Why don't we differentiate instruction...for teachers?

Submitted by Kathy Tracey on Thu, 02/02/2017 - 21:41
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We do this every day. A student walks into our classroom and we try really hard to create a learning environment that meets the student's individual needs. We differentiate instruction. So, why don't we do that with our professional development? Math Coach Pauline Zdonek explores how to make differentiation a reality in PD. She says, "a majority of PD is provided in a workshop model. And workshop models are inherently ineffective. It amounts to giving everyone the same information, regardless of their prior knowledge, skills, experience, and leaving it up to them to determine how (or if) it is implemented." 

She lists several strateiges for the planning of engaging PD such as identifying teachers' background knowledge in a content area, gauge teachers' interest in a topic, provide time to actively participate in the planning process, assess knowledge gained from the PD, and give teachers time to implement new ideas learned in the classroom. 

What are your thoughts? What do you want to see from PD? and for our PD providers....how do you differentiate your training for teachers? 

I'd love to hear your thoughts. 

Sincerely, 
Kathy Tracey 

 

Comments

 

I teach a Math 2 class whose students are just beginning to tackle basic word problems. This class has three levels of student readiness with regard to math proficiency. The lowest level group struggles to read the word problem with clear comprehension, to maintain their times tables in their long-term memory for useful recall, to translate the worded question into mathematical problems and numerical form, and to formulate a sequential step strategy to correctly solve the problem. They seem to struggle to understand exactly what it is they are initially looking for, and what set of ordered steps they need to solve the problem and find the correct answer. The intermediate group is a little different. These students can read the problem with a moderate amount of comprehension, but the nature of the answer being sought is still somewhat vague to them from an operational perspective. They know their times tables for the most part, and can calculate simple problems if the teacher provides them to the students, but cannot take the scenario provided and choose the operational steps needed to solve the problem, even though they can do all the individual mathematical processes that sum up the individual parts of the whole problem. The third group is the advanced group. They know their times tables solidly, can read the question and convert it into numeric form, and given enough time can conceive the order of operations needed to solve the problem. They also are the students who make the fewest calculation and procedural errors. So, what I do to incorporate differentiated instruction is use a sequential checklist for which students can get full, partial, or no credit for each stage of working the assignment problem. This allows me not only to tally an overall score of how well they did on the total assignment, but shows me where they need improvement and if they failed to solve the problem, where the breakdown happened within the students’ workflow that derailed them from correctly translating the problem from words to numbers, setting up the steps to solve the problem,, calculating each step correctly, and calculating the correct answer went wrong. Students get encouraging credit this way for all the aspects of the problem that they did address correctly, and as the teacher i can go to each student sheet and  quickly evaluate how to help the student get back on track. This makes some of my verbal comments adjust to exactly where they are rather than general comments made to the whole class. They receive the specific comments one-on-one in person as i walk around, and at the same time, since everyone works atr a different pace, they are still working together as a class on the same assignment. I believe this has improved my diagnostic and intervention quality for my math students, and the response has been good. The “answer” to the math problem seems to have more meaning now. I’m hoping to figure out a group activity with this as a follow up, where students with similar scoring sheets can addressed in a small group format before getting their individual specifics addressed one on one. What do you think? 

 

 

 

William, you provide an excellent example of how to effectively differentiate instruction, not only among different learning preferences but among students at different skill levels relating to the topic covered.   Your sequential list sounds like an effective rubric to help student control the pace of their own learning. I am a huge fan of rubrics, not so much for instructors, although we really benefit from them as well, but for students. Well-developed and differentiated rubrics, written in student terms and levels, are a gift to the learning process! Thanks. Leecy
Kathy, you are absolutely right. A lot of PD in the US is often offered from the top down and rarely differentiated in the four ways that Zdonek suggests. I would add that more often than not, PD is offered at high speeds, racing to shove all possbile valuable information (instead of participant insights) into training.    There are two common types of PD available to most people: (1) short sessions offered in conferences and Webinars by dozens of presenters on different topics and (2) longer trainings that involve professionals from half-days to several days or even weeks if courses are involved.   Some differentiation occurs at conferences and Webinars since participants select sessions that meet their own needs, abilities, and interests. During short sessions of 1-2 hours, it is often unreasonable to expect presenters to take time to survey interests and modify presentations to include everyone's input. My approach to differentiating short sessions like those is to first, allow participants to reflect on the content. We are a fast-paced society that, unfortunately, does not value reflection as a learning tool. In planning short sessions, I also include as many learning preferences as possible and make sure that I involve participants in actually applying major concepts during each session. Offering suggestions for those who want to expand more on the topic provides some differentiation as well.   On the other hand, longer PD sessions (half-days or more) do lend themselves to exploring the nature of participants, their experiences, interests, and strengths or needs. Some of that exploration can occur during planning. In addition to including the approaches listed above and those suggested by the article, in much longer sessions, I also like to have participants take turns (10-15 minutes) in presenting different topics relating to the training, using resources that I provide or that they uncover.  Leecy  

Leecy and others,

As you point out, the idea of  professional development as a one size fits all one shot event is flawed. Research by Linda Darling-Hammond and others distills the essential components of effective professional development. Effective Teacher Professional Development  lists seven features of effective PD:

1. Is content focused
2. Incorporates active learning utilizing adult learning theory
3. Supports collaboration, typically in job-embedded contexts
4. Uses models and modeling of effective practice
5. Provides coaching and expert support
6. Offers opportunities for feedback and reflection
7. Is of sustained duration

The third one, supports collaboration, typically in job-embedded contexts, I found especially important.  When I taught middle school, I found that the most effective PD was PD done with other teachers in my school around what we were teaching, This ensured that PD was differentiated and applied to what we were  teaching. It also promoted working with my colleagues to create a more integrated approach to teaching. While the Darling-Hammond research is from K-12, I think it applies to adult education.

  • What are other's experience with PD? 
  • What kind of PD do you find most effective?
  • What does collaboration among adult education teachers look like? What are some challenges adult education instructors face in collaborating with other instructors?
  • What would it take to implement effective PD in your program/state?

Steve

I cannot agree with you more!  My greatest frustration as a program coordinator is when my team and I create our own plans for their professional development in June for the coming fiscal year and then in September are hit with some mandate from our state department of education at their annual institute.  It commonly has no relation to what we're dealing with at the local level.  In the past it has even been a topic we've never heard of before.  Our entire plan is tossed to the wind and we're told we must do what they have in mind instead.  I've been a professional developer for educators (K-12 and adult ed) since 1989 (with a seven year stint back into the middle school classrooms within that period when I led a professional learning community) and to me professional development is my life blood.  Having our plans hijacked and derailed for some "flavor of the year" type of focus is terribly frustrating.  Even when the state wants monthly or bimonthly meetings to create "sustained learning", if it is a topic we don't care about why frustrate us so?  I wish we could just do our own thing and create and implement our own plans fully.

Colleagues,

This is a wonderful conversation! I'd like to share a LINCS Resource: Adult Education: What Makes Teaching Effective. So many of the ideas discussed in this thread are reinforced in the brief. Highlights include research on effective teaching. Strategies include covering relevant, meaningful information, using evidence-based practices, using data to understand student needs, remains learner-centered, and builds foundational and higher order thinking skills. 

Doesn't all of this sound like what effective professional development looks like? I'd love to hear more of your thoughts and ideas.

Kathy 

 

 

Now that I got that rant out... let me get constructive.  Teachers want a supportive environment that allows them to experiment with new lessons that follow quality practices.  They want to try out new ways of engaging their students in active lessons. 

For example, one of our teachers needed to help students understand some physics standards such as the dynamics of flight, motion, drag, thrust but the old standard of making paper and balsa wood airplanes didn't grasp the excitement of the learners in his class.  So he got a stroke of genius while watching something on tv or online and came to ask me about buying materials to make small catapults and trebuchets, having students begin with one standard of each that he would provide, and one standard size projectile.  He'd set up a "flight line" area to measure distance and have a scale to ensure conformity of weight of projectiles.  Then after gathering "standard" data, the students were let loose to explore online and find the catapult or trebuchet of their choice to create with any materials they wished.  We provided a lot of options, but some came up with very creative alternatives. 

What was designed as a one week plan turned into a three week exploration, and student designed competition for prizes (program logo pens, pencils, pencil holders, etc.) and a "major" trophy to be awarded to the longest flight of any projectiles weighing below a certain amount (it was October and a cheap skull decoration was chosen as the trophy). 

It was so exciting as a program coordinator to watch my teacher dig deep and challenge his students with powerful questions, challenges to design ideas, and be so supportive when designs failed.  He and I talked throughout the unit about his questioning techniques, how he chose when to support and when to challenge,  His thinking was deepened by my cognitive coaching of him, the students thinking was deepened by his cognitive coaching of them and everyone was enriched by the powerful cooperation, collaboration and just enough student-designed competition to excite the typically unengaged. 

This is the best of job-embedded professional development in my view.  An educator going in new directions based on quality effective practices (teacher researching a content topic deeply, student engagement, hands-on learning, hybrid learning) and accessing coaching from a mentor.  Hearing students discuss the design of the data gathering tables, comparing and contrasting their data, hearing them say to each other things like "How did you decide to use XX material?  I would have thought that would never work." or "Remember, you need to consider how much the projectile weighs in estimating flight distance."  What a great month that October was for us all!

 

Reading the articles tied to backward design really changed the way I design assessments now. I had always started with my learning objective before, then had built the content to teach that was tied the learning objective, and only at the end was I designing an assessment (exam) to test the content I had built. So for my Math 2 ABE class that was working on multiplication of decimals, this time I spent more time on considering the objective statement, making it more precise, building in differentiation by product and student readiness level into my SWBAT statement. It broke down the specific processes in incremental stages that are required for students to demonstrate mastery of that skill. Having a clearer, differentiated set of content and assessment criteria really helped me build the assessment rubric, a three-level scaled tool denoting accuracy in demonstration, partial accuracy in demonstration, or no demonstration by the student across the staged processes which were delineated on the sheet that helped them assess their problem areas (as well as areas of achievement) as they worked through the assessment problem. Finally, having built that, I went through all my activity materials and found simple word-problem assignments which corresponded directly with my rubric, and used those as teaching tools for my students. it really integrated my class content and assessment in a good way. Reviewing their rubrics in class and regrouping the class by shared rubric commonality gave me an opportunity to perform a formative assessment as well as a summative assessment of their learning. I'm still learning how to streamline this process, but I think it's a big step forward for me with regard to  the quality of my learning assessment. I hope I'm on the right track to do a better job making teaching adjustments and assessing them better.