Choosing Prevention Before Intervention
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learning through individual application by working on their own or in teams. In this way, students are engaged in appropriate activities, and the teacher is able to manage their learning.
Extending Learning
Most of us think of differentiation as a reactive process that we implement after a lesson. During the usual instructional cycle, teachers deliver a lesson and assume all students will learn. The intent is to keep all students together. Obviously, this rarely occurs, since all students learn at different rates using a variety of methods. With the best of intentions, most teachers find themselves reacting to student learning by improvising in the moment. The typical scenario includes a whole-group lesson followed by guided practice. As students practice, it becomes obvious that some students did not understand and are struggling to complete the activity. Teachers begin to assist these students and may even call them up to a table or gather their desks together to re-engage with the lesson. But what will the others do? Often, these students are directed to take out a book to read, complete homework, or do more of the same work that they just completed. According to Sylvia Rimm (2008), psychologist and director of the Family Achievement Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, students who know the standards or learn quickly often do not understand the correlation between effort and learning. Sometimes the most capable learners give up when they do not know the answer or cannot solve the problem. This is because most of them have never had to put forth effort to learn. They do not have a set of strategies to help them persevere to the answer or solution. So they give up. Rimm (1986) states: The surest path to positive self-esteem is to succeed at something which one perceived would be difficult. Each time we steal a student’s struggle, we steal the opportunity for them to build self-confidence. They must learn to do hard things to feel good about themselves.
The overall goal, after all, is to make sure that the curriculum appropriately challenges all students to put forth effort to learn.
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A teacher in Minnesota once said to me that she was most concerned about the students in her classroom who spend most of their day watching others learn. She was referring to those students who either know the learning targets before they are taught or learn them quickly. Because some students need additional teaching, others are given more work to keep them busy, asked to tutor peers, or left to fend for themselves. Collaborative teams must be intentional in answering the fourth PLC question: How will we respond when students have already learned?