Differentiation in the Classroom
An age old concept – adapt lessons and teaching strategies to meet the needs of individual students. Help maximize the educational potential of each of our students. This can take many forms, from running multiple novel studies at the same time to meet different reading levels, to running a full program based on concepts like Gardner’s Multiple Inteligence Theory. We do it by creating IPPs for our higher needs students, or when we stop to help an individual student by offering a different strategy to find an answer.
There are many books and a quick search will bring up many websites on the subject. Edmonton Public Schools is running a large project to look at how teachers are using Differentiation in the Classroom, and to encourage more directed planning in this area. At my school we are using this as an opportunity to look at what we are currently doing in the classroom, and celebrate our successes.
Personally I’m a big fan of multiple intelligences. I spend the first week of every school year teaching my students of the theory, and performing personal inventories to try and discover where their individual strengths (and conversely weaknesses) may lie. I use this information to help plan activities or certain groups throughout the year. I also use open format projects to allow students to show me what they know by using their own strengths.
But differentiation doesn’t just end there. It is a large and vast concept. How do you differentiate in your instruction?
Differentiation happens all the time in my classroom. From adapting curriculum to making personal connections to my students, to even giving choices where the students want to learn. I am a big believer in kids feeling safe and comfortable in order for them to learn. So, from the “hey, how’s it going” in the morning to check up on how little or much baggage they’re bringing with them to little contacts throughout the day, I make each of my students feel special and worthwhile. I also give them choices on where to work, so they feel comfortable and in a space where they feel productive, whether it be in a quiet secluded corner, spread out on a large table or the floor, or even curled up on a bean bag. My students welcome the change in environment and are much more open to learning! It’s the little things, that happen naturally, almost like common sense that we neglect to give credit to that create sparks to set individual students down the pathways to success.
Project work is a great way to differentiate at different times of the year. I read a good book by Carol Ann Tomlinson http://www.amazon.com/Fulfilling-Promise-Differentiated-Classroom-Strategies/dp/0871208121 which talked about ways to differentiate in the classroom, and in planning a project which involved science and technology http://www.maasd.ecsd.net/waste.htm , I attempted to create a learning opportunity for my students which allowed for differentiation in 3 different entry points in 3 different ways.
In terms of entry points of differentiation with this project, I attempted to provide student choice in 1) content (some choice of topic), 2) process (working alone or with a partner), and product (choice of end product for the project). With respect to the different ways to differentiate, I attempted to provide differentiation for 1) learning style (some end products dealt with more language-based styles such as a report, some dealt with more visual-learning styles such as PowerPoint, and some dealt with more tactile learning styles such as a triorama (see the website)), 2) Interest (numerous choices along the way for students which increased motivation and engagement, and 3) Ability Level (choosing web resources with text at varying readability levels down to mostly picture-based resources). Finding the web resources was the most challenging aspect of this project at that time (3.5 years ago), although with the proliferation of Flash-based video such as YouTube and Google Video, I might now choose those types of information sources as well).
To manage all these differences, I created a ‘Learning Contract’ for this project where the students had to fill out and decide (with student, parent, and teacher signatures).
Managing projects, especially those involving technology, can be challenging. To mitigate some of these challenges, I set goals with my students each session we worked on the project. For example, one day the goal might have been to generate 2-4 subsidiary questions to answer your ‘essential question’, and find the information needed to answer at least one of those questions.
Early finishers could have a different task to do (tried to stay away from tasks which were too rewarding, since that encouraged some to rush too much), and the strugglers could get extra help from me or a friend, could be given extra time between classes, or could have their task modified by me. Information and resource sharing was encouraged (we all have something to learn & something to share), as I tried to make the project more of just an info. gathering session to be more of a question-answering and sense-making experience. By setting small goals each session, it kept most students on approximately the same pace.
Inevitably, you have students who miss a week of school smack-dab in the middle of the project, and you have students who never finish the project. For this reason, I attempted to try to mark them on more than just the end product and tried to include social learning behaviors that happened along the way and an oral presentation based on the product.
In terms of grading these types of products, I learned a great way to build a rubric with kids based on an inservice that my then-VP Corrine King (now an awesome principal) showed a group of us. Given the choices between the end products the students chose to complete and the topics they were allowed to choose from, we brainstormed all the general qualities we would want to see in our end products and our oral presentation and our social learning behaviors that would go into this project. I recorded these on overhead projector (seems like such an old technology now but sure did the trick) and once we had 8-12 suggestions from the students I guided them to suggest different groupings or categories that the suggestions could fit into. If they had missed something that I needed on this project (which was rare – it’s amazing how a group of kids together collectively can nail exactly what you as a teacher are looking for), I might suggest something and in some cases I’d even say that there was one particular criteria or sub-criteria that I as the teacher needed, and would explain my rationale which they almost always agreed with (smart kids). We would end up with 3-4 criteria which would become the basis of the rubric, and from there we would spend a few minutes describing what the varying levels of achievement might ‘look like’ and tried to massage those descriptions into the rubric boxes. If we didn’t finish during the class (30-40 minutes to create the rubric but totally worth it), I would usually finish it on my own. Then, using the nifty Rubistar http://rubistar.4teachers.org , I’d plop it in and print it out for our Day 1 of the project. I’m not sure if I mentioned this but we did the rubric before the project.
You might think that organizing this might have taken a ton of work, and I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t some work. With the students’ help creating the rubric (and it really did help) plus the fact that the project would often take 2-3 weeks to complete (2-3 times per week), spreading those planning minutes out over the length of the project made it no more work than planning my regular lessons.
I’d only do a small handful of these projects each year, and over time I’d build myself a nice little bank of projects to choose from. There is definitely some merit in creating some type of learning community or repository of these types of activities to share amongst colleagues.
The message I’d like to send to those just getting into differentiated instruction is that though we can (and should) find little ways of adding some differentiation into our daily lessons at different entry points or in different ways, it’s unreasonable to come up with seemingly elaborate ways to differentiate every lesson. I tried to make sure that at least a few times per year that the multitude of learning styles – be it multiple intelligences or other categorizations – be touched on for the students in my class.
You know Shane, there is something about this blog that makes me just want to write and write. Sorry for being such a page hog – it is not intentional…
Danny