differentiating instruction in a world of standards and accountability massp 2015

Differentiating Instruction in a

World of Standards and Accountability

MASSP 2015

“Four-fifths of my kids keep failing their tests!”

We are hired for how we are similar to a company, but we

advance based on how we are different.

We teach all children, not just the easy ones.

Equal Fair

“I don’t have time to differentiate instruction or assessment.”

“There’s no way to teach all these standards and differentiate instruction and assessment.”

“They don’t differentiate instruction and assessment at the high school level or on the standardized tests, so we shouldn’t differentiate at the middle level.”

My Response to Mike Schmoker’s

2010 Attack on Differentiation

“Setting the Pedagogy Straight” (AMLE, Wormeli) differentiationcentral.com (Tomlinson)

Article on Finding Time to Teach Students:

rwormeli@cox.net

Dr. Daniel Willingham,

Professor of Psychology

at the University of

Virginia

Books: Why Don’t All the Kids Like School?

When Can You Trust the Experts?

What would happen if we never differentiated instruction and assessment, k-12?

Is the world beyond school differentiated?

What would happen if we differentiated instruction and assessment for all students, k-12, as needed?

[Artist Unknown[Artist Unknown

It is counter-cultural, subversive, to differentiate instruction .

‘Anyone out there know

me?

Being good at taking standardized tests doesn’t

qualify students for creative contribution to society or

successful citizenship.

Fair Isn’t Always Equal

Let’s embrace the reality:

During the course of his or her career, every great teacher breaks rules, many of them political. Since most school

policies are put in place to maintain order, yet learning is a disorderly enterprise, we are in daily conflict. We can’t survive

long in education when denying our rebel selves.

Time is NOT immutable.

Politically, students are often denied effective learning experiences because of:

•territorial boundaries•unquestioning adherence to program fidelity•punitive employment of ill-suited metrics•uninformed Federal mandates.

It’s arrogant and ineffective for districts to declare programs/guides sovereign over every classroom reality, or to prevent teachers from

deviating from established protocols as necessary in order to improve student learning.

In a scripted program, who do we blame when a student fails to thrive?

Differentiating instruction is doing what’s fair for students. It’s a collection of best practices strategically employed to maximize students’ learning at every turn, including giving them the tools to handle anything that is undifferentiated. It requires us to do different things for different students some, or a lot, of the time. It’s whatever works to advance the student if the regular classroom approach doesn’t meet students’ needs. It’s highly effective teaching.

Differentiation

Tomlinson: “If I laid out on my kitchen counter raw hamburger meat still in its Styrofoam container, cans of tomatoes and beans, jars of spices, an onion, and a bulb of garlic [and told guests to eat heartily]….My error would be that I confused ingredients for dinner with dinner itself.”

Tomlinson: “One can make many different dishes with the same ingredients, by changing proportions, adding new ingredients, using the same ingredients in different ways, and so on.”

1.Mental dexterity, skill versatility, and perseverance will put dinner on the table and help America remain competitive, not simplistic notions of basic recall qualifying as mastery.

2.Common Core standards are basic competencies, not the full curriculum for a state or local district.

Tenets

3. The CCSS are NOT the cure-all for all that ails our schools. While great minds believe the CCSS reflect what is necessary for 21st century citizenry, no one really knows whether or not their implementation will create the positive changes we seek, or if future iterations of these common standards will even include the standards listed in this first version. We also know that poverty has tremendous impact on student performance, Common Core standards used or not, as does class size, family dynamics, teacher professional development, equal access laws, job opportunity, and school leadership.

4. Untested, we’re putting a lot of eggs into this one basket, but we’re operating from hope, which is a lot better than indifference.

5. These skills can be employed with any set of standards, Common Core or future version thereof.

Kurt Schwangel, 15-year Santa Monica Kindergarten teacher referring to new, content-heavy, art-depleted directives for the kindergarten program: “They’re going to have to pry the crayons out of my cold

dead hands!” (from Dailycensored.com website)

Read complex text aloud with proper vocal inflection and pacing. Students can understand

text in readabilities above their own independent, silent reading proficiency when the complex text is read aloud by someone who understands the

material.

Tiering Assignments and Assessments

Example -- Graph the solution set of each of the following:

1. y > 2 2. 6x + 3y < 2 3. –y < 3x – 7

2. 6x + 3y < 2 3y < -6x + 2 y < -2x + 2/3

x y 0 2/3 3 -5 1/3

Given these two ordered pairs, students would

then graph the line and shade above or below it,

as warranted.

Tiering Assignments and Assessments

For early readiness students: Limit the number of variables for which

student must account to one in all problems. ( y > 2 )

Limit the inequality symbols to, “greater than” or, “less than,” not, “greater then or equal to” or, “less than or equal to”

Provide an already set-up 4-quadrant graph on which to graph the inequality

Suggest some values for x such that when solving for y, its value is not a fraction.

Tiering Assignments and Assessments

For advanced readiness students: Require students to generate the 4-quadrant

graph themselves Increase the parameters for graphing with

equations such as: --1 < y < 6 Ask students what happens on the graph

when a variable is given in absolute value, such as: /y/ > 1

Ask students to graph two inequalities and shade or color only the solution set (where the shaded areas overlap)

With hocked gems financing him,Our hero bravely defied all scornful laughterThat tried to prevent his scheme.Your eyes deceive, he had said;An egg, not a tableCorrectly typifies this unexplored planet.Now three sturdy sisters sought proof,Forging along sometimes through calm vastnessYet more often over turbulent peaks and valleys.Days became weeks,As many doubters spreadFearful rumors about the edge.At last from nowhereWelcome winged creatures appearedSignifying momentous success.

-- Dooling and Lachman (1971)pp. 216-222

Exposure to a wide array of experiences

creates is the basis for creative solutions.

Insulation embalms the sentiment that the

world we know is the only one that matters.

Don’t succumb to intellectual bias. Build Empathy.

In Case You’re Interested: Articles with More Ideas

• “Patient and Tenacious Teaching”• “The Intellectual Life of Teachers”• “Empathy as Doorway to Effectiveness”• “Writing Education Articles”

A. Steps to take before designing the learning experiences:

1. Identify your essential understandings, questions, benchmarks, objectives, skills, standards, and/or learner outcomes.

2. Identify your students with unique needs, and get an early look at what they will need in order to learn and achieve.

3. Design your formative and summative assessments. 4. Design and deliver your pre-assessments based on the

summative assessments and identified objectives. 5. Adjust assessments or objectives based on your further

thinking discovered while designing the assessments.

Quick Reference: Differentiated Lesson Planning Sequence

Learner Profile: Any Factor that might Influence Learning

Family dynamics (if influential) Transiency rateSES IEP504 ELLLD Gifted/AdvancedPhysical health Emotional healthSpeech and Language Issues Behavior/Discipline concernsNationality (if influential) Diet (if influential)Religious affiliation (if influential) Technology access/comfortMultiple Intelligences Arts – comfort/profiencyPersonal background/experiences Leadership qualitiesEthics CollaborationPersonal interests: sports, music, Weekly schedule

television, movies, books, Politics (if influential)hobbies, other Anthony Gregorc Scale

Myers-Briggs Personality Inventory Home responsibilitiesBernice McCarthy’s 4MAT ADHDTourette’s Syndrome Asperger’s SyndromeDown’s Syndrome Hearing ImpairedVisually Impaired Auditory Processing issues

B. Steps to take while designing the learning experiences:

1. Design the learning experiences for students based on pre-assessments, your knowledge of your students, and your expertise with the curriculum, cognitive theory, and students at this stage of human development.

2. Run a mental tape of each step in the lesson sequence to make sure things make sense for your diverse group of students and that the lesson will run smoothly.

3. Review your plans with a colleague. 4. Obtain/Create materials needed for the lesson.5. Conduct the lesson.6. Adjust formative and summative assessments and objectives

as necessary based on observations and data collected while teaching.

Quick Reference: Differentiated Lesson Planning Sequence

When Designing your Actual Lessons….

1. Brainstorm multiple strategies2. Cluster into introductory, advanced, and

strategies that fit between these two3. Sequence activities in plan book4. Correlate Class Profile descriptors, expertise in

students at this age, Differentiation Strategies, and Cognitive Science Principles to lessons – What do you need to change in order to maximize instruction for all students?

Moving Content into Long-term Memory

Students have to do both,

Access Sense-Making

Process Meaning-Making

Teachers can differentiate:

Content

Process

Product

Affect

Learning Environment

-- Tomlinson, Eidson, 2003

According to:

Readiness

Interest

Learning Profile

Flexible Grouping: Questions to Consider

• Is this the only way to organize students for learning?• Where in the lesson could I create opportunities for students

to work in small groups?• Would this part of the lesson be more effective as an

independent activity?• Why do I have the whole class involved in the same activity at

this point in the lesson?• Will I be able to meet the needs of all students with this

grouping?• I’ve been using a lot of [insert type of grouping here – whole

class, small group, or independent work] lately. Which type of grouping should I add to the mix?

There’s a range of flexible groupings:

• Whole class or half class• Teams• Small groups led by students• Partners and triads• Individual study• One-on-one mentoring with an adult• On-line communities• Temporary pull-out groups to teach specific mini-lessons• Anchor activities to which students return after working in

small groups• Learning centers or learning stations through which students

rotate in small groups or individually.

Ebb and Flow of Experiences[Tomlinson]

Individual Individual

Small Group Small Group

Whole Group

Back and forth over time or course of unit

This quarter, you’ve taught:

• 4-quadrant graphing• Slope and Y-intercept• Multiplying binomials• Ratios/Proportions• 3-dimensional solids• Area and Circumference of a circle.

The student’s grade: B

What does this mark tell us about the student’s proficiency with each of the topics you’ve taught?

Unidimensionality – A single score on a test represents a single dimension or trait that has been assessed

Student

Dimension A

Dimension B Total Score

1 2 10 12

2 10 2 12

3 6 6 12

Problem: Most tests use a single score to assess multiple dimensions and traits. The resulting score is often invalid and

useless. -- Marzano, CAGTW, page 13

What is the Role of Each One?

• Formative Assessment

• Summative Judgment

A child is attempting to ride a bicycle, and the bike falls over. Another child, learning to walk, loses her balance and lands on her bottom. A baby’s green peas slide off his spoon as he moves it toward his mouth. How do their parents respond? Good parents don’t say, “You fail, you’re not able to meet bicycling standards,” “I’ll develop a rubric for walking without falling,” or, “We need a Common Core curriculum to help you keep your food in your spoon.” ….[They] simply say, “Try again.”

-Richard L. Curwin, Education Leadership, ASCD, September 2014, p.38

Recovering in full from a failure teaches more than being labeled for failure ever could teach.

It’s a false assumption that giving a student an “F” or wagging an admonishing finger from afar builds moral fiber,

self-discipline, competence, and integrity.

Re-Do’s & Re-Takes: Are They

Okay?

More than “okay!” After 10,000 tries, here’s a working light bulb. ‘Any questions?

Thomas Edison

F.A.I.L.

First Attempt in Learning

We don’t let a student’s immaturity dictate his learning and thereby his destiny.

Cultivate Teacher Creativity.

Seriously, it’s just as vital as content expertise,

professional behavior, and maintaining proper records.

Writer and educator, Margaret Wheatley, is correct:

“We can’t be creative unless we’re willing to be confused.”

Could you teach the differences between architecture in the Middle Ages and architecture in the

Renaissance period in such a classroom?

How about the principles of algebra here?

Do teachers have the creativity to solve their own problems?

•My whole lesson today is based on accessing those three Websites, but the school’s Internet is down, so what can we do instead?•Small groups are not working in my class, yet I know they’re important for many students’ learning. How do I get these students to stay focused on their group tasks?•I’ve backed myself into a corner explaining an advanced science concept, and it’s not making sense to me, let alone to my students. What should I do? •Angelica is far beyond where I’m comfortable teaching, but we have two more weeks in this unit for the rest of the class. What will I do with her that honors her readiness level?

• I’m supposed to differentiate for some of my students, but I don’t see any time to do it.

• My school’s current electronic gradebook system doesn’t allow me to post anything but norm-referenced scores, and I want to be more criterion-referenced in my grades. What can I do?

• Because I’m a veteran teacher, I’ve been asked to be the rotating teacher using a cart and moving from classroom to classroom each period so the new teacher can have his own room and not have so much to deal with his first year. How will I handle this?

What if there were no

hypothetical questions?

1. Students are working in small groups on an assigned task. One student isn’t cooperating with the rest of his group, however, and as a result, the group is falling farther behind the other groups. What happens when it comes to grading the group’s product?

2. A student keeps re-doing an essay in order to improve his grade, but he seems to disregard the advice the teacher gives him on each attempt. He makes a few cosmetic changes and re-arranges some words, but there’s no substantive change. He and the teacher are getting frustrated at his lack of progress.

3. Eleven students do not do the assignment from last night. Consequently, they are not prepared to move on with the class in today’s task. What is an effective instructional response? And when it comes to assessment?

4. A student just moved into your class and school from out of state, and he seems to not have the basic foundations that you’ve already taught your class. Those foundations are very important for students to know for the next unit of study you have to teach.

• Some students [get] more work to do, and others less. For example, a teacher might assign two book reports to advanced readers and only one to struggling readers. Or a struggling math student might have to do only the computation problems while advanced math students do the word problems as well.” (Tomlinson, p. 7)

• Teachers have more control in the classroom.

• Teacher uses many different group structures over time.

Clarify Thinking through Realistic Hypotheticals

A science and math teacher, Mr. Blackstone, teaches a large concept (Inertia) to the whole class. Based on “exit cards” in which students summarize what they learned after the whole class instruction, and observation of students over time, he assigns students to one of two labs: one more open-ended and one more structured. Those that demonstrate mastery of content in a post-lab assessment, move to an independent project (rocketry), while those that do not demonstrate mastery, move to an alternative rocketry project, guided by the teacher, that re-visits the important content. (Tomlinson, p. 24)

As highly accomplished

professional educators at

advanced levels of responsive

teaching, we are capable of candid, insightful analysis

of differentiated lessons.

(Let’s try some of that analysis right

now with some video clips…)

As highly accomplished professional educators at advanced levels of responsive teaching, we see responsive teaching as a mindset, not a list of recipes.

What does it mean to do advanced responsive teaching?

It means we become mini-experts in increasingly diverse student populations:

Learning disabilities Artistic504 and Otherwise Health Impaired Speech and Language issuesHearing challenges AbusedVisual challenges Extrovert/IntrovertAthletic/unathletic Autistic Gifted/advanced English Language LearnersEmotionally challenged ADHDMilitary TransientGang-affiliated Tech-savvy/tech-illerateUnder resourced Poor readers Impoverished students Single parent homesLesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender (LGBT) Depression/SuicidalGamers PregnantWorking full time or part time Religious affiliation

What does it mean to do advanced responsive teaching?

It means we become mini-experts in cognitive science principles specifically for the students we teach:

•The mind craves structures, relationships, connections.•Emphasize sense-making, meaning-making, and the growth mindset.•Prime the brain.•Create prior knowledge where there was none.•The brain is a survival organ.•Getting enough sleep is critical, not optional. •Build in more movement and shifting from one activity to another. •The mind retains information/skills through reiteration, recursive experiences.•The brain needs a lot more water and protein than we think.•Stress limits cognition.•When assimilating too much, a child’s default response is anger, frustration.•There is no such thing as laziness.•While there may be varied experiences and frames of reference as well as learning preferences depending on the situation or topic, most of the time students can learn most content in more than one way – we don’t pigeon-hole students. •Motivation, resilience, “stick-to-it-ness” are specific fields of expertise.

What does it mean to do advanced responsive teaching?

It means we become mini-experts in assessment and grading practices that support responsive teaching principles:

•Evidenced-based assessment•Formative feedback, including getting training on descriptive feedback•Gradebooks cumulative for the year•Subject-like teachers collaborate on evidence descriptors•Allow/Require re-do’s for full credit•Time becomes a variable•Revising instruction based on assessment•Distinguish between formative and summative•Increase the role of pre-assessment in our lesson design•Develop a constructive response to late work•Report work habits, efforts, character elements separately from academic progress and performance•Welcome alternative assessments (This is different than most interpretations of “Credit Recovery”)•Disaggregate scores/topic evaluations to see strong and weak areas•Accept grades as what students know and can do at the end of learning, not during the learning.

What does it mean to do advanced responsive teaching?

It means we become mini-experts in building a personal repertoire of differentiated responses, cultivating pedagogical dexterity:

•Read professionally. Subscribe to at least one professional journal.•Think reflectively.•Keep up to date in our expertise regarding the disciplines we teach.•Attend at least one national or regional conference/seminar each year.•Exchange lesson plans for collegial review.•Participate in PLC’s, Teacher Action Research, Critical Friends Networks, or as a Lab School for a local university•Actively pursue new ways to do differentiation elements like flexible grouping, scaffolding, tiering, adjusting instruction to readiness levels, etc.•Participate in the national and local conversations of our discipline.•Participate in a professional on-line community and/or course.

What does it mean to do advanced responsive teaching?

It means we become mini-experts in building a personal repertoire of differentiated responses, cultivating pedagogical dexterity: (part 2)

•Analyze practices/decisions regularly, and revise/change/drop those that aren’t working.•Invite professional critique from colleagues, students, parents.•Coach others.•Participate/Conduct discussions of hypotheticals/scenarios.•Cultivate personal creativity and innovation.•Ask students for how to teach something best.•Co-teach.•Blog or write for publication.

What goes unachieved in students because we chose to be politically safe?

We close with a video mockumentary, I mean, documentary, of differentiation in the 21st century.