Book Summary: Differentiation

Differentiation--From Planning to Practice Grades 6-12 (Rick Wormeli, Stenhouse 2007)

Chapter 1 Developing a Common Frame of Reference
Wormeli begins by describing several of the ways that teachers differentiate, consciously or unconsciously, as they adapt to meet their students' needs on a daily basis.  A student asks for help, and we help him.  A student doesn't seem to understand an explanation, and we try it again in another way for her.  A student had a family emergency yesterday, and we excuse or postpone a due date.  A student can't seem to sit still, and we give him a classroom task to do that gets him out of his seat.  Teachers acknowledge that this flexibility with students is essential, but get bogged down in the practicalities of differentiating to 120 - 180 students each day.  The book is about how to increase our capacity to meet students' needs without exhausting our supply of personal energy.

I appreciated a list of questions that Wormeli offers that get at whether we have a "professional and responsive mindset" which is the basis for differentiation.

1. Are we willing to teach in whatever way is necessary for students to learn best, even if the approach doesn't match our own preferences?
2. Do we have the courage to do what works, not just what's easier?
3. Do we actively seek to understand our students' knowledge, skills, and talents so we can provide an appropriate match for their learning needs?  And once we discover their individual strengths and weaknesses, do we actually adapt our instruction to respond to their needs?
4. Do we continually build a large and diverse repertoire of instructional strategies so we have more than one way to teach?
5. Do we organize our classroom for students' learning or for our teaching?
6. Do we keep up-to-date on the latest research about learning, students' developmental growth, and our content specialty areas?
7. Do we ceaselessly self-analyze and reflect on our lessons--including our assessments--searching for ways to improve?
8. Are we open to critique?
9. Do we push students to become their own education advocates and give them tools to do so?
10. Do we regularly close the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it?

When I reflect on my own teaching over the past several years I find that I can answer yes to a few of these questions and no to others.  #1 and 2:  yes, but often it seemed that as the school year went along, my teaching became less creative, reverting back to a "show and tell, then they practice" model.  #3:  not so much, I think I became well aware of my students' strengths and weaknesses, but adapting to them was always a struggle especially when giving them what they needed meant math at an elementary level--how do you fit that in while still plowing through the required content at a pace that keeps the whole class together?  #4:  yes, but again I always seemed to get less creative as the year went on (was I busier?  overwhelmed with grading papers?  losing energy?).  #5:  I liked my tables arrangement which facilitated partners and group work, but I wish I'd been better at developing cooperative skills in my students.  #6:  yes.  #7:  no.  #8:  yes. #9:  no.  #10:  "regularly?"  um, probably no.

Considering all of the areas in which I have room to improve with respect to being a more responsive teacher, I'm actually looking forward to the strategies in our PLA/Transformation Plan.  The data teams process should support teachers toward questions #1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8.  An instructional coach and a principal who takes a more hands-on role during supervision will help too.  Even the threatening new performance evaluation tool will help teachers focus on some key elements related to effective instruction.  Maybe with these supports, question #10 will be able to be answered yes by every teacher at BHS.

Chapter 2 A Walk-Through of a Differentiated Lesson

Wormeli breaks down the planning process for differentiation into three phases:

• Steps to take before designing the learning experiences.
• Steps to take while designing and implementing the learning experiences.
• Steps to take after providing the learning experiences.

Then he identifies discrete steps within each phase and explains these steps in detail.

Before:

1. Identify your essential understandings, questions, benchmarks, objectives, skills, standards, and learner outcomes.
2. Identify those students who have special needs, and start thinking about how you will adapt your instruction to ensure they can learn and achieve.
3. Design formative and summative assessments.
4. Design and deliver preassessments based on summative assessments and identified objectives.
5. Adjust assessments and objectives based on further thinking while designing assessments.

At BHS we already do or will do these steps.  For instance, in 2012 - 2013 we have re-installed summative assessments into our instructional program via the interim comprehensive exams, and teachers will be asked to use preassessments for each learning goal.

While:

1. Design the learning experiences for students based on the information gathered from those preassessments; your knowledge of your students; and your expertise with the curriculum, cognitive theory, and students at this stage of human development.
2. Run a mental tape of each step in the lesson sequence to make sure that the process makes sense for your diverse group of students and will help the lesson run smoothly.
3. Review your plans with a colleague.
4. Obtain/create materials needed for the lesson.
5. Conduct the lesson.
6. Adjust formative and summative assessments and objectives as necessary based on observations and data collected while teaching the lessons.

After:

1. With students, evaluate the lesson's success.  What evidence do you have that students grasped the important concepts and skills?  What worked and what didn't, and why?
2. Record advice about possible changes to make when you repeat this lesson in future years.

I think that it is within these two phases that teachers will experiences the greatest changes (and possibly stress) from our Transformation Plan.  We will be asked to use a building-wide weekly lesson planning form that has fields for identifying different strategies for different students and to continually modify this planning form as the week moves along.  Afterward, there's a field to reflect on the success of the planning and implementation.  We've never had to do this before!  Yes, we've planned and modified and reflected, but never to this extent.  We'll also be evaluated on our progress toward doing all of this to a highly effective standard.  

Wormeli devotes the remainder of the chapter to explaining each step in these phases and illustrates with an example lesson about explorers from a middle school social studies class.  It is interesting to see how the differentiated mini-unit about the explorers develops as he progresses through the steps.  In this summary I'm going to address just two items from this lengthy explanation.  First, we must remember that differentiated instruction is founded on a mindset that our duty is to teach so that students learn.  So, what if we discover that some students in our class aren't able to learn the "required" curriculum despite our best efforts to re-cluster and reconnect it, create alternative pathways to performance, switching up seating, trying to address an underlying emotional problem, and so on?  What if we've "tried everything," so to speak?  Wormeli would say to adjust the curriculum.  We better serve our BHS mission "Every student will succeed!" and will be closer to our goal of increased student achievement on standardized tests as soon as teachers stop using "the curriculum" as an excuse to move whole classes lockstep through the year even when some students have cognitively checked-out long ago.  Wormeli says that a school shouldn't eliminate standards, but might temporarily simplify them for some students, only to reinsert them when it's developmentally appropriate to do so.  

Second, I wanted to highlight Wormeli's mention of practice/homework (p. 37).  Differentiated instruction increases understanding, and with correct understanding students can successfully complete practice.  With misunderstanding students will either not be able to do the practice or will practice things incorrectly, which reinforces the misunderstandings.  I'm a math teacher, and math teachers are known for using lots of practice problems, in class or homework.  Unfortunately we don't often use practice correctly--restricting the practice to what students already understand and distributing the practice over long periods of time.  Maybe I am the only teacher who did practice the wrong way, but in case there are more of you out there, consider Wormeli's caution about practice.

Chapter 3 Helpful Structures and Strategies for the Differentiated Class

• Different, Not More or Less:  Change the nature of the task, not the work load for students.
• Adjust Instruction Based on Assessment Results:  This includes those informal check-for-understanding activities we do every 10 - 15 minutes.
• Modify Options:  Content, Process, Product, Affect, and Learning Environment (*these categories are probably familiar from Carol Ann Tomlinson's Differentiation in Practice, 2005)
• Models of Instruction:  Examples include Direct Instruction (Madeline Hunter, 1993), Dimensions of Learning (Robert Marzano, 1992--man, he's everywhere!), One-third Model (Canady & Rettig, 1996), Concept Attainment Model, 4MAT System (McCarthy, 2007), and others.
• Flexible Grouping:  
• Collaboration with Students:  Sometimes students have great ideas for a teacher to use to teach those who are struggling with a concept.
• Personal Agendas:  An organization tool for that constantly unorganized student.
• Tiering/Ratcheting:  Use gradations within the categories of Tomlinson's Equalizer to make tasks move from introductory to sophisticated.  In a sense our learning goal rubrics are tiered, but here we're discussing tasks, assignments and activities.
• Respectful Tasks:  Provide meaningful experiences for students without drifting far from standards of excellence.
• Compacting the Curriculum:  Let's say that a student aces a pretest.  The next day they take the post-test and ace it too.  Instead of making that student go through all the same activities as the rest of the class, either accelerate them to the next concept or enrich their understanding of the present topic with related information that they don't yet know.
• The Football:  Consider the shape of the football, narrow ends and a wide middle.  This is a metaphor for a narrow, whole-class experience at the beginning of a lesson, a wider expansion of the topic as multiple groups learn at their own pace or in their own ways, then a re-narrowing to gather again to process what's been learned.
• The Anchor:  This metaphor refers to the use of an anchor task and multiple groups.  The class works on the anchor task while the teacher moves group to group to deliver mini-lessons.
• Scaffold Instruction:  Controlling the amount of direct instruction based on what some students or groups need.

Chapter 4 Cognitive Science Structures and Tips That Help Us Differentiate

Wormeli runs through a bunch of brain-related and learning-related information that is worthwhile to consider as we plan and implement lessons.  We all probably know these things, but in our busyness maybe we sometimes don't remember to factor them all in our planning.

• Build background knowledge
• Prime the brain and structure information (This brings to mind our focus in 2012 - 2013 on using pre-teaching strategies for vocabulary, upcoming concepts, upcoming activities, etc.)
• Primacy-Recency Effect:  We remember best what we learn first and remember second best what we learn last, so in differentiated lessons get all of the essential ideas out there in the first 10 - 15 minutes and conclude class by revisiting those ideas.
• Explore Similarities and Differences, Examples and Nonexamples
• Hydration (Yes, you read it correctly, apparently we need to ensure students have enough water during the day--something about lubing their myelin sheaths and priming their sodium-potassium ion pumps.)
• Emotional content:  Students will tend to have an emotional response to a lesson first, before they deal with the information cognitively, so we can't approach teaching with an attitude of "Just let me teach the curriculum and ignore that wishy-washy feelings stuff."
• Novelty
• Meeting survival needs
• Memory ideas:  Wormeli's discussion here included an interesting commentary about how we should separate easily confused concepts by a few days.  For instance, in Geometry I know students are going to struggle with SSS, SAS, ASA, and SSA triangle congruence principles, so why do I keep trying to teach them all at once?
• Social interaction:  Wormeli says that whoever responds to students' contributions in the classroom does most of the learning.  So, we want students to respond to students.  Let's get the teacher out of the way as much as possible.  Wormeli also gives some research from Betty Hollas (2006) that indicated teachers ask forty questions for every one question asked by students.  We probably need to do something about this 40:1 ratio.  Also, apparently 80% of teachers' questions are at the lowest levels of Bloom's taxonomy.  We probably should do something about that too.  I can't remember where I read it (not in this book), but a teacher described her questioning policy as never asking a question for which she already knew the answer.  So, she would ask questions that got after how and why a student was thinking the way he did, instead of asking for factual recall.

Chapter 5 Twelve Samples of Differentiated Learning Experiences from Multiple Subjects

All in all, I thought this was a great book.  It sparked many ideas for me who has wrestled with questions relating to differentiation.  Wormeli's advice is to start small, work with a colleague, and revisit those ten questions that get after the mindset of true differentiation.  Since differentiated instruction is to be a focus for us this year, it would be a good idea for everybody to use this or another book as a resource for instruction.