times teaching have been when I have lots of different things going on in the classroom. I was a fan of teaching at one level being easier, but I’ve come to appreciate how wrong I was.
Tracy seems to assume that non-differentiation is working. It’s not. Not only that, it’s not legal. Special education rules, guidelines for teaching ELLs and others require that we differentiate. THIS IS NOT A CHOICE!. You are violating a children’s rights when you don’t at least attempt this (you aren’t expected to always be successful).
The idea of every single student not being successful in a presentation is just not possible when you have scaffolded the instruction along the way. For the couple who still don’t get it then that is what you use independent work time for.
Matthew – this is interesting. It sounds like you are, in the classroom, doing far more than what you mentioned in your post. For example, before each kid does their presentation, you apparently have done a lot of scaffolding in getting them to certain quality levels. And in the writing workshops, you’ve started them off by teaching them quotation marks, etc. How are you doing this?
I will say that the teachers that I found inspiring were the ones who were passionate and expert (or at least appeared expert 🙂 ), in the areas they were teaching. This may be because I went to a primary school where I was one of the fastest-learning students and I got dispatched off so often with instructions to write something or create a painting, or write a poem by a teacher who was dealing with other kids in the classroom, that being actually taught something hard and being challenged was a lovely novelty until about my last two years at high school. I have never been very good at challenging myself.
I don’t assume. I asked.
And, as far as I can tell, education is far more complex than differentiation/non-differentiation. There seem to be a million different ways of implementing any big idea. Furthermore, teaching strikes me as being like the other great professions in that details matter – if you get one piece wrong you can really wreck havoc on the end result. So a big idea can be brillant, but if you get the details wrong in implementation, the outcome can be terrible.
@Tracy,
In regards to question about scaffolding, please see the English Language Learner category on the right side of blog for a sampling of articles about this.
Excellent article Mathew.
I appreciated the comments also.
Tracy,
You are correct in that Mathew is leaving out a million other things he does that allow his differentiation to work. I think you are also right in assuming that some of the early details wrong you can really mess things up in the future. I believe in previous articles http://www.needleworkspictures.com/ocr/blog/?p=294
that Mathew touches on this idea.
Teaching writers workshops don’t happen on day one, they take weeks of preparation. This doesn’t mean teaching isn’t happening, but the workshop that Mathew describes would probably be more primitive the first time it was presented to the children.
Sometimes it is easier to think of differentiated education as what good teachers to to makes sure every student in the classroom is not only learning, but engaged in the lesson.
I imagine you would have been just as disappointed in your education if your teachers had given you the same assignments as everyone else and then asked you to sit quietly until everyone else was finished. (This is probably why I read so much in high school)
I imagine you would have been just as disappointed in your education if your teachers had given you the same assignments as everyone else and then asked you to sit quietly until everyone else was finished.
I never got being told to sit quietly at my desk. The two treatments were either extra sets of basically the same questions, or being given “creative” programmes. I did prefer the creativity to yet another worksheet, but, oh, it was so excellent to run into some proper teaching. For example, I did a lot of art through primary school. At high school, the graphic design teacher was also a designer, and a mad enthusiast about his area, and gave me actual feedback on my designs, with ideas about how to make them more effective. That’s far more exciting than being dispatched off to do some artwork to which the teacher says “Excellent”, and that’s it.
And it was only after I left school and was reading about Wilfred Owen that I discovered that poets could actually critique their poems. He was seeking advice from another poet, and they were improving their poems! I never got that at school, you wrote a poem, and if it met the technical specs (sonnet/limerick/etc) that was it in terms of feedback. I mean, there’s hard stuff in poetry and painting, and presumably music. It’s so good to be taught any one area by someone who knows what that hard stuff is and how to give feedback.