Reflections on DI

For me, differentiated instruction will be something I don't attempt in my first year of teaching. It seems like the next step after UbD. In fact, the "three areas of possible modification" seem to connect or parallel with UbD:

• Content--what a student is to learn (Stage 1: Big Ideas and Understandings)
• Process--how the student is to learn this content (Stage 2: how we lead students to the understandings)
• Product--how a student is to display what he/she has learned (how we assess student development of the understandings) (King-Shaver and Hunter, p. 4)

To quote from one of our Issues readings, teaching by DI requires "with-it-ness." We need to know our students to best develop our instruction. "If there are 25 students in a class, there are 25 people with different prior knowledge" (p. 45). Thankfully, we can use the examples found in Chapter 5 without going completely DI.

As for the "Drive" reading, there was a lot of lingo from the book that I didn't know (ex. Type Is and Xs, Motivation 3.0). I do like the 3 question test for making homework. I think it follows nicely with Stage 1 considerations. I like the DIY report cards. The midterm self-evaluation that Tim used for Teaching Writing was helpful for me to see where I was and where I needed to go. The mix of student and teacher grades removes the "Teacher-as-Ultimate-Authority" role. Self-assessment is essential for whatever kids do after graduation.

The advertisements for alternative schools at the end of the excerpt seem far-fetched. I'm not against different approaches to education. (If I was, I would be against DI.) There is a tendency for these types of schools to be so far on the "be creative and do what interests you" idea that I question if those students can read and write well, for example. If we are preparing students for jobs that don't exist yet, we need students to be, for lack of a better term, well-rounded. It's already hard enough to get a job these days. We can't have "specialists" that can only do one exact thing. That might be a bit of a stretch, I know.