Week+8+Reflective+Journal

After reading "Differentiated Instruction 101 by Clare Kilbane, I know that i need to do more to differentiate instruction. My textbook has dozens of ideas and I do use them every chance I get but I usually have all the kids do them. The problem that I have is that if I single out some students with what is perceived to be an easier assignment or one that is more fun, the other students challenge me and say that I am not being fair. I try to be discrete with the special ed students as not to single them out, I make every accommodation that I can, such has more time, allowing them to go to the resource room and I allow them to correct their papers giving them half credit for any corrections. This keeps them feeling successful.

After reading differentiating Instruction by Scott Willis and Larry Mann, I agree that we all need to do more of this while facing the difficult challenge of teaching all the content to all the students. In Ohio, all students take the same proficiency test, special ed students are expected to pass the same test as the regular ed students. So how does one vary the amount of content. Tomlinson says all students should be taught the same big ideas as their classmates, not given watered down content. I can see the value of compacting, I have done this a few times when teaching the Constitution by giving a pretest to see what they already knew. This year most of them knew very little so I was starting from scratch. It would be really nice to see how other middle school teachers who have over 140 students a day accomplish this.

I like the idea of choice boards. The challenge would be coming up with enough activities for each concept. I could start small. I have a lesson coming up on the Tinker case that is interactive on-line. The activity moves very quickly so I gave out a case study sheet for all students to prep some before doing it. The upper level kids can probably do it without the handout but in order not to appear playing favorits I gave it to all of them and allowed them to work together.

I really like the idea of having some sample units for my area of study. If none exist, I would be willing to create one if I had some release time to collaborate with others. In my district we have 40 minutes per month and they usually tell us what they want us to do, and the teachers I meet with teach world history not U.S. history so it is not much help. I would like to call Bob Bateman at Riverheads Elementary school and ask him what the course was that he took on differentiating instruction. It would be great to have this on-line.