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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?
How did differentiated instruction came to be? Of course from our favourite educrats, who believed in the child-centre theories.
“Differentiation is recognized to be a compilation of many theories and practices. Based on this review of the literature of differentiated instruction, the “package” itself is lacking empirical validation. There is an acknowledged and decided gap in the literature in this area and future research is warranted.
According to the proponents of differentiation, the principles and guidelines are rooted in years of educational theory and research. For example, differentiated instruction adopts the concept of “readiness.” That is, the difficulty of skills taught should be slightly in advance of the child’s current level of mastery. This is grounded in the work of Lev Vygotsky (1978), and the zone of proximal development (ZPD), the range at which learning takes place. The classroom research by Fisher et al., (1980), strongly supports the ZPD concept. The researchers found that in classrooms where individuals were performing at a level of about 80% accuracy, students learned more and felt better about themselves and the subject area under study (Fisher, 1980 in Tomlinson, 2000).
Other practices noted as central to differentiation have been validated in the effective teaching research conduced from the mid 1980’s to the present. These practices include effective management procedures, grouping students for instruction, and engaging learners (Ellis and Worthington, 1994).”
http://aim.cast.org/learn/historyarchive/backgroundpapers/differentiated_instruction_udl
And of course differentiated instruction does nothing for the LD students who often struggle in material that are above their mastery level, where basic facts are omitted, that are crucial to understand the next level of knowledge. One of my youngest favourite line, “Why didn’t they tell us that in the first place?”.
Mentioned in the article, is curriculum. “First, we need coherent, content-rich guaranteed curriculum-that is, a curriculum which ensures that the actual intellectual skills and subject matter of a course don’t depend on which teacher a student happens to get.” http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/09/29/05schmoker.h30.html?tkn=YYYFAiDD9aHMUdH2dwAwVEipxlFkp2gcL9uY&cmp=clp-edweek
By a fluke, my youngest math curriculum is home grown and developed by a math teacher of the province. By fluke, it is designed very well, where my youngest is flying through her lessons, because it is coherent, and well organized. Teachers do not have to supply extra resources and material and teachers have a much easier time to sort out the students who are struggling and who are not.
So much for differentiated instruction, and the practice of skills taught should be slightly in advance of the child’s current level of mastery. One sure fire method, to have children be turned off by school, or see themselves as being too dumb for book learning or raise their frustration levels to the point they become behaviour problems. But than again Vygotsky was never concerned about the impact of behavior. He was more concern about “Vygotsky focused on the connections between people and the sociocultural context in which they act and interact in shared experiences (Crawford, 1996). According to Vygotsky, humans use tools that develop from a culture, such as speech and writing, to mediate their social environments. Initially children develop these tools to serve solely as social functions, ways to communicate needs. Vygotsky believed that the internalization of these tools led to higher thinking skills.” http://www.learning-theories.com/vygotskys-social-learning-theory.html
Vygotsky, did well for himself as Russia transformed into Communist Russia. His theories perfectly blend in the politics of Russia, and spread outward to the Western countries, to be eagerly adapted by our public education institutions. If anything, Vygotsky’s theories certainly reinforced the widening chasm between the students who can and the ones who cannot, and as a result, reinforces class structures in today’s society.