Educational Experience -- Peer Dialogue

Educational Experience -- Peer Dialogue Reflection

The quality of teaching in my high school was poor at best, and terrible at worst. At the time, many of my classmates (and I) believed that this is what school is all about, that this is what secondary education amounts to, basic mediocrity and getting by with little effort so long as you know what the teacher expects.

Recently I had a good conversation with a colleague in the teacher education program and we compared our early education experiences. Neither of us had instructors that delved into differentiation -- to any degree at all. We were treated as one homogenous group, sitting in boring classrooms with no air conditioning, using outdated books, listening to lectures that teachers practically read out of their lesson plans. The same plans my older sister had to endure, and the same plans my college colleague's older brother endured where he attended high school.

My friend and I sat over coffee and recalled our mindsets during those years. In my case, I knew that in my class we had students who should have been one or two years behind the rest of us, but no one in the school district was competent to give assessment tests and determine who among the students might have a learning problem. Or who might be dyslexic. For those who struggled to keep up, and who regularly turned in essays and tests that were given failing grades, I wonder where they are today.

The mean part of my remembrances of that experience was that teachers would poke fun at the students who were not up to speed with the top students in the class. Mr. Hancock would read aloud from essays that were very immature and sloppy, and call out the individual in front of all of us. If a teacher did that today, it is likely that he or she would be reported. And this, in hindsight, was where differentiation would have been appropriate, because as Carol Ann Tomlinson explains:

"Differentiated instruction is the process of ensuring that what a student learns, how he/she learns it, and how the student demonstrates what he/she has learned is a match for that student's readiness level, interests, and preferred mode of learning" (Tomlinson, 2009). What that really means is not that a teacher has to have a separate lesson plan for every student. Not at all. It simply means that, in the case of my high school, every learner has a different need for information and processes it differently. So teachers should provide educational strategies that facilitate learning for all students. In my class, there were those (including myself) who could have been given extra credit assignments because we were ahead of many other students.

My colleague had some similar experiences in high school, but not in all of his classes. In fact in some of his classes there were progressive teachers that helped minority students (some with English as a second language) from low-income homes by assigning advanced students to tutor those struggling students during homeroom periods. That wasn't exactly differentiated instruction, but in a way it was. He was one of the better students, and he was thrilled to be asked to work with some of the students struggling in math and science and English.

"I learned a lot about society and about the difficulties that immigrants have when they come to the U.S.," he noted. "I am glad I had that opportunity. It made me start thinking about going into teaching, to make sure students in my classes would not be left behind and that they would be better people as well as better students when they left my classroom."