Transcript Differentiation - Educational Leaders for Equity and

Differentiation
EdAd 202A
Pat Stelwagon
February 10, 2010
Gardner’s Eight Intelligences
 Logical/mathematical
 Verbal
 Kinesthetic
 Musical
 Interpersonal
 Intrapersonal
 Spatial
 Naturalistic
 Existential (being developed)
Curriculum Differentiation
Overview: Essential Elements
 Pre-assessment: identify students’ academic needs and
interests at the beginning of the year and at the
beginning of each new unit of instruction
 Tiered Assignments: Adjusting assignments into various
levels of academic difficulty in order to meet the varying
readiness levels of students. Every student should feel
slightly uncomfortable with the challenge being
presented.
 Project Menus: Offering students a variety of choices for
unit projects that extend their learning. The selections
should be crafted to meet a variety of students’ preassessed interests and learning profiles.
Differentiation’s Core Concepts (Dr.
Sandra Kaplan, USC)
 Novelty: Activities to make the curriculum
personally relevant
 Depth: Extending the unit of study into an
exploration of details, rules, patterns, trends,
ethics, and ideas
 Complexity: Activities that require students to
make connections between disciplines,
perspectives, and eras.
 Acceleration/Deceleration: Speeding up/slowing
down rates of learning and increasing/
decreasing difficulty of materials used for
academic tasks.
Begin Differentiation Slowly if You Like –
but Do Begin
Low Preparation
Book choices
Homework options
Work alone or together
Varied scaffolds
Multiple levels of questions
Varied journal prompts
Mini-workshops to re-teach
or extend skills
Varied pacing with anchors
High Preparation
Tiered activities and labs
Tiered products
Multiple tests
Multiple intelligence options
Interest groups
Learning centers
Literature circles
Project menus
Problem-based learning
The Equalizer: Adjusting Assignments to Create
Appropriate Depth for Students
Foundational
Concrete
Simple
Few facts
Smaller leap
More structured
Clearly defined problem
Less independence
Slower
Transformational
Abstract
Complex
Many facets
Greater leap
More open
Fuzzy problem
Greater independence
Quicker
Approaches to Greater Depth
(Sandra Kaplan, USC)
 Language of the discipline (experts’
nomenclature)
 Details (parts, factors, attributes, variables)
 Patterns (repetition, predictability)
 Trends (influences, forces, direction, course of
action)
 Unanswered questions (discrepancies, missing
parts)
 Rules (structure, order, hierarchy, explanation)
 Ethics (points of view, judgments, opinions
 Big ideas (generalizations, principles, theories)
What Can be Tiered?
Assignments
Activities
Homework
Learning centers
Experiences
Materials
Assessments
Writing prompts
Supporting Struggling Learners
(Carol Tomlinson)
 Look for struggling learners’ positives (e.g., slower
kinesthetic readers might benefit from pantomime)
 Make the learning relevant for today
 Don’t let what’s broken extinguish what works (avoid
constant remediation)
 Go for foundational learning: the big idea
 Give strugglers assignments that are a bit harder than
you believe they can accomplish
 Use many avenues to learning (learning cycles, profiles)
 See students with unconditional expectations and
unwavering vision of total potential
Supporting Struggling Learners (Jim Burke)
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Be multimodal and use multimedia
Sequence activities and assignments logically
Provide a weekly assignment check off sheet
Check frequently for understanding
Discuss learning strategies that might help specific
students
Allow strugglers more time to answer or react to
questions; allow practice time too
Break assignments into small units
Use small groups
Provide immediate feedback
Do not depend on verbal directions; use the board
Supporting Struggling Learners
(Jim Burke, continued)
Let students work with a partner
Use graphic organizers to help with
reading
Provide clear and logical transitions
between ideas and units
Provide lots of concrete examples to
illustrate ideas
Seat them away from distractions
One Last Flexible Grouping Option
Oral work and written work groups
(Many students are most comfortable
demonstrating their learning through
speech, yet most all of what we grade in
school is what gets written down. Given that
adults communicate most often in oral – not
written – formats, it’s important to let
students practice oral language skills
regularly.)
Complexity: Making Connections
(Sandra Kaplan, USC)
 Relationships over time (between past, present,
and future, within a time period)
 Points of view (multiple perspectives on the
same event, opposing viewpoints, differing roles
and knowledge)
 Interdisciplinary relationships (within the
discipline, between disciplines, across the
disciplines: aesthetics, economics, history,
philosophy, psychology, mathematics, science)
How do we evaluate differentiated products?
 Provide differentiated rubrics for all assignments
(or guide students into creating them)
 For a semester grade, you might wish half a
student's grade to reflect standards-based
achievement and the other half to reflect the
student’s growth in your subject area
 Some districts give two marks: a letter (A-F)
indicating the student’s grade based on
individual progress in the subject and a number
indicated whether the student is working (1)
above grade level, (2) at grade level, or (3)
below grade level
Choices for RIGOROUS guided practice:
Prepare to share
1. Create a project menu for your students
2. Create a tiered assignment for your
students
3. Create pre-assessment tools for your
students
The Elements of a Rigorous,
Well-Defined Assignment
 PROCESSING SKILLS (ask students to build,
create, invent, analyze, problem-solve, or
evaluate in order to make sense of the new
content
 New and rigorous CONTENT to explore facts,
concepts, principles, attitudes, skills
 Appropriate RESOURCES (and use appropriate
research skills)
 A well-designed PRODUCT
 A suitable project proposal and RUBRIC
Remember to take SMALL STEPS.
Don’t try to differentiate every
assignment every day!