Wednesday, October 17, 2012
Ricchio Noticing Blog Week 6
This week I have began to notice the large gap between my high students and my low students and how difficult it can be for teachers. I have some students writing and reading fluently while others are struggling with simple sight words. I find myself assisting the lower achieving students and forgetting to differentiate for my higher level students who finish quickly. I do not do this purposely, I just don't want those lower children to fall further behind because many of them won't even write a single word unless I am right beside them encouraging and pushing them to complete the assignment. However, this week I am noticing it is just as important for higher students to be challenged. I've noticed my higher students getting bored and then getting disruptive because they don't know what else to do. This is something I will try to differentiate when I teach because I remember being one of those kids. My teacher tries to let the higher level students have more freedom in their writing assignments which I think is helpful. So many students come in with past experiences and strengths that affect their success when they enter a new classroom. As a teacher, it is my job to make learning an equal playing field. I hope to look into differentiation more this year and take notes on what works and what doesn't.
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Again, from the perspective of the curriculum and instruction that we have tried to cover in TE 801 and TE 402, remember that such issues will always be a challenge in the classroom, but that one way to manage this dilemma is to provide students with a collaborative high-level task. The more open-ended and cognitively demanding the task, the more entry points there are, the more all students will be able to participate at their appropriate level (see the article, "Turning textbook problems into open-ended problems", for example). Also, the more opportunities students have to collaborate, either through cooperative learning or through classroom discussions and student-student interactions, the more the burden on the teacher-as-expert is reduced, and the more students can learn from each other. Of course, it is still the role of the teacher to monitor this instruction and to plan it in a meaningful way such that the student-student interactions are as productive and intellectually fruitful as possible.
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