Trying to solve the differentiation riddle

Differentiation has proven a struggle for me this year but over the past month I’ve pushed a little harder and had some success, especially with my juniors, who are my toughest challenge because the ability gaps in the class are so wide. Two kids are punching far below their weight: they should be in AP but wouldn’t commit to the workload. The rest are split among students who have ability but don’t typically push themselves; kids who are considerably below grade level in reading and writing, and two who have wide disparities in reading and writing ability. A few have conditions that have a big impact on their social interactions.

Probably not surprisingly, some classroom management issues come with this group. So I’m glad to

report that a recent argument essay for which I tried a few differentiation techniques went better than expected.

The 11th grade ELA curriculum focuses on argument. My mentor and I spent much of the second trimester teaching persuasive language and did a good job of providing different kinds of work and assessments as we had students analyze editorial cartoons and a political debate, create an advertising campaign and present it to the class, and compare and contrast the use of rhetoric in MLK’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and Atticus Finch’s closing argument in To Kill A Mockingbird. (My mentor and I develop the 11th grade curriculum together. Either he comes up with the plan and I edit it or vice versa. Then we teach separate classes, compare notes and make adjustments.) Now came the 3-page closing assessment in which students must research a topic and write a counterclaim-claim argument. While we could expect some balking from a large part of the class, we weren’t going to differentiate the assignment. As Rick Wormeli notes in “Differentiation at the Secondary Level” (as cited in Adolescent Literacy in Perspective, 2007, p. 3), sometimes the assessment approach is not negotiable: You’re writing a short research paper, period. But it was also obvious that a one-size-fits-all approach would leave the low and high performing kids frustrated. I can’t say I had a tight, well-thought out differentiation plan set from the start, but I began by giving a choice of topics: Students could write either on whether schools should allow cell phones in classes or on whether the government should raise the minimum wage to a “living” wage. Both topics hit them where they live. They all have phones, of course, and half have after-school jobs where they make minimum or close to it.

As soon as they started research, the light went on for me. I could adopt a tiered approach to the work, not that I knew the term as we worked in class but a second light went on as I read Diane Heacox’s “Six Ways to Tier a Lesson” (cited in On Target: Strategies That Differentiate Instruction, 2007, p. 9). Step 1 for me was to vary the requirements for research by number and depth of the sources. They had to have two sources beyond the two articles I started them with. The advanced students needed three. Then I varied the depth of acceptable sources based on my understanding of student reading and critical thinking ability. So some students got the ok for pieces from the popular press. Others got sign off when they hit a Bloomberg BusinessWeek article, and others were pushed to academic or policy-wonk journals. (“Tier by resources,” in Heacox’s parlance.) I tried a similar approach to working with their writing (“Tier by outcomes.”) I pulled the two most capable students aside and said that for the rest of the year, my comments/demands on drafts as well as their grades would mirror what I’d do if they were in a college freshman comp class; they readily agreed. They responded well to being pushed on logic, evidence and style. The rest of the writers were split into two tiers, with me pushing harder on students who had shown more ability over the year.

I liked this kind of differentiation because a) the kids really responded, and b) no social stigma attached to it because there’s no public display of different treatment. The social issue is something I wish were addressed in the readings, actually. Maybe knowing that different kids are getting easier or harder work isn’t an issue in class, but I’d like to read more about that topic.

In the future, I’m going to be more deliberate about this kind of differentiation at the outset: for example, recommending different kinds of sources depending on reading skills, and tweaking questions in the prompt so that they become more abstract as student ability rises (“Tier by challenge level.”).

The gaps in research knowledge and abilities also present opportunities for differentiation. Later in the process I had more advanced students helping others on their citations. I’m going to try the same approach to the original research. Having those two students help me with the half dozen who struggle with vetting sources is going to benefit everyone.

The group work concept that really struck me as something to try with my juniors is the idea of “cubing” (On Target, p. 12). Group work with my juniors has proven very hard and attempts to solve problems through different iterations of deliberately chosen groups haven’t worked. Some of the groups fall apart for social reasons and kids go off on their own, slightly embittered. Other times the slackers are clearly riding the coattails of the high achievers, to the latter’s frustration. The groups tend to get off task faster than I can move around the room. The cube idea, splitting a class into six groups and ramping up the abstraction and complexity level of learning tasks based on a group’s ability, seems promising. It will stop the freeloading and maybe do a better job of engaging students with tasks they find challenging but not too hard. It also allows me to focus on the groups that are likely to have the most management issues, which should improve everyone’s experience.