Quotes from The Differentiated Classroom
Here are some quotes from The Differentiated Classroom: Responding to the Needs of All Learners 2nd Edition by Carol Ann Tomlinson. I underlined other sections, but I decided to just include these quotes on this post.
Chapter 1: What is a Differentiated Classroom?
“More than a century ago in the United States and other parts of the world, the teacher in a one-room schoolhouse faced a challenging task. She had to divide her time and energy between teaching young people of varied ages who had never held a book and could not read or write along and teaching more advanced students of varying ages who had very different content needs. Today’s teachers still contend with the essential challenge of the teacher in the one-room schoolhouse: how to reach out effectively to students who span the spectrum of learning readiness, personal interests, and culturally shaped ways of seeing and speaking about and experiencing the world.
Although today’s teachers generally work with individual classes where students are approximately the same age, these children arguably have an array of needs greater than those of the children in the one-room school-house. Thus, a teacher’s question remains much the same as it was 100 years ago: “How do I divide time, resources, and myself so that I am an effective catalyst for maximizing talent in all my students?”
Consider how these teachers answer that question.
Ms. Handley studies her students persistently; she feels she must know them well to teach them well. She sets as her measure of professional success that every student engages in and contributes to learning every day and that every student makes observable progress every day. She works hard to gain her students’ trust very early in the year and to prove herself worthy of their trust thereafter. She uses formative assessment, both formal and informal, as her primary understanding of what each student needs in order to connect with the curriculum and to grow as a result of class experiences. She says that formative assessment lets her know what she needs to do to make tomorrow’s lesson work best for every student.
Mrs. Wiggins assigns students to multiple spelling lists based on pre-assessment results rather than making the assumption that all 3rd graders should work on List 3.
Mr. Owen matches homework to student need whenever possible, trying to ensure that practice is meaningful to everyone. He invites students to be part of determining which home tasks will best help them understand and apply mathematical concepts and principles.
Ms. Jernigan sometimes teaches math to the whole class at once. More often, she uses a series of direct instruction, practice, and application groups based on daily formative assessment information. She matches practice activities and sense-making tasks to students’ varied readiness needs, and she groups students for real-world math applications based on their interests or preferred approaches to learning. In this way, she says, students learn from and contribute to the learning of a variety of peers” (1-2).
“Mr. Ellis works regularly with small-group instruction he designs to move students forward from their current points of knowledge, understanding, and skill. Students with whom he’s not meeting at a given time work independently, in pairs or in small groups, on practice or sense-making tasks set at appropriate challenge levels or tailored to connect current content to students’ interests. Formative assessment guides his instructional planning” (3).
“In other words, teachers who differentiate provide specific alternatives for individuals to learn as deeply as possible and as quickly as possible, without assuming one student’s road map for learning is identical to anyone else’s” (4).
“These teachers are also artists who use the tools of their craft to address students’ needs. They do not aspire to standardized, mass-produced lessons because they recognize that students are individuals and require a personal fit. Their goal is student learning and satisfaction in learning, not curriculum coverage” (4).
Chapter 2: The Underpinnings of Differentiation
“These teachers don’t see assessment as something that comes at the end of a unit to find out what students learned (or didn’t learn); rather, assessment is today’s means of understanding how to modify tomorrow’s instruction.
The teacher then shapes tomorrow’s lesson - and even reshapes today’s - with the goal of helping individual students move ahead from their current position of competency. Further, the teacher understands that a pivotal classroom goal is to help students take charge of their own learning - to help them seek awareness of learning goals, and make plans that support their movement steadily toward (and perhaps beyond) the goals. Encouraging students to analyze their own work relative to clearly articulated goals and criteria for success helps them consistently grown in independence, agency, and self-efficacy as learners.
At benchmark points in learning - such as the end of a unit segment or of the unit itself - teachers in differentiated classrooms, like most teachers, use summative assessments to formally record student growth. Even then, however, they use varied means of assessment so that all students can fully display their skills and understanding. Assessment always has more to do with helping students demonstrate what they know, understand, and can do than with cataloging their mistakes” (18).
“A differentiated classroom is, of necessity, student-centered. Students are the workers. The teacher coordinates time, space, materials, and activities. Her effectiveness increases as students learn to help themselves, their teacher, and one another achieve group and individual goals” (21).
“Some may think that differentiating instruction is a relatively new idea, hatched from wherever it is that educational ‘innovations’ begin. Actually, its baseline principle is quite old - found in the writings of Confucious and in ancient Jewish and Muslim scriptures: people differ in their abilities and strengths. Differentiated instruction simply takes into account those differences.
Chapter 3: Rethinking How We Do School - and for Whom
In more recent history, one-room schoolhouses in the United States, Canada, and other parts of the world practiced differentiation. Six and 16-year-olds came each day to the same classroom. Teachers planned around the reality that it made little sense to use the same reading book or math problem with everyone in the room, and around the truth that a 16-year-old might require more fundamental instruction and practice than a 6-year-old” (29-30).
“The brain learns best when it can make its own sense out of information rather than when information is imposed on it. The brain doesn’t respond much to things that carry only a surface meaning. It responds far more effectively and efficiently to something that carries deep and personal meaning - something that is life shaping, relevant, or important or taps into emotions … Our takeaway from this research is that curriculum must cultivate meaning making. It should be organized around categories, concepts, and governing principles. A meaningful curriculum is characterized by high interest and high relevance, and it taps into learners’ feelings and experiences. If we want students to retain, understand, and use ideas, information, and skills, we must give them ample opportunity to make sense of or ‘own’ these ideas, information, and skills through involvement in complex learning situations” (32-33).
“Through increased understanding of both psychology and the brain, we now know that individuals learn best when they are in a context that provides a moderate challenge … That is, when a task is far too difficult for a learner, the learner feels threatened and ‘downshifts’ into a self-protection mode. A threatened learner will not persist with thinking or problem solving. On the other hand, a task that is too easy also suppresses thinking and problem solving, encouraging the learner to coast into a relaxation mode.
A task is appropriately challenging when it asks learners to risk a leap into the unknown bu they know enough to get started and have support for reaching a new level understanding. Put another way, both students who consistently fail and those who succeed too easily lose their motivation to learn. For learning to continue, students must understand that hard work is required and have confidence that hard work generally leads to success. Teachers also must remember that what is moderately challenging today most likely won’t offer the same challenge tomorrow. Challenges must grow as students grow in their learning” (33-34).
“Children who come to school advanced beyond grade expectations in one or more areas also require equity of opportunity to grow from their points of entry, with teachers doggedly determined to ensure that their potential does not languish. These children need teachers who model, commend, and command excellence - teachers who help them dream big, who cause them to experience, accept, and embrace personal challenge. Both equity and excellence must be a part of our road map for these students, as they must for every learner who comes to us” (36).
“Too often in settings designed to benefit learners whose school performance lags behind grade-level norms, teachers’ expectations for the students decline, materials are simplified, the level of discourse is uninspiring, and the pace slackens. When students look around at their peers, they see only other students who are discouraged or who have given up on school. Too few students escape these arrangements to join more ‘typical’ or advanced classes. In other words, remedial classes tend to keep remedial learners remedial … In theory, creating academically heterogeneous classes should address equity of access to excellence for all learners simply because of the presence of advanced learners; the full range of learners in the classroom would benefit from the high-level curriculum and instruction designed for advanced learners. There are three major flaws with this assumption, however, at least as schools function to this point.
First, struggling learners will not experience more long-term success by being placed in heterogeneous classes unless teachers are ready and able to meet them at their point of readiness and to systematically escalate learning until these students are able to function as competently and confidently as other learners. Including struggling learners in heterogeneous classes may represent high expectations for all students, but not if students are left to their own devices to figure out how to ‘catch up’ with the expectations. Such an approach does not result in genuine growth for struggling learners.
Another challenge is that in heterogeneous classrooms, advanced students often are asked either to do a greater volume of work than they already know how to do, to ensure the success of other students through much of the school day by serving as peer teachers, or to wait (patiently, of course) while students with less advanced skills continue to work for mastery of content that they themselves have already mastered. Implicitly - and sometimes even explicitly - we suggest that advanced learners are fine without special attention to their needs because they are ‘up to standards’ already. In other words, curricula and instruction in many classrooms tend to be aimed at ‘average’ students and do not account for the nature and needs of advanced learners. This approach clearly can’t achieve genuine growth for students whose performance surpasses the aspirations of curriculum designed to teach them what they already know.
A third problem with heterogeneity as it is typically practiced is the assumption that what happens in heterogeneous classrooms for ‘typical learners’ works for virtually all students of a given age. The premise has often been that everyone can benefit from standard, grade-level classrooms. In fact, it is often the case that this standard fare is less than the best we know to do, even for students who perform at or near grade level. Well into the 21st century, heterogeneous classrooms still usually follow a one-size-fits-all approach to teaching and learning, where a standardized learning plan swallows some learners, pinches others, and fails to inspire most. Such an approach proves for neither equity nor excellence for anyone.
By contrast, differentiation offers the possibility of creating effective heterogeneous communities of learning governed by flexible classroom routines that allow and invite attention to students’ diverse learning needs. In these classrooms, complex curriculum is the beginning point for instructional planning for virtually all learners, and for all learners there is the possibility for community, equity, and excellence” (37-39).
Chapter 4: Learning Environments That Support Differentiated Instruction
The content in a healthy classroom is rooted in these realities. Thus, in a healthy classroom, what is taught and learned
Is relevant to students, personal, familiar, and connected to the world they know;
Helps students understand themselves and their world more fully now and as they grow up;
Is authentic, offering ‘real’ history or math or art, not just exercises about the subject;
Can be used immediately for something that matters to students; and
Opens students’ ideas to their power and potential both inside the classroom and out in the world.
Chapter 6: Teachers at Work Building Differentiated Classrooms
There are three questions that are very useful in analyzing differentiated curriculum and instruction: What is the teacher differentiating? How is the teacher differentiating? Why is the teaching differentiating?
What is the teacher differentiating? This question focuses us on the curricular element the teacher has modified in response to learner needs. It might be one or more of the following:
Content - what students will learn or how the students will get access to the information, skills, and ideas that are essential to understanding and using those elements;
Process - the activities through which students make sense of key ideas using essential knowledge and skills;
Product - how students demonstrate and extend what they know, understand, and can do as a result of a segment of learning; or
Affect/learning environment - the classroom conditions and interactions that set the tone and expectations of learning.
How is the teacher differentiating? The question focuses us on the student trait to which the differentiation responds. Is the teacher differentiating in response to student readiness, interest, learning profile, or some combination of the three? Any learning experience can be modified to respond to one or more of these student traits.
Why is the teacher differentiating? Here, we consider the teacher’s reason for modifying the learning experience. Is it to support access to learning? To increase student motivation to learn? To improve the efficiency of learning? Any or all of these three reasons for differentiating instruction can be tied to student readiness, interest, and learning profile.
Students can’t learn that which is inaccessible to them because they have no way to understand it. They can’t learn when they are unmotivated by material that is consistently too difficult or too easy …” (82-83).
“Differentiating why? Here, too, efficiency of learning and access to understanding are important to the teacher. Ms. Howe tries to meet students where their skills currently are, and she wants to help each child move on as rapidly as possible” (86).
“Ms. Estes pre-tests her students on spelling in September. Typically, she identifies both students who work with 2nd grade words and those who top out on an 8th grade list, as well as the range in between. She uses a spelling procedure that is the same for all students, but each student works on a particular list indicated by current spelling performance. She color-codes the lists rather than labeling them with grade equivalents … Differentiating what? Ms. Estes is differentiating content by varying the spelling lists …
Differentiating how? All of the spelling differentiation is based on ongoing assessment of student readiness …
Differentiating why? This procedure provides access to growth for all students at a rate appropriate for them individually. Independence and peer assistance are both quite motivating to the middle schoolers” (89-90).
My reflection: Students can have different content, and this is good. ESL 1 (beginner ELs) shouldn’t have to study and take tests on ACT vocabulary when they are just learning the very basics of the English language like greetings, colors, subjects, etc. If there was ever a time to pre-test students, this would be the time to pre-test.
“Teachers in these illustrations are crafting escalators of learning. They do not assume there is one spelling list for all 6th graders, one set of volleyball skills for all 7th graders, or one set of sentences for every novice German student. These teachers demonstrate a systematic intent to find students who are one floor - or two or three - below performance expectations and to move them up with minimal gaps and no sense of despair. There is also systematic intent to find learners who are a floor - or two or three - above performance expectations and to move them further upward with minimal ‘marching in place’ and a sense that learning is synonymous with striving and challenge” (91-92).
Chapter 8: More Instructional Strategies to Support Differentiation
“Tiered activities are useful when a teacher wants to ensure that students with different degrees of learning proficiency work with the same essential ideas and use the same key knowledge and skills. In other words, tiering is a readiness-based strategy. For example, a student who struggles with reading or has a difficult time with abstract thinking nonetheless needs to make sense of the pivotal concepts and principles in a given article or story. A student who is advanced well beyond grade expectations in that same subject needs to find genuine challenge in working with the same key content. A one-size-fits-all activity is unlikely to help either struggling or grade-level learners come to own important ideas, nor will it extend the understanding of students with great knowledge and skill in the area … By keeping the focus of the activity the same but providing routes of access at varying degrees of difficulty, the teacher maximizes the likelihood that each student comes away with pivotal skills and understandings and all students are appropriately challenged … The goal should be to stretch all students slightly beyond their comfort zone and to provide the support necessary for students to succeed at the new level of challenge” (133-136).
“A powerful strategy for addressing students’ varied learning needs is the use of small groups for teaching, practice, or discussion. When a teacher’s classroom observations and formative assessment indicate that some students are lagging behind in key content proficiency, lack of prerequisite content, have misunderstandings about how the content works, or are advanced with essential content, small-group instruction provides a simple and direct way to reteach, review, provide focused and supervised practice, clarify misunderstandings, or extend student proficiency. Small groups are also useful in making interest-based connections with essential knowledge, understanding, and skill” (147).
Chapter 9: How Do Teachers Make It All Work?
“For a variety of reasons, students in a multitask classroom must learn to get help from someone other than you much of the time. Teach them how to do that, and make provisions for help from other sources” (161).
Chapter 10: Education Leaders as Catalysts for Differentiated Classrooms
“Differentiation is not an instructional strategy, a collection of strategies, or a teaching model. It’s a way of thinking about teaching and learning that advocates beginning where individuals are rather than with a prescribed plan of action that ignores student variance. It is a way of thinking that challenges how educators typically envision assessment, teaching, learning, classroom roles, use of time, and curriculum. It is also a way of thinking that stems from our best understanding of how people learn” (170).