His key message is that differentiated instruction which basically means teaching each student at his or her own level. Nice idea but like so many trends in education it is not practical, nor in my opinion even really desirable. Does each child in a classroom need a separate lesson plan? Do we really need to stress teachers out with unrealistic expectations.
Clearly our school division and school board herald this teaching method as the best since they have declared this extra PD day and insisted that all teachers attend to learn about it.
I have a number of issues with this method that I will address in posts over the next while.
However if you are interested in hearing his message first hand, please check out the link above.
Wow, Shauna. I'm really sorry I missed the boat in communicating this to you. I never said or indicated that differentiated instruction meant doing a separate lesson plan for each child. This is not even close to what we discussed in St. Paul. In fact, the St. Paul seminar wasn't on differentiated instruction at all. We spoke about issues and concepts with assessment and grading. As for the realistic or unrealistic nature of what we discussed, the strategies presented at the seminar are done by thousands of teachers across North America and around the world every day. This is reality. Please get well acquainted with differentiated practices before writing them off completely. You probably do many of them naturally: providing an extra example when the first one doesn't work with a student, re-teaching something that seems unclear, using proximity to quiet a talkative student, increasing the complexity of an assignment for a student who needs the extra challenge. All of these are clear examples of good, conscientious teaching, i.e. differentiated instruction. I'm not sure teachers would think these were so terrible or unrealistic. -- Rick Wormeli
ReplyDeleteInteresting discussion, Shauna and Rick. I have included my comments in my trustee blog. Shauna has provided a link to my blog on the upper-right corner of her page. Let's keep the conversation going! -- Rhonda Lafrance
ReplyDelete