I went to a conference on Differentiation took away some good information. Basically, differentiation is not giving more work to students who “get it” but it’s understanding where each of your students are at and providing them a learning experience to foster growth.
For example, if a student is struggling with basic concepts and you assign them 10 questions and it takes them 1 hour to complete the work, you would then assign the student who is extending his/her learning more challenging questions (maybe just 3) but it should take the same amount of time as the other students – 1 hour. It’s not about dumping more work onto the kids who get it, it’s about getting them to the higher levels of thinking. Does that mean students who are struggling at the basic level shouldn’t get higher level questions? NO WAY – they absolutely need to work on stretching and developing higher order thinking skills.
According to research, students are more engaged in the learning if they have a choice in it as well. Rather than giving them a standard assignment, teachers should consider developing various options for students to meet the learning goal. There are various ways to do this. One, you could base the tiered assignment on Bloom’s Taxonomy and create assignments that fall into each category. Two, you could create assignments based on multiple intelligences. However, whichever category you choose, should require students to stretch outside of their comfort zone and knowledge level. For example, a student shouldn’t just answer knowledge level questions or should work only in the kinesthetic intelligence but be encouraged (creatively required) to expand their knowledge outside of their zone of preferential learning. I’ve done a Tic Tac Toe activity in the past and have been mindful of where I place what activities I place on the chart. It has gone well and I think the students enjoy the variety of options they have, though, they often ask if they can choose any three to which I say “you can select any three squares as long as they make a tic tac toe”.
So, based on what I learned at the conference and the desire to give students more choice in their learning I created a ladder assignment (Annie has done a pyramid assignment before so that got my brain thinking). It is broken up by Bloom’s Taxonomy and assigned a point value based on that question level. Students are asked to select any activities that total up to 12 points. It can be any combination, however, if you’ll notice, there aren’t enough options in each section for a student to work only in that thinking level. A student who wants to take the “easy” way out will still have to step up their level of thinking to complete the assignment.
I haven’t yet tried it with my class but I hope to this spring. At this point, it’s a very general outline that can be tailored to each specific class. Below is the example (to be uploaded during the work week). Feel free to use or modify as you see fit!
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