“Much of what I need to know about differentiation comes from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince,” said Carol Ann Tomlinson at her Special Feature lecture. “The fox asks the Little Prince to tame him, and our children do this to us every day.”
Carol Ann Tomlinson
Tomlinson, an experienced teacher and author of The Differentiated Classroom: Responding to the Needs of All Learners, described the five essentials for “taming” students:
- Affirmation. Students need to know that they're accepted. “I had one student with a learning disability; everyone told him what was wrong with him, but no one tried to help him realize what was good in him.”
- Contribution. “Students want to know how they can make a difference.” Tomlinson recalled the night one African American student trembled before delivering a powerful speech on civil rights. “I found out years later that the civic group she addressed included three current or former members of the Ku Klux Klan. She was frightened, but she said it was her chance to make a difference.”
- Power. “Students come to us looking for what they can do. I had one tell me she did not respect her teacher because the teacher did not respect her. She said she was willing to sacrifice her class rank rather than help that teacher contribute to educational malpractice.”
- Purpose. Students need to know that there's more to school than just getting the right answers. “One of my students wrote a passionate journal entry about giving wrong answers. Right answers were rewarded, but wrong ones made her withdraw,” Tomlinson said. “Students should know how to develop that which makes them special.”
- Challenge. “Our students want to feel wrung out when we're finished with them,” Tomlinson asserted. “They're asking to be shown why it's a better world now that they're in it. We must tame them like the Little Prince's fox.”
Above all, Tomlinson said, teachers must look to their students for guidance. “It's not what you learn from books and conferences that makes you a better teacher,” she said. “We can always learn a lot from different sources, but we'll learn the most if we ask the Little Prince's fox directly.”
