As I observed my classroom this week, I particularly noticed a huge gap between the high-achieving students and the low-achieving students. I know that there is always going to be a gap between students achievement levels, but it stood out more this week than it has in the past. It made me start thinking about differentiation and how I can push the high-achieving students further when they complete activities and also assist those low- and mid- level students with the completion of their work. When completing individual writing assignments this week, which are always modeled by my mentor or myself on the ELMO, students were instructed to write their names and then complete a sentence or two using information that they had researched. They had multiple categories that they researched about safari animals. Each category was made a heading on a different page in their books so that students could record facts about what they learned. In the hour time that we worked on writing, some students had completely finished creating sentences from their research and writing at least one sentence on each page of their four page book. Other students had only written a few words on the first page.
It's important that I notice the gap between the students' work, so that I can differentiate my instruction when I teach. It's important that I notice what each student is doing in the class at any given time so that I can notice their productivity. Some students are completely off-task and will sit for an entire lesson without writing a single thing, while others finish their entire books and are bored because they're done.
I understand that all students are very different and work at different paces. I also understand that some students need one-on-one attention in order to accomplish any task. The reason that I noticed this this week is so that I could think of what I can do as a teacher to help each and every student learn. Today, my mentor took aside those students who had completed their entire books and allowed them to transfer their information from their draft books to their final books. I took a group of students who worked at the slowest pace and helped them to catch up. This really helped the students to work more efficiently. I'm starting to think of more and more ways that I can differentiate my instruction so that everyone is being challenged in their work.
This is a case of student achievement levels and teacher differentiation. Without my mentor taking a small group aside and myself taking a small group aside, these students would have likely been off-task and disruptive. We try to keep all students on the same track, but that is not always effective for students to learn at their own pace. This week helped me to visualize differentiation more than reading about it in textbooks.
This is a very significant post. The fact that you not only notice this discrepancy but want to actively address through your instruction is the sign of growing as a professional teacher (as opposed to throwing up your hands and attributing students' lack of achievement to "lack of motivation"). Differentiation is certainly one of the important ways to address this discrepancy. I also think that collaborative learning (e.g., student-student interactions) is another very important approach. You need not feel that you are the source of all information. Of course, you are a significant source of expertise, but other students also have much to offer each other, as you point out. So, I think that you might benefit from considering different ways to pair / group students together so that they can explore the mathematical content with one another, with more "expert" students as the guides. Then, coming back together, you can serve as the expert that links different student strategies together through whole-class interactions / discussions. This way, all students will learn from each other and you need not feel yourself as the only source of knowledge in the classroom.
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