A teacher who tries to grasp each student's uniqueness in the first weeks of school lays the groundwork for a successful year. Veteran educators advise teachers to get an accurate read not only on their students' skill levels and content knowledge, but also each student's interests and emotional life. These efforts provide entry points to differentiated teaching and can avoid student frustration that's often harder to solve in the middle of the year.
The first six weeks of school are important for setting the climate of learning by reinforcing the idea that we have multiple intelligences, advises Julie Dermody, a 5th grade teacher at Mary Scroggs Elementary School in Chapel Hill, N.C. "When students understand and respect individual differences, differentiation makes sense to them. They also need to understand that intelligences are not fixed—we can grow in our weak areas," says Dermody.
Formative Assessments
While educators agree that getting to know new students to provide the appropriate intellectual and developmental challenges during the year can be difficult, formal and informal assessments and inventories make the job easier by showing students' strengths and weaknesses. From these formative assessments, teachers can make better decisions about tailoring their instruction, say experts.
Early on, teachers should be checking students for prerequisite skills tied to grade level and subject area curricula, says Carol Ann Tomlinson, associate professor of education at the University of Virginia and author of the ASCD book The Differentiated Classroom: Responding to the Needs of All Learners. It's also important at the beginning of the year to figure out students' interests, what they know about how they learn best, and how "they feel about themselves as learners in a given subject," Tomlinson adds. Learning profiles, interest inventories, and more specific checklists for spelling, vocabulary, or math knowledge can be easily found on the Internet, Tomlinson suggests.
Dermody suggests short reading assessments, like the Scholastic Reading Inventory, to provide data for creating guided reading groups or for matching textbooks and reference books to readers. "The better you know your students, the easier and more effectively you can differentiate [teaching and learning]. The most obvious need to differentiate is regarding reading levels," says Dermody.
In other subject areas like science or social studies, Dermody uses K-W-L charts; cloze (or fill-in-the-blank) exercises; and word splashes as informal assessments that will allow her to better differentiate teaching for her students. Prior to a unit on animal habitats and the food chain, for example, Dermody gives students a variety of words or phrases about owls—randomly arranged or "splashed" on the board (hence, word splash). As students use these words to write creative sentences, Dermody can evaluate a student's content knowledge, possible misconceptions, and ability to connect and apply prior knowledge in new contexts. Such tools can give teachers a direction for fashioning individual student tasks later.
"When you differentiate—at any time of year—you need to make sure everyone has engaging, worthwhile work at his or her appropriate level," says Dermody.
Variety of Challenges
In her classroom, she keeps various material at different reading levels in core subject areas. Dermody can give struggling readers a research topic for which she has plenty of books at the appropriate reading level to make information-gathering easier. In contrast, Dermody might encourage advanced readers to ferret out information on the Internet, which also requires that they learn how to evaluate the accuracy and value of Web sites. The end result is the same—whether it's a research paper or a diorama—but the variety of approaches gives each student a proper challenge.
The start of school is also a crucial time for catching misconceptions students might have about a particular concept, advises Dermody. "A child may feel she understands a topic, but unless you take time to somehow verify her information, she could continue to have misconceptions—and that will impact future learning and investigations," Dermody warns.
One student, for example, said he knew how to compute the area of a triangle, and he was actually able to do so when a line indicating a triangle's height was drawn within a basic triangle. However, when a line indicating height was drawn outside the triangle, the student mistakenly chose one of the triangle's sides to compute the area.
"He didn't understand the concept of locating a triangle's height. His prior assessments had been with triangles that reinforced his idea, which wasn't accurate for more advanced geometry," Dermody says.
Steven Levy—a classroom veteran of 28 years now working as a consultant for Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound, a comprehensive school reform model—would assess his 4th grade students' reading ability by having them read into a tape recorder during the first weeks of school. Although the tape was primarily a record, it could also, more importantly, "show kids their progress at the end of the year," Levy says.
A brief exercise, such as writing three descriptive sentences about the weather, also can provide insight into a student's ability levels, he adds. For example, half the class might write simple sentences like "It is sunny," and the other half might write more complex sentences. Then Levy would challenge all his students to rewrite their sentences without using the pronoun "it" or the adjective "sunny," for instance.
"You'll see some students fly with the exercise, while others will have to begin collecting a word bank of powerful verbs and adjectives to associate with the weather," says Levy. "At this point, diagnosis is not separate from instruction."
But in trying to understand each child, Levy cautions, teachers should keep in mind that different students show their abilities at different times—"some you don't figure out for months."
Michael Mills, who teaches advanced placement English, debate, and journalism at Sheridan High School in Sheridan, Ark., uses his students' summer reading logs to help determine their writing ability as soon as school starts. Mills not only uses the logs to assess individual students' abilities to summarize, use pertinent details, and craft a well-organized paragraph, he also gains a sense of the class as a whole through the novels they choose. Last year, because many students picked The Autobiography of Malcolm X as part of their summer reading, Mills decided that African American author Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man would be part of the curriculum during the school year.
By using students' summer reading logs and an essay they write on the second day of school, Mills gains a snapshot of his 11th grade students' interests and abilities. In individualized writing conferences with students, Mills gives them writing tips, asks them what they think they can do to improve their writing, and suggests other writers they might pursue, according to their interests.
Because Sheridan High School maps its curriculum, Mills also holds discussions—maps in hand—with his students' 10th grade English teacher to find out what his new students are capable of, and, likewise, passes on information to the 12th grade teacher who has inherited his former students. The insights help Mills tailor "daily language activities"—short warm-up exercises involving grammar, usage, comprehension, and editing skills—to strengthen predominant weaknesses.
Cheryl Dobbertin, who teaches secondary-level English at a regional summer school in New York, recommends using analytic rubrics to assess student work. Dobbertin also is the coordinator for professional development at Monroe 2-Orleans Board of Cooperative Educational Services in Spencerport, N.Y.
With rubrics, teachers can make grouping decisions based on levels of performance or specific areas of need or strength. From an early writing sample, Dobbertin evaluates the sophistication of a student's vocabulary, how well he formulates a controlling idea, and how effectively he uses details. She prioritizes those three areas differently for each student, tracking the information in a class chart. "Anything can be used for a pre-assessment, if you look at it with ‘formative’ eyes," remarks Dobbertin.
When a teacher finds gaps in student learning, she should provide review to those who need it, while allowing others the opportunity to forge ahead, Tomlinson says. "There is no point in asking students to review things they clearly haven't forgotten," she adds. Learning centers, homework, study groups, small teacher-led instructional groups, learning contracts, and games are among the many forms reviews can take. Such "refresher" activities should also be sprinkled throughout the year, she advises.
Motivating Students
To get to know his 4th grade students better, Levy also took the step of making home visits during the summer before the school year began. In four days, Levy could visit about 25 students and their families in Lexington, Mass. Spending 15 minutes with students and as much time with parents, Levy says, "you learn something in the home that you wouldn't learn anywhere else."
During each visit, "I got some small glimpse of who the student was. I knew who liked to read, who liked horses, who played with Legos all day, who played video games," says Levy, who used these student interests as links to academic areas during the school year.
Equally important was time spent talking with parents about their learning goals for their children, he adds. "Some parents wanted their children to have three hours of homework a night, while another didn't want any for their kids," he recalls.
In the first weeks of school, Levy would also use a variety of seemingly low-stress activities that sent deep messages about high expectations for the class. For a few minutes each day, students would draw a series of straight lines, curves, and diagonals. By the third day, as expected, students would be "rolling their eyes" at the task, so Levy would assign more complex, intricate designs configured from the previously practiced straight, curved, and diagonal lines. During the same period, students recited alliterative poems based on letters of the alphabet. In both exercises, students "couldn't believe that I was paying so much attention to detail," whether it was their simple line drawings or their enunciation of poetry. Levy says he was sending a message to students that whether it is poetry or peer critiques, "we are going to work on something until we get it right, and that we keep on aiming higher and higher."
Mills surveys students in the first weeks of school to find out whether they are bound for college, the military, or trade schools, then uses those personal hooks to sell students on the importance of skills for good communication and information evaluation, whatever their future holds. He shows students that his class is the key to getting and honing skills they will need in subjects like science and history and in their careers as well.
"I feel I need to know what they want out of life, so I can provide opportunities that appeal to them," Mills says.
Last year, Dobbertin taught a summer school class of struggling high school students who needed to pass the New York Regents Comprehensive English exam to graduate. She asked her students to write an essay that would serve as a tool for figuring out the best way to teach them. Using the essays, Dobbertin wrote each student a letter with an evaluation of their skills and suggested academic goals.
"The kids really appreciated those letters, especially because I think in high school students feel fairly anonymous, and those letters made it clear that I saw each of them as individuals. That set the stage for the differentiation that followed," Dobbertin says.
The Heart of the Matter
The combination of the formative assessment and clear, individualized communication during the course helped students invest in the class, says Dobbertin. One of her students retook the Regents English exam to try to get a higher grade, even though she had already passed. The student, Justine Zodarecky, a senior at Greece Odyssey High School in central New York, wrote in a self-reflective essay that Dobbertin's attention "made me realize the person I really am and the abilities I have. She brought the heart out from inside me, and because of her, I will never be the same."
Dobbertin concedes that differentiation, especially with many students, is a challenge, but one that teachers should keep pursuing because the payoff can be invaluable.
"You just can't make assumptions about what kids know, understand, and are able to do. Plenty of students struggle—and hide it well—while others have gifts that have never been discovered," says Dobbertin. "Each teacher has an opportunity to make his or her class that one special class a student will remember forever."
