Please do read Andy Tharby's full posting.The dangers of differentiation .... and what to do about them
Posted on October 5, 2014 by Andy Tharby (Twitter: @atharby)
Differentiation seems to revolve around a dilemma. It is evidently clear that all students have different needs and areas of weakness; yet it is also true – or so it seems to me – that if we obsess about what they cannot do now, or do not know now, we risk losing sight of the direction we could be taking them in. Valiant attempts to ‘differentiate’ often prove counterproductive because, cumulatively, they decrease challenge in the long-term.
A few things about differentiation that seem true to me are:
http://reflectingenglish.wordpress.com/ ... omment-978
I've left a comment at the end of the posting:
I think this is an extremely important topic and I agree with everything you have written here.
I am in the field of teacher-training and consultancy so ‘differentiation’ is a hotty for me.
Over and again I find teachers’ mindset gets in the way of ambitious expectations. When, for example, I find teachers blanking out half the words on an Activity Sheet for those children who, according to their mindset, “will be overwhelmed by so many words”.
In effect, the children who are apparently less mature, less articulate, or most needy, get much less practice than the more mature and apparently quicker-to-learn children.
Times this by day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.
Hey presto – there we have a contribution to the socio-economic gap, the gender gap, the EAL gap, the ‘dyslexia’ gap, the you-name-it-gap.
And I promise you that it started as the mindset, misconceptions about children’s capacity to learn, years of expectation that teachers will provide different levels of work for different children – special needs caused, in the long run, by the well-meaning teachers themselves and their conscious acts of ‘differentiation’ from the outset.