In a democracy that stresses freedom and individuality, education reformers remade public schools focusing on aligning children to narrow high-stakes standards, even before Common Core State Standards appeared in 2010.
It isn’t easy to differentiate when the end goal is the same narrow standard.
Standards don’t involve differentiating how children learn. Teachers might try individual and small-group remediation, but ultimately, students must achieve the same standards simultaneously.
For example, when all students must pass a reading test by third grade or fail, a practice that started with NCLB, this is alignment, not differentiation.
Carole Ann Tomlinson defines differentiation:
At its most basic level, differentiation consists of the efforts of teachers to respond to variance among learners in the classroom. Whenever a teacher reaches out to an individual or small group to vary his or her teaching to create the best learning experience possible, that teacher differentiates instruction.
Alignment insists children move in lockstep. However, teachers are also told to differentiate student learning needs, even when facing large class sizes, making this a difficult task, not to mention conflicting tasks.
David Lee Finkle’s Dylan Fitz comics are excellent; a recent one captured this dilemma beautifully. David graciously permitted me to post it.
Alignment to the curriculum becomes more important than the teacher’s professional judgment.
School districts purchase programs, sometimes without teacher feedback, that promise to align instruction to the standards. Since they fork out massive funding for canned programs, often with little independent research to indicate their effectiveness, teachers and students can’t escape.
How does a teacher say, my students need something different; this isn’t working for them?
Some curriculum packages make teachers commit to teaching it with fidelity. They must marry the program!
Alignment caters to those who can follow scripts and canned instruction that tells the teacher exactly what to do. Teachers might work to supplement the problematic programming with their own materials. But if the student fails, teachers take the blame, not the program.
Alignment also works against children without learning problems and might hurt their learning progress. How many students show up to school reading and are drilled on sounds they already know?
It’s easy to find kindergarten through third-grade teachers with students lined up at desks or on the floor, where they’re teaching the same letter sounds or rules when some children may be reading fluently, and other children may need more assistance understanding what the teacher means.
Or, students wind up facing screens with curricula that advertise alignment for personalized learning, including online assessments focused on aligning students to standards. They work at their own speed, but they must master the end goals to succeed.
Differentiation is the key to good teaching.
Differentiation, however, is significant, especially for teachers with students who have disabilities, and results in an Individual Educational Plan (IEP). However, IEPs have changed too often, reflecting the program rather than the teacher’s ideas of how the student should progress. See Common Core and IEPs.
Real differentiation looks at students for their strengths to help them with their difficulties but not make them feel like they’ve failed. Differentiation is critical, and the answers to how to do it are complex, demanding well-prepared teachers who are accessible to individual and small group instruction and teach the students they know first-hand in the classroom.
The system requires change to demand fully-prepared university degreed teachers in the area they teach and smaller class sizes. There also needs to be more scrutiny and less reliance on curriculum programs, especially those that are online, with little proof of success, that cost school districts so much.
Differentiation is critical. We don’t find the best in each child with narrow standards. Every child deserves to have their individual educational needs addressed not by a canned curriculum or computer program but by a capable teacher who knows and understands them.
Two examples from this practitioner:
1. As a newly minted assistant principal I used to have teachers struggling with differentiation observe our very successful band teacher. The observing teacher and I would then discuss the effective strategies used in band when it was necessary to have the various instrument groups practice their parts independently without disrupting the progress of others. I recalled my experience playing trumpet after observing the band teacher in my new school. Differentiation requires strategies that are specific to task and considerate of the student expertise that can be used to enhance growth.
2. Teachers at my first school as a principal were practitioners of Question Answer Relationships (QAR) led by one of the best teachers I ever worked with. This was an effective strategy to bring most of students up to speed while working through text. However, when some students mastered this practice, or simply worked through a text effectively using other strategies, it was difficult to get teachers to allow those students to focus on other aspects of the reading, freeing them to go deeper into the content. When an instructional strategy is universally embraced by a teaching staff, the challenge is to provide the tools to help teachers expand their approaches for the benefit of individual students.
Helping students master individual content, in the case you mention, improving the playing of one’s instrument, is great for leading towards working with the band or orchestra.
I’m all for sometimes changing the goal. Many children might do well in one area but not another, but with today’s standards, they will fail, which is why the arts and other paths to success are so important.
And as you state so well, Paul, some students need to reach deeper into a subject and not stagnate.
Thank you!
All I know is…the students I taught hated just about everything academic. I remember a young man I was working with said, “Why should I try? I am going to fail anyway. And, I can’t draw.” I said, “Do you like models?” He loved them.
Well, you pick out a model you would like to build and I will show you how to think, follow key directions, and maybe learn something along the way. The young man said, “I can do that?”
“Yes, we will accomplish all the we need to in a different way.”
He went on to build the USS Arizona. And, if anyone has ever used model glue and tried to figure out all how the little parts go together, well, if you glue the wrong part, you know it.”
After he built his ship I said, “You know what would be cool is when we display your model, we have an informational piece to go along with it. Something that addresses the history behind the USS Arizona.”
He did his research and later presented me with a fantastic report. I read it and learned things I thought I knew.
He asked me so many different questions and as I recall wanted to read and study more about Pearl Harbor and whatnot. He was a kinesthetic learner, but through a “different way” became a very good student.
I believe we hit on many standards in history, English, and met our ESLRs (Expected Schoolwide Learning Results) just in, well, as we called it “The Charvet Way.” As always, just expressing what I lived with my students.
What an amazing story, Rick! Thank you!
Just had to share this young man’s story. He is impressive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E4PUbCuU3k
Thank you for sharing, Rick. I saw it this past weekend and it is interesting.
“It’s easy to find kindergarten through third-grade teachers with students lined up at desks or on the floor, where they’re teaching the same letter sounds or rules when some children may be reading fluently, and other children may need more assistance understanding what the teacher means.”
If you can provide specific examples of this, this would be a powerful point.
If you could share data on results from classrooms where direct, phonics-based instruction methods are emphasized, it would be more powerful still.
Since, as you wrote, “it’s easy to find” such examples, can you do so?
Genuinely curious.
Would you happen to know what scripted teaching involves? Some teachers on social media provide examples and are proud of this because they’ve been led to believe it works. I taught a scripted program for a while. Students reply in unison to what’s asked of them with the manual, which can easily be converted to an online program.
I ran across this today. It might help you to understand scripted teaching. https://northamptondaily-ma.newsmemory.com/?publink=0984296b0_134d179