Differentiation doesn't work?

In a couple of Facebook groups I have seen the following article and discussion about it:

"Differentiation doesn't work"

I have to say that I have a huge problem with what this article is saying and there were other teachers commenting along the same lines so I thought I'd give a different view.

A theme that cropped up in more than one of the discussions was about how it worked in classes with high needs or gifted and talented students where differentiation was expressed as an appropriate tool to ensure that all students were able to learn.  This is basically confusing differentiation with individual learning plans.  Individual learning plans are made for students with different capabilities and learning goals that address their specific learning needs.  They are each working on different academic content.

Differentiation is where students work on the same academic content.

"Simply stated, differentiation is modified instruction that helps students with diverse academic needs and learning styles master the same challenging academic content."

From "A Teacher's Guide to Differentiating Instruction".

Differentiation is about making sure each child gets what they need but it's not all about different academic levels as some were thinking during the Facebook discussions. It is about different learning styles and is achieved by not assuming each student will benefit equally from the same learning activities.

As an example I was in a spec dev class and we were learning about rain in weather cycles; it rains, the water goes into creeks and into rivers and back into the ocean, evaporating along it's journey to form new clouds to bring the rain again. One student stared off into space for a little bit and then asked out of the blue if the water from rain that goes down the drain in the street, the water from the bath and the water from the toilet all went into the same drain.

What this allows us to learn as a teacher is to understand how our students are thinking. We can see how they each approach the same learning and the different strategies they employ to understand the lesson being delivered. This student was understanding the world from how one thing was connected to another. Another was learning by copying the pictures of rain and where it went to create a visual reference in their mind. Another was repeating each step verbally and learning through auditory means.

In classrooms with high learning needs students frequently have individual learning plans and so on but that doesn't mean that there aren't things they can all work on together and in this case differentiation is a vital tool.  The students as a whole are unable to grasp the content through a specific learning style because of their ranging cognitive abilities as well as other issues. You can't just give the same activity to each student, you have to target their individual learning abilities.

Once you understand that student A needs to make connections, student B needs visual activities and student C needs aural then differentiating for these students becomes relatively easy, it can just be labour intensive on occasion as you seek out appropriate activities and support the students through these activities. Once you've got the activities, however, you've got them and in a digital age they can all be filed away on something as small as a flash drive instead of needing file cabinet after file cabnet like was necessary in the past.

When applied properly differentiation does not hamper learning, it enables it by providing each student with appropriate avenues for them to understand the same content in a personally understandable and meaningful way.

You still need to have some activities that can be differentiated for the whole class so it can feel like a class instead of an individual collection of students.  For inclusion purposes you're all doing the same thing just at different academic or physical ability levels. Everyone is doing spelling differentiated with level appropriate words for example. Some are using pencils and paper and working on letter formation and so on while others are using counters. fridge magnets or dictating to ES staff because they have motor skill issues that prevent them from being able to write. Some are using a combination because they need the process broken down for them in order for it to be achievable (they'll work out the spelling with counters then use one to one copying from the counters to paper so they can focus on writing alone for example).

Differentiation is an incredibly powerful learning and social tool and articles like the one that got me thinking about all of this simply doesn't do it justice.

So when it comes to statements like these

"In every case, differentiated instruction seemed to complicate teachers' work, requiring them to procure and assemble multiple sets of materials, … and it dumbed down instruction"

we can understand one of the reasons why special development classrooms have quite small class sizes and an appropriate number of ES staff. Differentiation can be a very time consuming to achieve on occasion but it gets easier and faster over time as you fill up your flash drive with the stuff you need to make it happen.

What I learnt in Spec Dev has allowed me to differentiate far more easily in mainstream classrooms. It's led me to a far deeper understanding of what differentiation is actually supposed to be doing in our classrooms and how to achieve it with the minimal possible effort.


So while differentiation may be "a promise unfulfilled, a boondoggle of massive proportions" as practiced by those observed in the article, it doesn't mean that's how it needs to be and the couple of intervening years really makes a difference. It's considered "somewhat" or "very" difficult to implement by 83 percent of teachers.

The question I'd like you all to ask yourselves is this one:  "Well... What are the other 17% doing?" because they are the ones finding it easy.  What do they know and do differently?  That is the information for us to learn from which is much more productive than than letting ourselves be convinced that it doesn't work or is too much work.

My piece of advice is that we live in a day and age where instructional activities are easy to access and we don't need to create everything ourselves. The internet offers an avenue to digital tools, hands on activities and pen and paper exercises at an unprecedented level of accessibility.  We just don't need to reinvent the wheel anymore and it gets easier and easier to deploy quality differentiation into our classrooms with each passing year.

It's a lot easier now than it was even 5 years ago (the latest date in the first article is 2011 for studies with the earliest being fron 2008). You can get online and buy rubrics very cheaply that have pre-generated differentiation built in and all the resources right there simply to deploy into classrooms. Not just for high needs students but also extended activities for gifted and talented learners as well.

Differentiation is just not the huge effort it has been in the past for the average classroom teacher. With the explosion of the online sharing of resources through Teachers Pay Teachers and similar sites a market has been generated for standalone lessons where in the past it used to be primarily learning systems that we were able to buy. Australian Governments and education systems are even coming on board with websites of their own, such as Scootle, offering pre-generated content with differentiated activities included.


So a bit of a warning. The info the original article is based on is from an "educational consultant" and you can often put those in the same class the article puts uni lecturers into (not all uni lecturers are in that boat either). They are often a couple years behind the times and also rely on studies that in turn rely on "what the majority do".

If the majority struggle with it and find it hard then that's how it must be.  Suddenly "it's bad". They don't ask "why do the 17% find it easy".  As teachers that sort of stuff isn't what we need. What we need is the educationalists seeking best practice examples and putting that out there instead. Look for those, read them intently so we can decide for ourselves whether it's something we should or can implement in our classrooms.

I recently ran across this video too;

"Systems are not the solution, people are".  We are Teachers, the people who educate the students. They are our classrooms. They are our students. No-one knows our capabilities and theirs better than we do.  Don't discount differentiation because others struggle with it.  Don't discount your own ability as a Teacher to use it effectively.  Invest in it.  Get enthusiastic about it.  Learn about it.  Get creative, use your lateral thinking skills and find the most efficient ways to implement it.

Once you achieve a state where you want differentiation in your classrooms, or any other strategy you can name, and are genuinely invested in it you'll learn about it because you want to and it becomes  a joy, not a worry.  It becomes easy, not a struggle.

Your faith in your own abilities is one of the most important learning tools you will ever have on the road to becoming a great teacher.  Just don't listen to people telling you that you just aren't good enough by telling you what's too hard for you, pay attention to the 17% who caan tell you how to do it instead and learn what they have to offer.

Regards,

Mel.

Visual Literacy with Cookie Monster.

Just a quick one today!  I'm working on a project for hands-on/visual literacy and I just thought I'd drop this in...

Watch Cookie Monster on YouTube!

As a child I was totally captivated by Cookie Monster spelling a single word.... 

Word groups highlighted in a different colour, the motion of letters coming together into a word and all overlayed by phonics and comedy. Of course it's done by apps all the time these days but it's great to look back at the "olden days" on occasion.

It's great being a teacher sometimes, I can sit on the couch and watch old sesame street re-runs or DVDs and nobody looks at me funny!

Mel.

What is it that collegial groups of excellence actually do?

I've got things on the go that are involving email conversations with a bunch of people with concepts flying left and right.  I'm learning some REALLY interesting stuff but one area I'm kind of the expert of the group.  Collegial CRTs groups are popping up and because I coordinate a very successful one, the Wodonga CRT Support Network, I'm getting asked exactly why the Wodonga network works so well when other collegial groups in education often struggle a bit.

One of these people is a relatively young principal in a school of unusual size for someone of his experience.  He has excellent administrative skills and his school runs like clockwork and is very well structured in terms of budgets and programs.  He has a little bit of a problem with morale though and he's struggling to come to grips with how to improve this for his staff.  He knows that improving collegiality is the key and he knows about collegiality in a textbook sense very well. 

I have the weird feeling that I was set up.  The principal wasn't in the conversation, he was brought in by someone else and told "Talk to Mel, she knows her stuff".

He has done a lot of reading and knows about all of the technical factors of high quality collegial practice such as equity, reliability, inclusion, accountability and so on but he's struggling to understand exactly what all of that is supposed to be doing and how it's supposed to be assembled to help with the particular issues he's having.  He's come to the understanding that he has the knowledge of what to apply but lacks the wisdom of how to apply it.

He asked me point blank "What is it that a high quality collegial group actually does?"  It stumped me for two days and it was awesome!  I know precisely what they do from the inside of course and I can build new or improve existing collegial groups by looking at them and implementing what needs to be implemented.  But....  I was the teacher of teachers now and that's not what I'm used to.  When my husband and I created the Wodonga Network it was about creating a self sustaining collegial environment.  We set the framework up front with a relatively small group and as new members enter they now learn about high quality collegial practice simply by being put into a group already practicing it.  We use high quality collegial practice to teach about high quality collegial practice and I don't really have to teach it anymore, it just sort of happens all by itself. 

Teaching someone else how to understand it from outside of that framework?  That's really really different....  How do I help someone else understand how to do it?  Usually I use the concept of community and it's generally enough to get small points across but when you're in a top down position of delivering complete understanding you sort of end up needing to explain community too.  Of course that's anthropologist territory and what I have is a Bachelor of Education - Early Childhood so no help there...

Oddly enough, the answer came from science. 

Of course this video drew my attention because looking at punishment Vs reward is a "teachery thing".  The video has a specific message to deliver about understanding the feedback we give and how sometimes our observations on the effectiveness of the feedback we give can be incorrect simply because we live in a random world.  It's the random world part right at the end that sort of brought me to a lightbulb moment.

What successful collegial groups do is eliminate luck from our professional universe.  Can you imagine having a math problem and asking random strangers on the street for advice?  How many would you have to ask at random until you got lucky and found one who both had the answer you were looking for and willing to spend the time to explain it to you?

Collegial groups create an ordered world for us that gives us a security blanket against the unknown.  Our collegial group gives us a framework where we can go and seek answers because we interact we also learn who is able to give us the advice we need and will be aligned with who we want to be as teachers.  We can target our search and save ourselves a whole lot of time and effort.

Do we need advice on how to structure our lessons?  Do we need advice on how to deliver those lessons more effectively in the classroom?  Do we need advice on how to best support a particular student with particular issues?  Do we need professional advice on the rules and regulations of teaching?  Are we simply getting a little snowed under and need a bit of moral support?

A collegial group gives a reliable way to get each and every one of these things with luck playing as small of a part in the process as possible.

How we differ as CRTs is that Collegiality is far less common for us than other teachers.  The way we work often creates a diverse professional network, rather than a collegial group, where it can be a matter of luck on which school we are working in today is the same school where who we want to ask also works in.  Collegial CRT groups are certainly out there though and joining or starting one is a really good idea.

What many tend to rely on however is online groups such as those created on Facebook.  These don't immerse us in collegiality in the same way as in-person groups do but they still offer a place where we can go to ask questions and get answers.

This still leaves us with a little bit of a hole in that it doesn't really provide an immersive experience to learn high quality collegial practice from in it's deeper implications with Teaching.  So, for those without in-person collegial networks we are about to add to our CRT booklet with the basics of how high quality collegial practice works.

Some recent conversations with educationalists and some feedback from CRTs on our "Desirable CRT" booklet have shown us that perhaps adding to the booklet is a good idea.  As before we try not to concentrate too much on "common knowledge" types of things but touch on both creating a Network and how to participate in them to a high standard of practice.  Also just as last time we are seeking some feedback about how we have approached it and are looking for input from CRTs at various career stages as to how useful it is to you at that stage.



Obviously as a draft there's missing bits and there's some holes in the information that need plugging by adding a page or two and we'd like your input on what other topics we should include as much as anything else!

Feedback and further input can be emailed to wodongacrt@vit.vic.edu.au and your support is greatly appreciated!

Regards,

Mel.

Merry Christmas!

The shopping is done and the presents are wrapped.  The finishing touches are being made to the deserts ready for their big day!  Another year is over and another one is just about to begin.  Please travel safely and share a smile and hug with those around you.  Remember to put your feet up and relax while reminiscing about the year that has been.  

From our family to yours, we hope you have the safest, most enjoyable of holidays and look forward to seeing you all next year.

Regards, 

Mel, Paul and family

What's on the feed? Veritasium - "this will revolutionise education".

This week comes something for you Science teachers, or science buffs, out there.  A video from Veritasium, a YouTube channel dealing with understanding our universe.

About Veritasium

As will become apparent over time, my feeds are rather eclectic.  While I don't teach science as a general rule I do subscribe to a few science oriented places on the internet because the background information helps me when intelligent questions from students come out of left field.  This channel is very easy to watch (or listen to as I cook dinner and so on) and they obviously have done their research and have the backing to make effective and engaging videos.

This week's Veritasium Video;  "This will revolutionize education".

Well, I've been busy so it's actually last week's Veritasium video...  The week before maybe?  The end of the year is so close I can taste it, the lines are blurring.

This one came up on a couple of my feeds this week and struck a chord because it's something I've tried to blog about for quite a while now using exactly the same examples I was going to use. It's never seemed to come out right so I've never posted it and of course I have a bit of a different point to make overall.

Part of the post I had in mind (which this video essentially does for me) was that instead of looking at what was changing in education I wanted to take a look at the constants.  The parts of Teaching which haven't changed in many many years for teachers in spite of the changing mediums we have had access to in order to deliver information.

So to bring in a relatively new happening, we now have websites available to us that give us access to anything up to full units, semesters or years of planning for the price of relatively few dollars.  Websites like Teacher's pay Teachers, Teacher's Marketplace and even Scootle are able to remove a large portion of necessity of spending so much time for planning.

Which means that full time teachers are beginning to follow through on other people's planning.  That should sound very familiar to us CRTs because that's exactly what we do...  It forms the core of our job descriptions.

I think it's worthwhile observing how the modern age is starting to blur the lines between CRTs and other brands of teachers.  As the possibilities open up because of how the digital age is able to transmit information it's moving past the search for worksheets and other core resources and evolving to a point where the job of the CRT is going to become more normal and to some extent become more normal in the average classroom.

As CRTs though, we all inherently understand after a while that following through on someone else's lesson plan isn't as easy as it seems when observed from the outside.  When you write a lesson plan you have an inherently deep understanding of it because you know exactly what you expect the students to get out of it in intricate detail.  When you're delivering someone else's though, it can be a mad scramble of on-the-fly thinking to try and understand these deeper issues and do a good job.  You also might not have the solid knowledge surrounding the topic either, meaning if the students ask a question "out of the blue" you might not have the answer where whoever wrote the lesson probably has a higher knowledge of the general information surrounding it.  They have, after all, selected the focus of the lesson based on things they are personally knowledgeable about.

It will be interesting to see whether initiatives such as these sites that supply lesson, unit and full-year plans continue to grow or sort of plateau at some point as the issues we deal with every day become more common knowledge in mainstream teaching.

And, of course, whether it will result in a little more respect for the difficulty of what it is that CRTs do and the skills they are required to accrue in order to do it well.

Regards,

Mel.

Looking for opportunities to increase your chances of full time work.

Often I just concentrate on CRT work but every now and then I branch out a little into related topics.  I thought that since many CRTs wish to move on to full time work I'd have a little look at what I've done in my current contract position that will feed into improving how I can perform in interviews.  Now it must be mentioned that this isn't something I set out to do, it was a collision of ideas and things I do in education outside of the classroom that just led to a "light-bulb moment".

As we know there's key selection criteria and interview questions relating to the implementation of whole-school initiatives.

This isn't something that's easy for CRTs to show experience in and therefore discuss in a personal and enthusiastic way in interviews.  Especially when they only work as a "technical CRT" in daily hire work instead of also taking on contract work or having been full-time in the past.  Still... when the opportunity presents itself...

How did it all come about?

So I've had a position in a special development school for two terms as an Art teacher.  I'm not art trained but I was able to get the position, mostly because the school had decided to cancel art as they found it very difficult to hold onto art teachers.  It was only two terms and then definitely over and all that was really expected of the person who got the job was to ride it out to the end of the year when art would be replaced with another specialist area.  This made it a little uninviting to art specialists and I ended up not having to compete against them for the position.

One of the advantages of specialist positions like this is that virtually the whole school comes through your door.  It's something I didn't really think about at the time but it was kind of the first piece of the puzzle.

A couple of the students were particularly difficult to engage in anything but preferred activities (it is a special development school and these things happen).  One in particular just wanted a big sheet of paper, some paint and a roller every class and the other only wanted a big sheet of paper, some paint and brushes to make dots with and things to stamp with.  Give either student anything else to do and you just couldn't keep them at their table for more than 5 minutes.  I was looking for a gateway to help these students move beyond this and broaden their horizons a little.

In the end I chose to go with giving them an opportunity to experience purpose in what they were doing.  What I began doing is using the big sheets they were making, which they were never interested in keeping (though I did make sure a couple were saved), and using them as resources in other projects for their class.  I began by explaining to them that today they were making coloured sheets that other students would cut up to use in their work.  I was just trying to prepare them so they didn't get upset if they saw their work being "destroyed" but something fantastic happened.

Both students became a little more conscientious about how they put colours on the page.  Not always of course, but sometimes.  Where normally they would fill a page and just want another every time, I'd now occasionally catch them looking at a full page and purposefully changing it.  It's a small win to be sure but a win never the less.

Then there's something a lot of art teachers end up doing, specialty cards.  In this case it was Christmas cards.  Other specialty cards had been done in class but for christmas cards I was asked to do them in art by a number of teachers.  One of my teaching ethics is that inclusion is a very big deal for me and I had two students who weren't going to be making Christmas cards because it involved more than a roller or stamping.  So I went to the fallback position of using their sheets to use as resources to use in making cards.

I had them use all greens or all browns on a sheet for example and these were used to cut into shapes to make Christmas trees rather than using store-bought coloured paper.  By the end of the project each of these students also had a couple of cards that, while they didn't make them, they had contributed to.  Both were incredibly proud of these cards and, I must admit, they had a right to be.

I have to admit that the cards turned out looking absolutely fantastic.  They by far exceeded the expectations of everyone involved including myself and the ES staff who came with the students to the room.  The students all had very good reason to feel a sense of accomplishment from what they had produced.

Then there was a chance comment and a flashback.  As many are aware, I am a Teacher but I also work for the Victorian Curriculum Assessment Authority delivering PD for the MoneySmart Teaching program.  One of the ES staff said "wow, those are good enough to sell" and visions of one of the MoneySmart modules we like to talk about in the presentations filled my head.  It's a particularly successful module on fundraising that has been successfully implemented right down to preps.  Of course I was only sort of thinking pie in the sky and didn't really expect it to happen.

Over the course of a week however more and more people started saying "wow, we could/should sell these".  So, it ended up with me in the Prins office discussing the possibility and, well, the school had it's concert the other night and we sold 169 of them.  There's also a shoebox in the office that has to be periodically refreshed as teachers and parents buy them 10 at a time.

The cards!
 
Most of these cards are 100% the work of students and are also a collective effort.  Students of varying ability levels undertook different tasks like the example above.  The two students made paper resources to be used in the cards.  We used punches from Officeworks for some of the shapes and this was often done by students with motor skill issues.  High needs students for example, who may be wheelchair bound and have very limited movement will have had ES staff help them get the paper in the stamper for them to punch.  They also used stampers to put "Merry Christmas from Belvoir Special School" on the back of every card.  There was something for everyone to do in order to be included in the project.

Stars using stock created by the roller student.

More stars - hand cut from stock made using coloured

bubble blowing on white paper.

Painted Doilies cut into trees using sequins and stars as ornaments.

Presents using scissor-cut squares and hand-tied bows.

 Our "Made by Belvoir Students" sticker.

The benefit for my interviews.

Of course now I can discuss the implementation of whole school programs from a personal perspective and display experience at having done it.  I have pictures of the finished results and when it's all over I'll have monetary facts and figures.  That's not really all it will do for me though.

This sort of came about by accident and the story above shows how I use reflective practice in my classrooms.  It involves two challenging students who need heavy differentiation or individual programs but by reflecting on the situation and being a little inventive I was able to begin to implement a class structure that offered them an avenue to be included in what the class was doing rather just being off at a table on their own doing their own thing.

It also shows how I am able to utilise the flexible and open-to-change nature that every CRT must learn to have in a classroom setting for the benefit of students.  I didn't set out to create a fund raising activity but by being open to change and paying attention to possibilities as they presented themselves I was able to capitalise on the situation and offer better outcomes for my students without compromising on the curriculum.

I also made a mistake.  I only made Christmas cards...  Nothing with just "happy holidays" on them or reasonably blank for families to create their own holiday message for the cover...  Christmas is a big thing in my family and I made the mistake of thinking personally instead of professionally.  I found myself making an apology or two and accepting responsibility for my insensitivity to the needs of their family and their ability to equally enjoy the product of the students of the school.  This, of course, allows me to show how I am fully capable of using mistakes as learning experiences and also capable of dealing with, and being sensitive to, parents of students when issues arise.

It also allows me to shoe-horn in the fact that I also work for the VCAA as a presenter of professional development for the MoneySmart Teaching program.  More importantly it's not saying "I have this feather in my cap", instead it's showing how that experience is used in my reflective practice as a benefit to my classroom teaching.

So what am I saying here?

Of course I ended up being able to do this through an unpredictable chain of events that isn't likely to present itself to a significant number of CRTs.  The story is not going to be directly applicable to very many CRTs at all, if any.  The idea behind it though is a solid one and will be of benefit to many of us.

Sometimes, for those of us looking to move on to contract of full-time work, we want to apply for a position or run into an interview question that stumps us.  We can, of course, then go on to study up on those areas so we are able to discuss them in a technical capacity. 

We can also choose positions that are in the right time of year for us to be immersed in the full effect of assessment and performance.  We can choose a contract in a school where we know we will be involved in class presentations.  We can choose contracts in schools that we know will be having a play, concert or sports carnival while we are there and help with gaining experience of these things.  Which contracts we get can have a large effect on our interview performance of the future.  By choosing to apply for contracts that offer experiences that are not normally available to those engaged in daily CRT or up to 30-day block work we can expand our experiences.  We can begin to address those KSC or questions that used to stump us from more than a technical perspective.
 
This allows us to use contract work as a gateway to a very wide range of experiences if we choose wisely and keep an eye out for opportunities to present themselves.  We can expose ourselves to a wide variety of experiences that, after some reflection, allow us to move beyond the technical and show practical and personal examples of who we are as Teachers to address those KSCs we previously struggled with and to excel when those left-field questions get fired at us in interviews.

A bit late I know but happy job hunting everyone!

Regards,

Mel.

Sometimes it pays to be a little crazy...

The other day we were heading down to practice for the end of year school concert and I had been recruited to help walk a couple of classes to the venue.  We were using the Catholic College hall which is about a 15 minute walk, it used to be right across the road but we moved into a new school this year.  Wearing my reindeer antler headband I walked into the first classroom that was in the group I was with; the students are used to me having something "Christmasy" on by now and are getting into the Christmas mood.

One of the students had one of those small self-adhesive bows that you stick onto presents to "special them up" but the self-adhesive backing was gone.  Red of course.  He came running up to me "Mel, Mel, Mel!  You should use this as your nose, then you could be Rudolph!" and foisted it on me.  Of course we all had a good laugh as I held it over my nose.

The class' teacher waited for everything to subside and sidled up to me, "Mel, we have a bit of a problem".  Uh oh.  4 out of the 6 students in her class just didn't want to go (not an uncommon problem in special development and one that is not necessarily easy to overcome).

So I stepped forward and said "I'll make you guys a deal.  If you all come down to practice, I will wear the Rudolph nose all of the way there".

"Yeah right, Mel" came from the class, bracketed with giggles and guffaws.

I smiled with them and then went through to collect the other class we were going with.  When I re-emerged it was with the Rudolph nose firmly in place.  One quick clap to draw attention and I said "Right, Let's Go!".  After a few looks of disbelief and a few more giggles, all 6 got up and joined us, ready for the walk.  Problem solved.

As soon as their backs were turned the classroom teacher looked at me gratefully, holding her clasped hands under her chin mouthing "Thank you so much!"

What's odd is no-one snapped any embarrassing photos with their phone on the way...

You know what?  I love my job.

Regards,

Mel.