The Story of the Question
My first grade students at Blankenburg hard at work.
This question arose as I found myself having trouble planning and teaching lessons that met the diverse needs of my class of 22 first graders at Blankenburg Elementary early this past Fall. Up until that point most of my experience working with children in classrooms had been in one-on-one or relatively homogeneous small-group settings. As both a special education assistant teacher and a City Year corps member I was most often working with just one child or with small groups made up of students at similar stages in their learning and development. In one semester’s worth of student teaching experience, on the other hand, I taught a number of whole class or small-group lessons that included students at widely varying stages in their learning and development. Doing so forced me to think about how to design and teach a lesson that reaches and challenges every student. I found this to be quite difficult, as often a lesson that speaks to the needs of one, or even many, students, isolates others by making the content either too difficult or too easy.
It seems to me that the key to meeting the needs of individual students lies in finding a balance between providing necessary scaffolding and consistently putting the cognitive workload on the students. This balance between rigor and accessibility is critical because the goal is to put kids in what I call their “challenge zone,”—or, as Vygotzky might say, their zone of proximal development (Bransford, Brown and Cocking, 2000). A student’s challenge zone lies in between his or her comfort zone and chaos/frustration zone, and is characterized by an appropriate level of difficulty. When a student is in his or her challenge zone, he or she is being pushed to explore new ideas and think critically while also being given the appropriate foundation upon which to grow. The difficulty, then, becomes figuring out how to find this balance for each student given the fact that each of the 25 students in a given classroom has a slightly different challenge zone.
Ken Osborne’s discussion of education and schooling sheds interesting light on this question of what it means to be a teacher (Osborne, 2008). Osborne makes a clear distinction between the two, characterizing schooling as a model for dumping information into students’ brains, and education as involving a more global and well-rounded, true understanding. He comes down firmly on the side of education over schooling.
To call for a truly liberal education is not to advocate stuffing the so-called great books down the throats of unwilling
students….Liberal education entails introducing students to the never-ending conversation about what it means to be human and to
live together with other human beings on a finite planet. No liberal education worthy of the name can content itself simply with the
transmission of information from teachers to students. It demands a pedagogy of dialogue and inquiry, of teaching with students
rather than at them (p.33).
Osborne’s words have resonated with me since I first read them in July. Having worked in classrooms in some capacity for the past 5 or 6 years I have always believed in education over schooling. However, it was not until I really started to focus on student learning, and then on lesson planning, that I began to understand the true implications of the meaning of Osborne’s ‘education.’ It seems fairly obvious and simple that learning is not one-size-fits-all; that a good teacher must know how to cater his or her instruction to different kinds of learners. Putting this understanding into practice, however, is an entirely different matter. To be a good teacher means to know your students well enough to identify their individual needs, and furthermore, to be able to meet those needs, regardless of how different they may be from everyone else’s in the class.
It seems to me that the key to meeting the needs of individual students lies in finding a balance between providing necessary scaffolding and consistently putting the cognitive workload on the students. This balance between rigor and accessibility is critical because the goal is to put kids in what I call their “challenge zone,”—or, as Vygotzky might say, their zone of proximal development (Bransford, Brown and Cocking, 2000). A student’s challenge zone lies in between his or her comfort zone and chaos/frustration zone, and is characterized by an appropriate level of difficulty. When a student is in his or her challenge zone, he or she is being pushed to explore new ideas and think critically while also being given the appropriate foundation upon which to grow. The difficulty, then, becomes figuring out how to find this balance for each student given the fact that each of the 25 students in a given classroom has a slightly different challenge zone.
Ken Osborne’s discussion of education and schooling sheds interesting light on this question of what it means to be a teacher (Osborne, 2008). Osborne makes a clear distinction between the two, characterizing schooling as a model for dumping information into students’ brains, and education as involving a more global and well-rounded, true understanding. He comes down firmly on the side of education over schooling.
To call for a truly liberal education is not to advocate stuffing the so-called great books down the throats of unwilling
students….Liberal education entails introducing students to the never-ending conversation about what it means to be human and to
live together with other human beings on a finite planet. No liberal education worthy of the name can content itself simply with the
transmission of information from teachers to students. It demands a pedagogy of dialogue and inquiry, of teaching with students
rather than at them (p.33).
Osborne’s words have resonated with me since I first read them in July. Having worked in classrooms in some capacity for the past 5 or 6 years I have always believed in education over schooling. However, it was not until I really started to focus on student learning, and then on lesson planning, that I began to understand the true implications of the meaning of Osborne’s ‘education.’ It seems fairly obvious and simple that learning is not one-size-fits-all; that a good teacher must know how to cater his or her instruction to different kinds of learners. Putting this understanding into practice, however, is an entirely different matter. To be a good teacher means to know your students well enough to identify their individual needs, and furthermore, to be able to meet those needs, regardless of how different they may be from everyone else’s in the class.
My second grade students at PAS.
In the second half of the year I have continued to examine this question while student teaching in a second grade classroom at the Penn Alexander School (PAS). I have seen a fantastic model of effective differentiation in my classroom mentor. Carol Ann Tomlinson outlines key principles of a differentiated classroom, many (or all) of which I see in Room 119. My classroom mentor has carefully constructed a classroom environment that allows for flexible grouping; her instruction is so closely tied to assessment that they are virtually inseparable; she adjusts content, process, and product in response to individual student need; finally, she understands, appreciates, and builds upon differences amongst our students (Tomlinson, 1999, p. 48).
Through my observations of both her instruction and the growth of our students, I have come to a new understanding of what it means to differentiate. I have learned that differentiation is not just a tool that should be used for the students who are considered particularly ‘low’ or ‘high.’ My classroom mentor has such a deep understanding of each individual student that she is able to differentiate for every single one of them. I have also learned that differentiation comes in many forms--it does not always look like a child getting a different worksheet, being able to use manipulatives, or getting extra time. Instead, that which is differentiated depends entirely on the student and his/her particular need, and may range from content to process to product to learning environment.
I am beginning to believe that the best teachers have mini IEPs worked out in their minds for all of their students; they know what accommodations even their most high-achieving students need. The students in our class feel happy and successful when they are in school, and I attribute that to my teacher’s ability to meet each of them where they are and work from there. I feel even more urgently now the need to figure out how to incorporate the practice of differentiation into my own teaching and instruction.
Through my observations of both her instruction and the growth of our students, I have come to a new understanding of what it means to differentiate. I have learned that differentiation is not just a tool that should be used for the students who are considered particularly ‘low’ or ‘high.’ My classroom mentor has such a deep understanding of each individual student that she is able to differentiate for every single one of them. I have also learned that differentiation comes in many forms--it does not always look like a child getting a different worksheet, being able to use manipulatives, or getting extra time. Instead, that which is differentiated depends entirely on the student and his/her particular need, and may range from content to process to product to learning environment.
I am beginning to believe that the best teachers have mini IEPs worked out in their minds for all of their students; they know what accommodations even their most high-achieving students need. The students in our class feel happy and successful when they are in school, and I attribute that to my teacher’s ability to meet each of them where they are and work from there. I feel even more urgently now the need to figure out how to incorporate the practice of differentiation into my own teaching and instruction.