Fluff, The Magic Drag

"Differentiation"

Also known as Fluff, the Magic Drag, the education system's new pet.

Here is a quote concerning the definition of differentiation.

The model of differentiated instruction requires teachers to be flexible in their approach to teaching and adjusting the curriculum and presentation of information to learners rather than expecting students to modify themselves for the curriculum...Differentiated Instruction is a teaching theory based on the premise that instructional approaches should vary and be adapted in relation to individual and diverse students in classrooms.

~taken from: http://www.cast.org/publications/ncac/ncac_diffinstruc.html

What this means, practically speaking, is that teachers are required to consider such things as Multiple Intelligences, Bloom's Taxonomy, culture, race, gender, and ability and thus create several lesson plans for one subject.

Example: You're teaching the geography of India.

Option One: Students must correctly label the cities of India on a map and color it.

Option Two: Students must accurately calculate how long a trip from Madras to Calcutta would take - on a train, in the rain, with a goat and then a boat.

Option Three: Students must research the topography of India, build a model, bring it in to class and give a lecture on how environment affects culture and the socio-economic impact of globalization.

The students, of course, will tend to choose the option that fits their ability level best (cough, cough). The teacher then supervises this chaos. Then the 99% of the students finish their colored map and turn them in, while the 1% presents their mini-lecture and at the end of the day, those who did the map are equally as likely to get an 'A' as the one who spent ten hours creating a miniature of the country of India.

Now you may wonder why we would do this. What is the goal? Well, that is the question put forth in one the differentiation workshops I attended. Here was the situation presented:

A teacher of an English Writing class had a student who had difficulty writing. She asks how she should differentiate for this student. The answer is that she might consider allowing the student to dictate - either into a tape recorder on in person - what that student would have originally wrote. The writing teacher cautiously poses this timid question,

"I should do that in a writing class?"

The answer, given with a smile, a laugh and a shrug was,

"Differentiation!"

And then, the question put back to the writing teacher:

"I mean, what is the goal of your English classes?"

The writing teacher responds, "To make them feel good about English and to advance them to the next year."

Yes indeed. That was the correct answer. Followed up by reminding us that the most important aspect of the classroom was relationship between the teacher and the individual student and, once again, the classroom goal is to make the student "feel good about the subject."

Differentiation helps us meet that goal, so I think we may safely assume that the goal of differentiation is to make the student feel good as well.

From the above article, here are some more quotes.

"While no empirical validation of differentiated instruction as a package was found for this review, there are a generous number of testimonials and classroom examples, authors of several publications and Web sites [that] provide, while describing differentiated instruction. Tomlinson [the author of education books] reports individual cases of settings in which the full model of differentiation was very promising. Teachers using differentiation have written about improvements in their classrooms."

And...

"...Based on this review of the literature of differentiated instruction, the "package" itself is lacking empirical validation. There is an acknowledged and decided gap in the literature in this area and future research is warranted."

So there we have it. There is no research to support the effectiveness of differentiation (though we may question whether or not we care to have effective differentiation based on its goal) and yet teacher evaluations (the thing that keeps teachers employed and dictates their salary) include a section in which the teacher is required to show that he/she "differentiates" in his/her classroom.

And, to think, the only "teacher strikes" I know of are conflicts between union pay and schoolboard budgets...

I don't want anyone to ever suggest that it would be a good idea for me to be a teacher.

Here's another quote:

What does it profit a person to gain the whole world [make 28,000 a year] and lose their soul?

(For those interested, I did find one article opposing differentiation. Here it is.)

posted by Headless-in-GR @ 2/21/2006 11:32:00 AM