Chapter 6: Rationale to Practice (Part three)

Use Small Group Instruction as a Regular Part of Instructional Cycles:
It is critical during a unit to find a way to teach to a learners need rather than only to an imaginary whole-class readiness. The principle of flexible grouping is central to the concept of differentiation.
Establish Peer Networks for Learning:
Helping students form study groups and providing structure and guidance for effective group study can greatly assist students who tend to feel alone academically and who bog down as they study because they have no network of academic peers of whom they can turn for clarification.
Promote Language Proficiency:
-For students learning a language, have items in a classroom labeled and pose schedules, routines, and other guides to which students might often refer.
-Use key vocabulary lists and concise definitions for unit of study to help students develop both language proficiency and focus on what matters most in a unit
-Post ideas written in complete sentences and complex questions to model both for learners
-Encourage students to express ideas on paper fluently and freely before reviewing form and structure. This can be more encouraging than cutting off ideas by premature attention to mechanics.
-Have students tell stories or summarize ideas while the teacher write what the student speaks. The student then uses the manuscript to practice reading, develop vocabulary, and review ideas.
-Use visual cues such as icons, pictures, and organizers as you present or explain information. Label the visuals with key vocabulary or phrases.
Use Weekend Study Buddies:
Teachers can develop canvas bags or shopping bags with materials designed to assist a student with particular learning needs. Contents of the study bag include familiar books for students to reread,flash cards for math, and audiotape of an explanation or story, a request for a letter the student might write to the teacher on a designated topic, etc.
Make Peer-Critique or Peer-Review Sessions a Regular Feature:
Ask students to bring a draft project to class a few days before the final version is due so that one or more peers can review the work to ensure that all necessary parts are present and that work is of high quality.
Cue and Coach Student Responses:
Students are both stretched and supported if teachers ask questions of varying complexity in class discussions.
Team with Resource Specialists:
Invite specialists to come into the classroom and get to know your learners, teach with you, and share strategies that can help students with whom they specialize.


Love this from the chapter:

Looking Back and Ahead:

1. Because I see your value, I will connect with you.
2. Because I see your uniqueness, I will come to you on your own terms and in accordance with your own needs.
3. Because teaching is part of connecting, I will honor you by teaching you what matters most in your life.

Chapter 6: Rationale to Practice (Part two)

There is so much information in this chapter with different strategies and ways to implements supported curriculum and instruction.

Strategies for Demanding and Supported Curriculum and Instruction

Use Tiered Approaches:

Many instructional approaches can be tiered for example: writing tasks, homework, learning centers, computer tasks, product assignments, learning contracts, and labs to name a few.

Incorporate Complex Instruction:

Challenging tasks relating to individual tasks that are necessary for increasingly independent work.

Use a Variety of Rubrics to Guide Quality:

The use of rubrics help teachers to teach about the various elements and how students can continue personal development in them, and to modify the rubrics as students develop in proficiencies over time.

Provide Learning Contracts at Appropriate Times:

Learning contracts allow teachers to focus students on work necessary for their own development and growth at a particular time. 

Aim High:

It is highly likely that students achieve much more when we present them with tasks that we genuinely believe to be beyond them, and then set out to ensure their success on those tasks.

Take a "No Excuses" Stance:

Accepting no excuses for work that is undone, incomplete or inferior can be tricky, but enabling students to succumb to excuses empowers the problem that already diminishes their vision of a possible future.

Become Computer Savvy:

Appropriately monitored, the internet provides endless resources that can link with students interests, experiences and primary languages. It enables students to build knowledge and skills in an array of subjects as long as the teacher assesses students needs and matches task and program to those varying needs.

Help Students Realize Success Is the Result of Effort:

The most successful students understand that their success results from their own effort.

Use the New American Lecture Format:

When the lecture is the most appropriate instructional strategy, be sure 1) that the lecture is well organized to clearly present key knowledge, understanding and skill 2) to provide students with a blank graphic organizer that follows the flow of the lecture 3) to guide students in completion of the organizer as the lecture progresses and 4) to stop often during the lecture to ask students to review ideas, make predictions about what will come next and make links with past knowledge or their lives.

Designate a "Keeper of the Book"

Helps students to listen for important ideas, and it is a great help to the teacher in dealing with absentees and a range of students who need support in grasping the flow of the class.

Try ThinkDots

An instructional strategy that can be of high interest to students as they work toward competence in knowledge, ideas, and skills. 

Directly Teach Strategies for Working Successfully with Text

-Surveying a chapter to determine its structure 

-Predicting what will be in a chapter based on the survey

-Asking questions as they read, based on their thinking and the structure of the chapter

-Locating hard and important words

-Finding main ideas

-Finding details that flesh out main ideas

-Linking ideas in the text to personal experience and prior knowledge 

-Summarizing important ideas

-Determining the structure of meaning or flow of ideas in the text material

-Monitoring ones attention, thinking, and understanding while reading

-Making adjustments in reading in response to self-monitoring

Use Think Alouds

 This strategy asks students to verbalize their thinking as they encounter and grapple with problems. Teachers can use think alouds as an assessment tool.

Chapter 6: Rationale to Practice (Part one)

This chapter hit me hard from the start after reading this statement in the very beginning:
"Because you matter, and because learning matters to you, I will do my best to:

• Make sure I teach and you learn what is genuinely of value in a subject;
• Pique your curiosity about what we explore, capture our interest, and help you see daily that learning is inherently satisfying;
• Call on you consistently to help you become more than you thought you could become through dedicated work; and
• Be your partner, coach, mentor and taskmaster all along your learning journey in this class."

It mentions that to do less than this would be to send negative messages to the student and the importance of the mission to teach and be taught. The chapter explores some ways that teachers make certain curriculum and instruction are important, focused, engaging, demanding, and scaffolded to maximize the likelihood that each student is well served in the classroom-both as human being and as a learner. 

Strategies for Important, Focused, Engaging Curriculum and Instruction

-Focus student products around significant problems and issues

-Use meaningful audiences

-Help students discover how ideas and skills are useful in the world

-Provide choices that ensure focus

-Look for fresh ways to present and explore ideas

The example shown in the chapter is "Mr. Johnson's Two-Tiered Inquiry on Buoyancy". His first version of the buoyancy inquiry below is more structured and guided than the second version. The second is set up to be the "fuzzier" in processes and goals. It also has some more complex requirements that extend the essential goals of the unit. 

How Differentiation Makes a Difference

This clip really portrays a great example about how differentiation can really turn around learning for students. This school started with low test scores that were devastating to teachers, and then the teachers and school leaders came together to figure out a plan on how to change instruction to make it effective and more helpful for students in their learning process. The change that they saw because of this change they made was wonderful and amazing. The students were becoming more and more successful and this differentiation instruction was making a big difference in each child's life. I love to see how big of a difference differentiation can make. It motivates me to implement this in my classroom.

Teacher Response to Student Needs

There are so many things from this chapter that I appreciated and enjoyed reading about about differentiation.

I really enjoyed what it had to say about teacher responses to student needs, and how it greatly effects the vision for the classroom. It states there are at LEAST five ways in which a teacher can respond to the students needs for affirmation, contribution, power, purpose, and challenge. The chapter goes into depth of five key teacher responses to students needs:

The Response of Invitation
To issue the invitation, the teacher's demeanor, words, and actions need to communicate the following...
-I respect who you are as well as who you can become
-I want to know you
-You are unique and valuable
-I believe in you
-I have time for you
-I learn when I listen to you
-This place is yours too
-We need you here

The Response of Opportunity
My goal as a teacher will be to make sure each student knows the opportunities that lay in front of them. I will communicate this by saying:
- I have important things for you to do here today
-The things I ask you to do are worthy things
-The things I ask you to do are often daunting
-The things I ask you to do open new possibilities for you
etc.

The Response of Investment
It's important to communicate to each student that they are important individually and collectively... I would effectively communicate this by saying:
-I work hard to make this place work for you
-I work to make this place reflect you
-I enjoy thinking about what we do here
-I love to find new paths of success
-It is my job to help you succeed

The Response of Persistence
Young students are most likely resist challenge than to embrace it. The best way to communicate that persistence is the best way to overcome these challenges is by saying:
-You're growing, but you're not finished growing.
-When one route doesn't work, there are others we can find.
-Let's figure out what works best.
etc.

The Response of Reflection
To help students understand that reflection is an important part of the learning process, it's important things like:
-I watch you and listen to you carefully and systematically
-I make sure to sue what I learn to help you learn better
-I try to see things through your eyes
-How is this partnership working?
-How can I make this better?

Curriculum and Instruction: Vehicle for Addressing Student Needs

My favorite part of this chapter was the topic of curriculum and instruction being the vehicle for differentiation. The different aspects that go into this are:

• Scaffolded
• Important
• Focused
• Engaging
• Demanding

The chapter focuses in on each one of these to accurately describe how these are the tools that actually drive curriculum and instruction as the vehicle.

Important: 

-What we study is essential to the structure of discipline

-What we study provides a roadmap toward expertise in a discipline

-What we study is essential to building student understanding

-What we study balances knowledge, understanding, and skill

Focused:

-Whatever we do is ambiguously aligned with the articulated and essential learning goals

-Whatever we do is designed to get us where we need to go

-Both the teacher and students know why we're doing what we're doing

-Both the teacher and students know how parts of their work contribute to a bigger picture of knowledge, understanding and skill

Engaging:

-Students most often find meaning in their work

-Students most often find the work intriguing 

-Students see themselves and their world in their work

-Students find the work provokes their curiosity

Demanding:

-The work is most often a bit beyond the reach of each learner

-Student growth is nonnegotiable 

-Standards for work and behavior are high

-Students are guided in working and thinking like professionals

Scaffolded:

-The teacher teaches for success 

-Criteria for success are clear to students

-Criteria for classroom operations and student behavior are clear to students 

-Varied materials support growth of a range of learners

-Varied avenues to learning support a variety of learners

-Small and large group instruction focuses on varied learners needs

Lessons in Differentiation

I really enjoyed this website about eight different lessons learned on differentiating instruction. Below I have outlined a few main points from each lesson that I thought were the most insightful and important.

Lesson 1
Differentiation does NOT take place over night. It is a work in progress. You can master one aspect of differentiation at a time. Once you feel comfortable with one part of differentiation, you can move on to another.

Lesson 2
Differentiation can be accomplished in many ways.
-Content: what the students learn
-Process: activities used to assist the learning
-Products: demonstration of learning

The methods you use should be based on the student's needs:
-Readiness: student's academic standing
-Learning profile: how the students learn
-Student's interest

Lesson 3
Learn EVERYTHING possible about your students. This will help immensely when trying to differentiate in the classroom.

Lesson 4
Pre-assess students knowledge to find out what the students know and don't know about the content and what they don't know. This will help to make and modify groups during instruction.

Lesson 5
BEGIN SMALL. Create activities where individual needs can be met with small activities. Allow students to choose

Lesson 6
Gradually add more difficult things to your differentiation instruction.

Lesson 7
Set expectations for yourself and for your students.

Lesson 8
READ up on differentiated instruction to keep updated and informed on how to differentiate effectively in the classroom.

http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/8-lessons-learned-differentiating-instruction