Differentiated Instruction

A Guide for Middle and High School Teachers

Amy Benjamin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138143777
• eBook ISBN: 9781317923688
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book demonstrates how to make your classroom more responsive to the needs of individual students with a wide variety of learning styles, interests, goals, cultural backgrounds, and prior knowledge. Focusing on grades 6 through 12, this book showcases classroom-tested activities and strategies.

Differentiated Instruction: A Guide for Middle and High School Teachers shows you how to vary your instruction so you can respond to the needs of individual learners. The concrete examples in this book demonstrate how you can use differentiated instruction to clarify:
the content (what you want students to know and be able to do)
the process (how students are going to go about learning the content)
and the product (how they will show you what they know.)

This book is uniquely interactive. It features "Reflections" to help you understand your teaching style and guide you towards developing habits of mind which result in effective differentiated instruction.

Also included is a chapter on teaching students whose native language is not English.

1

Foundations

What Is Differentiated Instruction?

Across the country, the public is expecting more from educators. With nearly every state having a standards-based curriculum, all students are expected to achieve at a level higher than ever before. And that’s good.

It’s good because the standards movement has led to better staff development for teachers and administrators. Whereas in years past we might have been able to consign certain students to low-achieving classes with euphemized names like “English for Real Life” and “Math for Everyday Living,” we now must find ways to make higher achievement accessible to everyone, no matter how challenging that is for all concerned.

What do we mean by “higher achievement”? The standards are about critical thinking skills, application of information, fluent and accurate use of the English language in written and oral expression, some exposure to a second language, and familiarity with a body of knowledge referred to as cultural literacy. Out of this goal of elevating the intellectual function of all students comes the philosophy and practice of differentiated instruction (DI).

Differentiated instruction is a broad term that refers to a variety of classroom practices that accommodate differences in students’ learning styles, interests, prior knowledge, socialization needs, and comfort zones. On the secondary level, it involves a balance between the content and competencies expected on the mandated assessments and various pedagogical options to maximize durable learning. The standards tell us what students need to know and to be able to do. Differentiated instruction practices help to get students there, while at the same time teaching them how to learn in a meaningful way.

In its modern application, a differentiated classroom is widely heterogeneous, dynamic, purposeful, and intense. The pedagogical theory that guides differentiation is constructivism: the belief that learning happens when the learner makes meaning out of information. That may sound too self-evident to deserve mention. Of course learning involves making meaning out of information. What else would learning involve? Well, if you’ve ever seen a kid memorize definitions for a list of “vocabulary words” without having the slightest idea, nor any intention, of how to use those words in context, then you know what learning is not: we do not know the meaning of a word, the significance of a historical event, the applications of a formula, just because we have memorized a set of words. That is why the first step toward differentiated instruction is knowing what understanding means.

Why now? If Rip Van Winkle were to wake up at the beginning of the 2000s and ask if there have been any changes in public education in the past generation, what would we tell him? We would probably start by telling him about the national imperative toward standardized testing. We would describe the intense pressures on administrators to produce test scores in their schools, making it appear that their schools outperform neighboring districts. These scores are going to be publicized in bar graphs in the local newspapers and even in real estate offices: The better your kids and your neighbor’s kids do on the state tests, the more your house will be worth. It’s that simple.

But there’s good news as well. In the 1990s, knowledge about the brain and learning burgeoned. Now, we know much more than we did 20 years ago about individual learning styles, how emotions and ambient conditions affect learning, how the mind processes and memorizes information, the importance of prior knowledge, how various features of the classroom can enhance or impede learning, the role played by the teacher/student relationship, and the way certain drugs can change one’s ability to concentrate. The field of neurological science has delivered information which should have transformed the look and feel of classrooms across the country.

Dispelling Some Myths About Differentiated Instruction

In the education graveyard lie the bones of myths, fads, purist fanaticism, demagoguery, shallow thinking, and silliness. Is differentiated instruction just another passing fancy? Can we just watch the carousel go by until something we like better comes along? The answer is yes, if we look at DI simplistically, if we think there’s a “recipe” for it, if we think that a half-day workshop or two is going to solve all our problems. The answer is no, if we understand that DI is a complex set of beliefs and practices that take respectable, humane, and flexible principles of learning and human growth into account.

In conversations about education reform and at staff development session, we tend to hear clichés like these:

♦ We’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater: Educators and people who care about education have a right to fear that in our zeal to make education new and interesting rather than “drill and kill,” we are abandoning basic skills. By basic skills, we mean reading, writing, clear speech, and computation, as well as the facts about history, geography, and science that high school graduates are presumed to know. No one really knows what these facts are and why everyone has to know them, but we get nervous when we think too many people don’t know what the capital of North Dakota is.

♦ We’re reinventing the wheel: This, like many of these clichés, assumes that everything old is new again. The fact is, it’s possible to make a better wheel, one that fits the kind of cars that we drive now, rather than the covered wagon wheels of yesterday. We do need to remember that not everyone is a veteran teacher. Some people, new to the field, are not reinventing the wheel, but discovering it. Some educators find no problem using the prepackaged teaching materials provided by textbook publishers. Others can’t do that: they have to devise their own tests, performance tasks, lecture notes. To the former, the latter is reinventing the wheel. (It’s Bismarck.)

♦ We’ve come full circle: We’re back to where we started from. We’re walking around in circles. Educators who lament that we’ve come full circle may think they’d have been better off just staying in the same place and waiting for the world to pass their way again. What they don’t see is the value of the journey toward professionalism: to some, it may be a circle; to others, it’s an upward spiral. Yes, here we are, with heterogeneous grouping instead of tracking again, or with tracking again instead of heterogeneous grouping. But, we haven’t regressed unless we aren’t bringing new skills and an enlightened attitude that learning is a complex process and that it isn’t so easy to predict who is capable of learning what.

♦ The pendulum has swung (will swing) the other way. This either/or thinking is similar to the full-circle thinking described above. It’s usually said in a tone of vindication, meaning: “See? I didn’t change my ways, and now I’m back in style, just like my powder blue tuxedo that I wore to my wedding.” Or, “Why should I bother changing? If I wait long enough, this, too shall pass.” Actually, I don’t think “it” will. We know too much about learning. I do think that the current mania for test scores won’t last forever. I surely hope that the testing frenzy will abate, but I don’t see Americans going back to the days when we gave up on kids as easily as we did in past generations. I don’t think we’re going to sort and classify kids into “college material” and “vocational school candidates” anymore. Nor do I think we will ever return to a golden age (that never existed) when kids and their parents treated the school with unquestioned deference. We’re not going to reinstitute corporal punishment on a large scale. We are going to continue to humanize education and operate on the belief that every kid deserves to be taken seriously. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be doing this.

♦ You can bring a horse to the water, but you can’t make him drink. This one is true enough, but it’s too easy. As educators, we need to find out more about why the horse doesn’t want to drink. We do have to assume that the horse might drink eventually, or maybe it would drink something that looked a little more appetizing. What this cliché means is that we absolve ourselves of the responsibility to do anything more than present material and give assignments. I have news for you: if that’s all there is to our jobs, then we can be replaced by Web courses.

Consider the following, relative to differentiated instruction:

♦ What’s the baby, and what’s the bathwater?

♦ What is the wheel that keeps being reinvented?

♦ Where does the full circle begin and end?

♦ Where is the pendulum right now? In which direction is it swinging? How far do you think it will swing in this direction? What will get it to start swinging in the other direction?

♦ How do we get this stuff to look like something that the horse would drink?

Myth 1: Differentiated Instruction Consists of Students Doing Exercises in Self-Correcting Workbooks

When I was a young teacher in the mid 1970s, something called “individualized instruction” was the fad. Students would come into a “reading” class, go for their folders, and then work themselves through various self-correcting exercises. The teacher would work quietly with students one at a time, perhaps “going over” problematic reading comprehension questions. These questions were based on isolated passages of the sort that might be found in a content area textbook. The level of difficulty of the workbook was color-coded.

The “individualized instruction” classrooms that I observed were dreary places. There was no student-to-student talk, no interest in the text, no joy of language, no classroom dynamic, no humor. Yet, this system was considered a breakthrough improvement over full-class instruction.

I suspect that the term differentiated instruction evokes that image for many teachers, either because they once taught that way or were taught that way when they were students.

Myth 2: Differentiated Instruction Is the All-Purpose Problem Solver

The techniques that are in this book will make you a better teacher only if you use them the way you should use any pedagogy—in combination with others. No one method works all of the time for all students. Teachers have personalities, strengths and weaknesses, communication styles, and organizational habits. A particular pedagogy cannot be imposed on every teacher.

Myth 3: Differentiated Instruction Means That the Teacher Does Not Present Information

Whole class presentations are an essential part of any effective teaching plan. There’s no substitute for the modeling, enthusiasm, rich knowledge of subject, anecdotes, storytelling, and shared learning experience that an excellent teacher provides. Whole class instruction sets the tone, establishes the knowledge base, and ignites the interest of students. What it usually does not do is hold the individual accountable for making meaning out of the information. Performance tasks and communication do that.

Myth 4: Differentiated Instruction Does Not Work in Classes Where Students Have to Master a Body of Information for a High-Stakes Test

Studies at reputable institutions have determined conclusively that we...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• About the Author
• How to Use This Book
• 1 Foundations
• 2 Where Do I Start?
• 3 The Language of Differentiated Instruction
• 4 Differentiating Instruction for Reading the Textbook
• 5 Differentiating Instruction for Independent Reading
• 6 Differentiating Instruction for Learning New Words
• 7 Differentiating Instruction Through the Arts
• 8 Differentiating Instruction for English Language Learners
• 9 Administrative Support for Differentiated Instruction
• 10 Case Studies
• Conclusion