SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Back to the drawing board

A hot fad in education circles these days is "differentiated instruction". If you have the time and a heightened ability to tolerate frustration, you can read about differentiated instruction in this Wikipedia entry. The idea is that teachers should bend themselves into pretzels so that they can deliver the exactly-right personalized instruction to every single student in their class. I suppose differentiated instruction was invented in the wake of another hot education fad, namely the inclusion of special needs students in regular classrooms. As well, modern "child-centred" practices mean that even ordinary students get more and more spread out in terms of their academic capabilities as they rise through the grades. As a result, there is a tremendous spread in academic preparation in a typical classroom: for example, a grade 6 classroom might easily have students achieving at a grade 1 level, along with students achieving at a high school level. 

This kind of spread makes life very hard for classroom teachers, and I expect some of them complained. So then the geniuses who come up with the various fads invented differentiated instruction. Unfortunately, differentiated instruction is quite impossible to implement, as this Education Week article attests, and it has no research basis. 

So if differentiated instruction is not the answer, what is? It seems to me that there is no solution to a 10-grade spread in a grade 6 classroom. Ergo, the solution lies in abandoning the practices that lead to the 10-grade spread: no more child-centred pedagogy and no more mandatory inclusion of special needs students. Or am I missing something?