The Best Resources On Differentiating Instruction My colleague Katie Hull-Sypnieski is leading a February 1st Education Week Webinar on differentiating instruction, and I would strongly encourage people to participate. Katie’s the best teacher I’ve ever seen…. In addition, Katie and I have co-authored a piece for Education Week Teacher on the topic that will be appearing there soon (it’s appeared: The Five By Five Approach To Differentiation Success), and an upcoming post in my blog there will be talking about it, too (that two part series has also appeared). Also, check out The Best “Fair Isn’t Equal” Visualizations. Given all that, a “The Best…” post was inevitable, and here it is. Here are my choices for The Best Resources On Differentiating Instruction: The Best Places To Get The “Same” Text Written For Different “Levels” Busting Myths about Differentiated Instruction is by Rick Wormeli. Reconcilable Differences? Deciding to Teach Them All is by Carol Ann Tomlinson. Here’s a slide from a Rick Wormeli presentation: Related January 11, 2015
Teaching the Gifted and Talented: 33 Websites Where You Can Find Good Resources I wish the Internet was available to me as a kid in elementary school. In New York City, where I attended kindergarten through sixth grade, they called the gifted and talented class "SP". I remember being put into a class to learn French, but very little else. I figured out how ahead I was only when I entered junior high school in New Jersey. The French language I had studied for three years allowed me to coast through French class for the next four years. Without anymore "SP" or "G and T" classes, I unfortunately developed a lazy attitude and eventually quit taking French in eleventh grade. LESSON PLANS41 Ways to Go Beyond the Book Report Edsitement- from the National Endowment for the Humanities Gifted and Talented Education Lesson Plans Helpful Sites for Gifted Students Lesson Plan Resources- from Davidson GiftedMrs.
Ways To Differentiate Instruction - Classroom Q&A With Larry Ferlazzo (This is the first post in a two-part series on differentiation) I posed this question last week: "What is the best advice you can give to a teacher about differentiating instruction?" I've shared my response in an Ed Week Teacher article that I've co-authored with my colleague, Katie Hull Sypnieski. It's titled "The Five By Five Approach To Differentiation Success." I'll limit my contribution here to sharing a useful link to The Best Resources On Differentiating Instruction. Experts in the field, though, have agreed to share their responses here, so today I'm pleased to publish answers from Carol Tomlinson and Rick Wormeli. Response From Carol Tomlinson Carol Tomlinson is an internationally-recognized leader and author in the field of differentiated instruction. My journey with differentiation began in my middle school classroom when it was quite clear that my one-size-fits-all approach to teaching was, in fact, not fitting many of my students. There were many more questions, of course.
Dare to Differentiate - 50 Terrific Teacher Tips! Great Lessons 3: Challenge Who is up for a challenge? Number 3 in the Great Lessons series:Great Lessons 1: Probing Great Lessons 2: Rigour These posts focus on the habits of great teaching; not one-off strategies but the things we do every day. 3. Challenge: Subtitle 1: The thrill of the chase.Subtitle 2: No struggle; no learningSubtitle 3: Beware the Buzz that drowns the Fuzz. How do you know that a lesson is a great lesson? But that isn’t it. The point is that Great Lessons, with or without the buzz factor, have something in common: Challenge. Perhaps the Holy Grail of challenge are lessons that lead to Flow, where the challenge levels are continually just ahead of the level of skills: Flow: Where challenge and skill levels are high. A brilliant example of this is skateboarding as I describe in this post: In practice, routine, habitual challenge manifests itself in myriad ways. LOW CHALLENGE: In my experience, the most common reason for lessons to be sub-standard is that there isn’t enough challenge: Like this:
Deliberately difficult – why it’s better to make learning harder The most fundamental goals of education are long-term goals. As teachers and educators, we want targeted knowledge and skills to be acquired in a way that makes them durable and flexible. More specifically, we want a student’s educational experience to produce a mental representation of the knowledge or skill in question that fosters long-term access to that knowledge and the ability to generalize—that is, to draw on that knowledge in situations that may differ on some dimensions from the exact educational context in which that knowledge was acquired.Robert A Bjork, 2002 Who could argue with this? Certainly not Ofsted who happily claim in their most recent Inspection Handbook,”The most important role of teaching is to promote learning and to raise pupils’ achievement.” Quite right. This is, after all, what teaching is fundamentally about. This statement inevitably begs two questions: If Ofsted judge T&L by observing lessons, what does progress in lessons look like? PerformanceNo …because…