One of the many great practices I observed at the American School of Bombay during ASB Unplugged 2010, was differentiation in action. One method of differentiating was allowing students to choose how they shared their learning. Sometimes they had to choose from a number of different tools (e.g. a presentation, a poster or a written report.) Other times they could choose any tool they wanted. In one class different students choose a skit, a flash animation, and a clay model to explain what they knew about cell structures.
I’ve been thinking about how to help my staff do more of that. At this time, based on how our curriculum was previously developed, units tend to have a single type of product to show learning, such as a rainforest Powerpoint or a biography research paper.
Opening up the end product has a number of challenges. Some products take longer than others, so it may be even more difficult to have students finish within the same amount of time. It is challenging to create a rubric that allows for many different types of end products so it could lead to lower quality products. There are management issues when some students require technology to work on the project and others need paint and others are needing places to move around for a skit. There is also the teacher’s comfort level with having children doing different products.
This video on the Edutopia website doesn’t address all of those issues, but it does show powerful differentiation in practice.
I’ve had a lot of success with this over the past few years in my History classes (I need to get to this point in my English classes, though). I have 5 or 6 pretty well developed assignments that work for just about any content. I have three different points in the year where students can choose to do any of the projects to show what they’ve learned.
The biggest challenge has been keeping students moving along at the same pace – I have to keep on tweaking the different steps for each product so they all take the same number of classes to finish.
I was immensely impressed with the differentiation practiced by Daniel Tammet’s teachers in England. He’s the high-functioning autistic savant who wrote the book Born on a Blue Day. I wonder if I could have been that patient in their shoes. I hope so.