Cycle Two Concluding Post: Honoring the Uniqueness of Each Student

Hi everyone. Thank you for your work over this past cycle. I really enjoyed reading your posts and your responses to each other. Given that this is such a mixed class in terms of the age of the children we work with, and the subjects we teach, I always learn an incredible amount. As one of you noted this week, we stand to learn an incredible amount about teaching by dialoguing across the early childhood, elementary, middle and secondary landscape!

I really want to encourage you, as well, to keep these dialogues going. Often, in a response, someone will pose a further question, or take you up on an offer to to share more about what you are doing in your classroom. I encourage you to respond to any questions or requests for more information that you receive! Often, the best way to continue these conversations is via email (you can access everyone’s MSU email by going to Angel, and looking it up on the class roster). Sometimes, a further post on your blog might not be seen by a reader. So please do consider following up these specific conversations via email! It’s fun to get responses on your writing.

Let me start this concluding post with a longer quote, from Nel Noddings, an education writer many of you have encountered before:

If the aim is justice--to provide all students with an education that will meet their needs--the solution is likely to involve the provision of considerable variety in school offerings and to include material that might contribute to personal as well as public life. Offering a variety of curricula does not mean putting together a set of courses labeled easy, average and hard and then equating  hard with best. It means cooperatively constructing rigorous and interesting courses centered on students’ interests and talents. It means that the schools should show the society that a democracy honors all of its honest workers, not just those who finish college and make a lot of money

Noddings goes on to ask how fair it is to force kids into learning certain subjects that don’t interest them, and then turn around and evaluate them against kids who are interested in such subject (say, calculus, or AP history). The implication here is that tracking itself is not really the problem--rather, it’s our belief that some subjects are more worthy than others, that the fine and industrial arts are unsuited to a twenty-first century education--when in reality, for a large number of jobs, and a happy and well rounded personal life, the exact opposite may be true!

In the above quote, Noddings seems to be writing for high school teachers. She takes the course as the unit of analysis. She talks, that is, about constructing courses centered on student interest and ability.

Now that is certainly one solution, but it is perhaps not the ideal one in many situations (courses are long in duration, and hard to get on the books). In elementary classrooms, it is not even a feasible solution at all.

It seems, then, that we need to scale down our “tracking” efforts, and differentiate at a more micro level--on the level of the unit, the project, the lesson, or even the activity. This is clearly where differentiated instruction comes in. As many of you noted, DI shares certain uncomfortable associations with tracking, and hence, can make some of us quite nervous.

But I don’t think it need to. Tracking got a justifiably bad rap, in my opinion, because it tried to take the infinite diversity of human beings--we are all unique and irreplaceable--and tried to boil us down to three classes (remedial/vocational, standard/general, honors/college-bound), determined along one questionable measure (general intelligence). In reality, given the typical spread in a typical classroom, I don’t imagine that breaking kids into one of three groups even simplifies teaching all that much--even in a class of “gifted” learners, there is still an incredible diversity of ability, interest, prior knowledge, and life experience as it relates to any one particular topic.

This is where I personally tend towards heterogeneous classrooms, heterogeneously grouped, and differentiatedly instructed. To my mind, this is the highest ideal for both democratic social relations and individual human growth.

I learned at least two important things about DI, I think, by reading our blogs this week. Here is a summary of them.

1) Sometimes, especially in the early elementary grades, we may need to differentiate our instruction based upon ability--and therefore group according to ability. This, of course, is not in itself a bad thing. It allows us to spend more time with students who need it, and provide work that challenges all students. This type of differentiation is most common, it seems, for work on the basic skills of literacy and numeracy.

However, and there was a pretty strong majority opinion here, grouping only by ability carries great risks with it, and may mean we have overly narrowed what we recognize and honor in our students (and in ourselves!). Therefore, there should be times in all classrooms where we differentiate instruction based on interests and strengths. It means providing options for projects and summative assessments that vary quite radically in the skills called to complete said project or assessment. We want to watch out, especially in the upper grades, of differentiating assignments by making them more “watered-down” versions of the “real” assessment we would prefer to give to the whole class. The key here is that we honor and challenge, to the increasing best of our ability, all students at all times.

2) Folks who are good at differentiating instruction--who have walked furthest down this path--are really good at observing kids. They do lots of formative and diagnostic assessments. They don’t make a snap judgement based on one measure, done at one point in time. Remember what Khan said in his video--in all of his studies, he noticed students who took a while in the beginning to get through a concept. If we assessed them only at the beginning of our time together, we risk mis-labeling them. For these very same students will be near the head of the class at the end of the unit or course!

Therefore, I was reminded by many of you, that DI is not something we do in the abstract, prior to meeting our students. We differentiated based on the emerging and evolving needs of our students! It’s when we can’t imagine a lesson that could possibly meet the needs of our whole class that differentiation becomes a natural strategy. Therefore, I think, we needn’t stress about DI--are we doing enough of it?? If we are careful observers of our students, then we will quickly learn how much and in what direction we need to differentiate our instruction (and in what types of groups).

I want to end by reminding you that, at bottom, communities are formed when they recognize the multitude of worthy forms of human occupation. We are currently experiencing a crisis in our system, where all kinds of subjects and programs are cut in order to improve test scores in the basics. This, to my mind, is extremely short-sighted. It harms both individual students and our society at large. It sends the message that people who work with their hands are not as worthy as people who manage hedge funds. Reversing this message is something we can start tomorrow, and is a lesson we need to continue to teach administrators, school board members, and politicians who have lost sight of this reality.