In their work, Overschooled but Undereducated: Society’s Failure to Understand Adolescence,
John Abbott with Heather MacTaggart (2008) explain that societal and educational missteps result from faulty assumptions made about society’s ‘tweens and teenagers. Brain research and neuroscience are helping to frame the process of physiological maturation as one more closely resembling periods of earthquake-like development followed by stabilization rather than a neat and tidy progression of development. If you teach teens or have raised teens, you are probably in the best position to testify to what those “earthquakes” really look like. Reframing the period we call adolescence as an explosion of brain development, Abbott and MacTaggart lend a voice on behalf of oft-misunderstood teenagers that attempts to restore balance to our adult assessment of how well children are making the transition to young adults moving on to adulthood.
For teachers who actively differentiate, paying attention to how education feels to the learner factors into decision-making. Education is most powerful when students are interested, engaged, challenged appropriately, and supported through a community of learners when adversity is encountered. In differentiated classrooms, the rule of thumb is that there is a community of learners, but that growth is maximized on an individual basis. An emphasis on cooperative learning has a positive impact on students as they learn in a context with others, sometimes through others, and not merely as individuals.
The process by which a teacher practicing differentiated instruction creates cultural norms with her class resembles a family, or a community, much more than an authoritarian or rule-based traditional classroom. Tomlinson suggests that classroom norms be created with students (2001). Abbott and MacTaggart (2008) suggest that we must remember that children count on us, as adults, to know our own role in preparing them to make the transition from childhood to adulthood:
Years later when, lecturing in Africa on the subject of Adolescence, the African greeting “Umbutu” was explained to me. It is the traditional greeting used when people of different tribes come together. Literally it means “how goes it with the children?” It is an enquiry about the “state” of the next generation. It is every bit as much to do with rearing in the home and community as it is with formal schooling. It is about the preparation and nurture of young people to take over from their ageing parents. It is nothing short of a life and death issue, for on that depends the continuation of a way of living, of a civilisation. Adolescence, to those Africans, was too important to be ignored. (pg. 1)
As we draw near to the end of our journey in this course across the concepts, content, and considerations for a teaching philosophy known as differentiated instruction, it seems appropriate to be mindful of the true purpose for such crucial conversations: the welfare of children. Far from the discourse on NCLB, IDEIA, and standards (etc.), there must be a continual re-focusing on the end, or purpose, for our professional activities. To differentiate instruction is to ask, and answer, the question as to how we can best be the teacher of someone else’s children even when we may not fully share their interests, passions, or culturally diverse viewpoints (Delpit, 1996). In a progressively evidence-based field, we are finding more powerful ways to answer the question, “And how are the children?” Differentiated instruction is an approach that holds great appeal for those wanting to answer this question beyond what information standardized test scores, entitlement decisions, or disability labels can tell us.
How Are Your Students?
A powerful reason for considering differentiated instruction is the focus it places on the teacher-student relationship. Related to this, differentiated instruction emphasizes that teachers do well to develop a variety of ways to assess for student interests, preferences, and learning profile. The connections missed when such strategies are not in place may be exponential. Far from just being able to answer the question “How are your students?” the goal is for such information to transform the decisions made in service to students when they are known well. The opportunities are everywhere, but no one has the authority to dictate what is best for you or your students. One goal of the course is to articulate a rationale for embracing a differentiated approach to meeting the needs of students, and the reflection this may cause, while intentional, is not intended to cast a professional judgment on anyone’s practice that may differ.
As a result of examining a framework for assessing where you fall along this continuum, you likely have found yourself juxtaposing elements of your current practice with those being outlined–and this is a good thing. Hopefully you have made mental notes during this course about what you are feeling and why. Brain research shows that emotions are a powerful variable in the learning process and can work to our advantage, or against us (Medina, 2008). Emotions are clues to meaning, both for us and for our students.
There may be some discomfort for you with the direction of the field as it relentlessly asks, “How are the children?” instead of asking a more traditional question: “How are the teachers?” This is not to say that the field does not care about teachers, their working conditions, their place in society, their role in reform, or their significance in shaping the lives of young learners. We need to avoid proposals for reform that paint the pursuit of excellence and equity as a tough choice between teachers and children. Such proposals will serve the interests of neither. Transforming one’s practice as a teacher is not an either/or, my-way-or-the-highway dichotomy.
A differentiated approach avoids the problem created by pointing to solutions that exist somewhere “out there” in the field of education, and not residing in the co-learning activities right inside of the existing classroom. In the end, for us to be effective teachers, we must make a real difference in the lives of real students to help co-create real futures for them to move toward.
Why Should Change Be Considered?
In a report presented to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (March 2006), Peter D. Hart Research Associates shared findings from a study on one of the most significant indicators, if not the most significant indicator, of the health of the U.S. public education system: dropouts. The research included four focus groups of ethnically and racially diverse 16- to 24-year-olds in Philadelphia and Baltimore in August 2005. In September and October 2005, interviews were conducted, primarily face-to-face, with 467 ethnically and racially diverse students aged 16-25 who had dropped out of public high schools in 25 different locations in large cities, suburbs, and small towns. These locations were selected from high dropout rate areas with a significant degree of geographic and demographic variation. Sixty-seven percent of the sample consisted of city residents, and the remainder were from the suburbs (14%) or small towns and rural areas (17%). Thirty-six percent were white, thirty-five percent were black, and twenty-seven percent were Hispanic.
Below are some statistics and facts about high school dropout rates from the Silent Epidemic Report:
Beyond the sheer magnitude of the problem, what is most telling within the data are the perceptionsof high school dropouts. In particular, Hart reported how dropouts do not make an impulsive decision to do so, but rather elect to drop out after a long, slow process of disengagement. One of the statistics reported by the “Silent Epidemic Report” suggests that school systems can predict with 66% accuracy which students will eventually drop out of public schools. Other statistics worth noting follow.
Would Differentiated Instruction Make a Difference?
How might a differentiated instructional approach help to address the dropout statistics? One of the hallmarks of a differentiated approach is to know students well, and early, in order to help shape what defines success for each student. As such, as early on as possible and in a variety of ways, the teacher establishing a differentiated classroom will work to know as much as possible about each student’s interests, learning preferences, and strengths. This is intentional and sets a firm foundation for the learning relationship. In addition, teachers work to convey a genuine interest in the varied successes students have and offer support in overcoming the barriers students encounter as they attempt to progress toward their own learning goals.
Another way that a differentiated approach makes a difference is that students become engaged in their own learning process as early as possible. They become students of themselves. This means that as soon as a student can conceptualize him or herself as being a learner, and not just a student in attendance, the better. A teacher who differentiates conveys to students that there is always a place for them in that teacher’s classroom and that regardless of how students might struggle, they are welcome. Because all students struggle in various ways, at various times, and for various reasons, a teacher who consistently differentiates will meet needs at critical junctures for individuals. The 2006 “Silent Epidemic Report” by John M. Bridgeland, John J. DiIulio, Jr., and Karen Burke Morison highlighted that while dropping out is considered an event, it is more accurate to say it is a “long process of disengagement ” (p. 19) (emphasis added). By emphasizing relationships with their students, and by providing ways for students to be involved in self-reflection, self-advocacy, self-regulation, and self-directed learning, teachers who differentiate are attuned to connections that can be made that make a real difference to students.
As educators, we should always be on the lookout for barriers that bring student learning to a halt. It has been pointed out that one of the most often underappreciated deal-breakers in the learning process is the role that assessment plays for each student. Rick Stiggins, an expert in educational assessment, has issued an Assessment Manifesto (2008) that outlines the ways in which the quest for valid measurement tools has ignored how assessments affect students. In his plea to school, research, and legislative communities, Stiggins argues that in order for assessments to be high quality, they must
include the evaluation of the impact of those scores on the learner during the learning. The most valid and reliable assessment in the world that has the effect of causing students to give up in hopelessness cannot be regarded as productive because it does far more harm than good.
Stiggins’ view represents a significant shift in the assessment world toward installing students as the end, or purpose, for the assessment system, not just the system itself. According to Stiggins, there should be two purposes of assessments: (1) to gather evidence to inform instructional decisions, and (2) to encourage students to try to learn. In order for schools to be effective, assessments must yield good information, but they must equally leave the learner with a sense of wellness. Teachers who differentiate instruction use assessment of learning, but also use assessments for learning. The varied types, formats, and uses of assessment are already closely linked to decisions a teacher makes regarding curriculum, instruction, and further assessments. Because the antidote for a long process of disengagement is precisely a long process of engagement, teachers who differentiate will be right at home in an assessment world that asks them to consider frequent, student-centered, and affect-aware assessments that will help motivate students to continue learning.
What Is the Purpose of Differentiated Instruction?
Many have viewed the process of calibration or alignment to be the place to focus energies. In a paper entitled “Rethinking and Redesigning Curriculum, Instruction and Assessment: What Contemporary Research and Theory Suggests,” James Pallegrino (2006) points again to the interconnected triad upon which the entire educational system operates. Further, Pallegrino, stresses the role alignment plays:
A precept for educational practice is the need for alignment among curriculum, instruction, and assessment. Alignment, in this sense, means that the three functions are directed toward the same ends and reinforce each other rather than working at cross purposes. Ideally, an assessment should measure what students are actually being taught, and what is being taught should actually parallel the curriculum one wants students to master. If any one of the functions is not well synchronized with the others, it will disrupt the balance and skew the educational process. Assessment results will be misleading, or instruction will be ineffective. Alignment is difficult to achieve, however. Often what is lacking is a central theory about the nature of learning and knowing in a given domain of knowledge and expertise around which the three can be coordinated. (2006, p. 3) (emphasis added)
The interconnected variables (such as curriculum, instruction, and assessment) each has its role to play, but in the end, it is about students. Teachers everywhere have known this inherently and have received the true “pay” of intrinsic rewards as students in their care learned, sometimes in spite of their instructor’s methods. In the absence of a unifying theory of education, the work to synthesize, align, and make necessary linkages of the elements of education continues--as it should. The whole of education is greater than the mere sum of all the individual parts. While teachers who embrace a differentiated approach seek a similar alignment or synchronicity within their own classrooms, or mini-systems they have designed, they do this in recognition that students are the true end, or purpose, for all professional activities, and press on in search of ways to do just that. In short, learning is the journey, but students are the mission.
Ted Sizer, founder of the Coalition for Essential Schools (CES), has commented that the obvious overzealous approach to publicly mandated school accountability that resulted in standardized testing has left us numb to the aims of data collection in the first place. What is occurring now is a “period of standardization” as systems search for ways to balance out an overzealous approach to accountability that became equated with large-scale, high-stakes testing and sanctions. The CES came out in 2004 with a bold, pointed statement against high-stakes testing. Embedded in renewed efforts to strike a balance among data, instructional decisions, and resource allocation on behalf of students, is a collective attempt to answer the question raised at the outset of this Introduction: What defines student success?
Unlike efforts in previous decades to the accurately frame the question of “What defines a successful student?”(and the corollary questions of what defines a successful school and successful teacher), differentiated instruction frames the answer to that in much more holistic terms. It assumes that a necessary condition of school and teacher success is the success of individual students. Without student success there can be no teacher and school success. That is not to suggest that a differentiated approach does not entail high expectations, alignment with standards, or rigor. It is to say that having those as the goals without simultaneously envisioning students being motivated to excel, or having barriers placed in their way, is to be at “cross purposes” (Pallegrino, 2006).
It has been commented that the presence of differentiation in today’s classroom is similar to the need that existed in the classroom we could imagine was the setting for the one-room schoolhouse of 100 years ago. Whether those teachers called it “differentiation” or had the same reasons for meeting the needs of mixed-ability and multi-age classrooms, they were in essence meeting students where they were at (Tomlinson, 2000). But today’s social, economic and educational complexities are far removed from the setting one might find depicted in Little House on the Prairie. After students spend approximately 800,000 minutes in a 13-year formal public education process (K-12th), the expectations are quite differentfrom the ones in place when a child completed any level of schooling previously. One should use extreme caution when comparing the estimated drop-out rates of antiquity with those of today, because the conditions that existed outside of formal schooling, though comparable in some ways, did not place the individuals in nearly the same fiscal and societal peril as dropping out of school does today.
It could be argued that with the advent of technology and globalization, the change is now exponential and that changes packed into the last twenty years are more significant and tumultuous than all changes of schooling previously–combined. Another way to put this is that the classroom in Abraham Lincoln’s day had more in common with the classrooms of the 1950s than the classrooms of 1950s have with classrooms today.
Perhaps the two single greatest developments are in the areas of: (1) technology and (2) scientific breakthroughs, especially in the area of brain-based research. Consider that as early as Kindergarten, students are routinely exposed to forms of technology (e.g., personal computers, web-based interface, DVDs, etc.) that were not even in existence just 15 years ago. While technology represents a powerful tool to help address the achievement gap, the gap has existed for some students in the realm of access to the very assistive technologies themselves (CAST, 2008) and the result is that the advent of computer technologies may also be helping to widen the achievement gap. The most obvious reason for this is that technology, as an extension of poverty, will be at the reach of the middle- to upper-class family than to students of lower SES situations. This has been described in education as “the Mathew effect”: those who have receive more, and those who have less end up with less than what they started with.
One reason for the double-edged sword of technology is found in generational perspectives toward technology. Among the parents and grandparents of today’s school-aged students, there may still be a fear factor toward technology because it is foreign to their own experience of what it meant to be “successful” as a student in their own generation. Also, a perception may exist that computers are more indicative of a growing emphasis on entertainment or be a source of distraction rather than a tool for education. While general education is generally oriented toward the future and preparing students for success in the future, the reality is that the pace of change remained only incremental in the past and matched generational change, whereas the rate of change is now outpacing generational change. This means that while previously the parents and grandparents of students were justified in regarding inventions of modernity as novelties, now that same conclusion can distance families and their children from tools that could help mitigate their challenges. This is especially the case in cultures or contexts where advanced technologies are not as prevalent (Sedere, 2008).
Conclusion:
How are the children in your care? What variables do you believe have the greatest impacts on their current ability to access the general education curriculum? What specific actions are you taking or considering taking to ensure all students are making progress? There is no one else who is uniquely positioned in education to answer these questions for the particular students you teach. It is a sobering and daunting responsibility, but also a privilege, to be in such a strategic position in the lives of children.