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Differentiated Instruction Revisited (Released to the web December 14, 2008) Years ago, before the current Readington school district administration came to be, this website published an article on differentiated instruction. The thrust of the piece was to define the notion of differentiated instruction and to raise the level of awareness in parents so that they could recognize the still nascent forms of this teaching practice in a Readington classroom. Unfortunately, support of differentiated instruction faded out even before the last change of superintendent in 2006. In this 2008-2009 school year, the current administration has made noises about promoting differentiated instruction practices again, and it has included the subject in its "turnkey training" initiative, which has Readington teachers training their peers instead of bringing in outside experts as was often previous practice. While the administration has said very little publicly to define its own understanding of differentiated instruction, knowledgeable observers have reason for deep concern. As we will discuss below, there are structural barriers, either pre-existing or purposefully put in place by the current administration, which prevent differentiated instruction from being implemented in Readington. These barriers, no matter what else is done or said, will doom efforts to implement differentiated instruction as a working district philosophy. This begs the question: does our administration correctly understand what differentiated instruction is, or are they merely co-opting the term to suit their own notions and agenda? Let's briefly review the tenets of differentiated instruction and then look at the structural barriers to its implementation in Readington. In a few sentences, differentiated instruction can be defined as an educational philosophy which asks teachers to adapt, in real-time, the content, the activities, the culminating projects, and the environment in their classrooms to respond to student readiness, learning style and personal interests. It is not about individualized lessons for every student, nor is it about separating kids into low, middle and high achieving groups. It requires habitual, ongoing assessment by teachers to evaluate students for their learning strengths and weaknesses, their interests and background, and their progress in specific academic areas. It requires teachers to run an open classroom where spontaneous reorganization can easily be made to react to student needs. In short, differentiated instruction is about teachers who are consummate, independent professionals tuned-in to the students in their classroom like they were their own children and able to flexibly reshape their classroom at a moment's notice to respond to student needs and potential. (Review more with the links provided below.) The structural barriers against differentiated instruction which exist in Readington today, most of which have been erected by the current administration in the last two years, are significant. Consider these issues: Grouping. In 2007, this website published an article concerning the disturbing practice of ability grouping being implemented by the administration. Differentiated instruction assumes heterogeneous classrooms where teachers have the freedom to create ad-hoc clusters of students during lessons in order to capitalize on student ability, interests, learning styles, experience and other factors. The district ability-grouping structure, instead, aims to create more homogeneous classrooms and therefore creates a barrier for teachers. Guess what? A student who is put into into a "high" ability group for a subject may actually have specific subject-matter, cognitive, social or learning style issues which could be addressed by a teacher who could otherwise cluster him or her with similar students--even if those other students normally struggle with the same academic subject that this student does not. When students are grouped and separated by general performance in a narrow academic subject area, we put up a barrier for teachers who could otherwise respond in a nuanced manner to specific subject area weaknesses, or to the myriad of other factors that make up the "whole child" we should be educating. Pull-out Programs. The current district practice is to pull out certain students from their regular classrooms during parts of the school day in order to put them with specialized teachers who work in the "intervention" or "enrichment" or "gifted and talented" programs. This is a barrier to differentiated instruction because it prevents classroom teachers from making spontaneous adjustments to lessons and removes at any given time a population of students who would otherwise be available to be matched up with complimentary students during a lesson. More critically, pull-out programs take away both the responsibility and the possibility for the "regular" classroom teacher to be tuned-in to every student and to practice that habitual, ongoing, real-time assessment required of differentiated instruction. When other teachers are removing students from your classroom and when you are no longer accountable for those students, differentiation becomes a moot point for those pull-out students and the richness of a heterogeneous classroom is missing for all of the students. NWEA Testing. The NWEA testing suite, implemented by this current administration at great expense and effort, is used for multiple purposes, including the prediction of state test scores on NJ ASK, the selection of students for ability grouping, and as predictive guidance about individual students in detailed academic subject areas. The testing program is most toxic to differentiated instruction in the sense that it purports to predict with accuracy very specific academic subject area strengths and weaknesses of individual students, all based on just a handful of multiple choice questions in one short testing period. Teachers, who are provided with binders of information which break down to the nth degree what student scores are supposed to mean, are put in the position of blindly accepting this statistically predicted data given its pervasive onslaught. Differentiated instruction requires constant, habitual, ongoing assessment of students. Referencing a binder with lists of statistical interpretations of a few questions answered by a student months ago during one short period does not qualify as constant or ongoing. Such information is stagnant, it has questionable accuracy at best, and in its most perfect form only provides a snapshot of one short period of time days or weeks or months ago. As parents who have resisted the student placement recommendations resulting from NWEA testing can tell you, and as students who have blindly skipped through the multiple choice questions out of boredom can attest, the scores are not necessarily reliable for anything, much less as a substitute for real-time observation. Class Scheduling. Our current administration has instituted a different sort of scheduling than what previously existed in fourth and fifth grades, and made changes elsewhere too. Previously students in these and other, younger grades would spend the bulk of their day in a single classroom. This was compatible with differentiated instruction because it allowed teachers the time to better hone in on individual student needs and potential. As important, it allowed teachers the flexibility to alter the time and depth spent on subject areas during the course of a day in order to respond to students. One day an extra twenty minutes spent on a math or science lesson might be invaluable and well worth pushing off another subject for a little while. That is the very heart of differentiated instruction. The whole point is to meet the curriculum goals, but get there with a route that considers the strengths and weaknesses of the students who are actually there in the classroom. Arbitrary timeframes or highly scripted lessons based on some average student profile are not compatible with differentiated instruction. Yes, we want all of our students to end up in the same place, but they may (or may not) take the same road into town. By scheduling students in lower grades to move back and forth among different classrooms as they do in a middle school or high school model, we put up a structural barrier to the flexibility differentiated instruction requires. We take away the time teachers need to examine individual student needs during this critical developmental period. We also take away the overarching responsibility teachers had under the previous model. Student Voice and Self-Awareness. Differentiated instruction--and authentic learning in general--requires that students be allowed to develop their own voice, that they feel safe to make mistakes in their environment, and that they are mentored by educators. Essentially, students need to feel ownership of their learning and not feel pressured to conform to scripted expectations. Scripted learning meant as an academic "floor" invariably becomes a ceiling of minimum expectations. Successful differentiated instruction also depends on students developing metacognition--an awareness of how their own learning works and how to capitalize on their strengths. Existing barriers to these two strands of differentiated instruction have existed in Readington--especially in the middle school--for years. A previous article covered the cultural problem in the middle school, and it isn't difficult to connect the dots to see how that problem is a barrier to students developing their own voice or feeling safe in their learning environment. The self-awareness which comes as part of metacognition is too often overlooked in Readington, if nothing else due to a lack of concentration on the matter. When state test scores are held up as the ultimate arbiter of success and younger students are jumping from teacher to teacher and subject to subject willy-nilly, there simply isn't much opportunity for a student to be the captain of his own learning ship. Plus, students quickly recognize how they have been grouped (according to those "objective" test scores) just by which teacher pulls them out of class, or what textbook they carry down the hall, or what "enrichment" activity they don't have the good fortune in which to participate. They don't need to develop an awareness of their own learning abilities or to plan for the most effective means to reach their own, individual success because they've already been pigeon-holed by test scores, by teachers with no opportunity to differentiate--by a system of barriers which prevents them from experiencing classroom learning apart from their pre-determined fate. These structural barriers which exist in Readington--many of which were expressly implemented by the current administration--can do nothing but doom any serious attempt to implement differentiated instruction. Unfortunately, it would appear that the term "differentiated instruction" as used in Readington is destined to become a hollow shell with no meaning other than lip service. Unless we reject the ability grouping, the pull-out programs, the false assumptions about the value of testing, the disruptive scheduling, and similar harmful approaches, differentiated instruction will be just words. The irony is that Readington schools did come much closer to achieving success with differentiated instruction a decade ago, when the concept was still relatively unknown outside of educator circles. Those efforts faded with each administration since, and with the crowding out of authentic learning by the accountability movement over the same period. For more information:
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