Sunday, November 26, 2006

I love experts

"Experts," that is. Quotation marks are important.

One of the experts hired by the district to help make us better teachers loves differentiated instruction. It's a cool concept. It's also one I don't know a lot about, but here's what I do know: Typically, you have several "centers," each with different tasks, and the students go to the different centers to do the tasks they think they can accomplish best. The teacher is supposed to construct these centers so they focus on different skills, slightly different content, etc. so that each student has a successful learning experience. I like the idea a little bit, but this means that there are about 3-4 different lessons needed for each class, each day. And to be totally honest, I am barely keeping my head above water coming up with the 1-2 activities each day I have been doing. Maybe it will work better next year when I'm familiar with the books, but for right now I'm managing to keep a chapter ahead of the students, if that.

Here's the other thing: differentiated instruction requires students to be motivated to learn and get work done on their own, because with 3-4 different activities happening simultaneously the teacher can't be there each minute to walk them through it. Most of my students do not have this sort of motivation, and they drag the motivated ones along with them.

The expert also says that students hate to write so I shouldn't make them do it, and the minute I make them write I lose them. (This is English class...) She said the same thing about reading.

Let's recap. I teach English. The expert says don't make them read or write, but give them extra opportunity to create unsupervised chaos. Does the math add up here? Does anyone know how this promotes literacy?

Here's the thing, some of my worst kids have actually told me that they like the daily writing. They miss it when we skip a day. A couple of them are barely literate and can hardly string three words together, but they like writing. And the freshmen loved when I gave them free time in class to read. Best class we had all year. Almost all of them actually read.

Is it clear to you guys why I'm a little confused sometimes?

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