Teach Wonder
Teach Wonder
Everything but the Book Study: How to Differentiate Without Splitting Students Up
This week we discuss an Edutopia article on differentiating instruction without separating students. This article intersects several important aspects of teaching- good questioning strategies, making content accessible for students- and addresses the challenge of doing this when students are coming at a topic from a lot of different places.
Intro Music: David Biedenbender
Find us on social media:
Instagram: cmichcese
Facebook: cmich_cese
Julie, welcome to episode three of our series, everything but the book study, where one of us brings an article, a podcast, a piece of content that we have read or interacted with and know something about, and the other person doesn't. So today, I have brought an article, something that I actually found on Edutopia, which I know a lot of our teachers check out often. Something I like about it is it's not super long. And I was looking for something about questioning strategies, and this one hit the mark for me. So the title of the article is how to differentiate without splitting kids up.
Introduction:Okay, now we're recording. So welcome To Weach Wonder. Yes, welcome to teach wonder, a podcast hosted by Ashley O'Neil and Julie Cunningham.
Ashley O'Neil:So do you want me just go through and give you a quick overview? Okay, so basically, one of the things that I liked about this article is that it gave a realistic summary of challenges that I have heard teachers share, which is that you have a group of students, some of them are ready for a deeper engagement with a topic, some of them are still kind of on the facts and figures piece. And one of the really common methods that we think of when it comes to handling students who are all at different starting points is to put them in small groups, right? And in fact, in the second paragraph, it says, you know, too often differentiation gets confused with separation, and you think about the model where the teachers with one group, the other group is doing an independent activity, or as this author puts it, they're waiting without access to the expert in their room. And the other thing that this can do is it can take something that's pretty precious away from the teacher, because if the teacher has to move to all of these different packets of students over time, that can be a time waster. Now, I do think it's important, because I was reading this, and I like when students are interacting without a teacher in front of the group, right? I like when kids are learning from each other. In fact, it kind of made my I don't know my I paused for a minute when it said, like without enough access to experts in the room. But I think what this article is really talking about is when you're first engaging with a new skill set, a new mathematical strategy, a new something, and you're in a guided phase, right? So this article is not a comprehensive, all the time set of strategies, but it is a if you find yourself in a place where you want to have rich discussion with students or who are at different levels, here's a way you can do it in a whole group. That makes sense.
Julie Cunningham:Yeah, that makes sense. I think sometimes people balk at like having students teach their peers, which is maybe slightly different than the student interactions you're talking about too. So you wouldn't want the student to teach them here something new or to, I don't know, like, like, if they had questions that really should go to the teacher, or that was more likely that the teacher would answer appropriately. I suppose you wouldn't want that type of a question answered by a peer.
Ashley O'Neil:Yeah, exactly. And I think you know, in situations like this, the some of the examples that they talk about are when you're doing multi step word problems for the first time, and you're kind of engaging with that, and some of the students are catching on quite quickly, but it's not appropriate for them to then be teacher leaders in every group, like you said, or students are working on like new vocabulary or new grammatical structures. And the kids, you can tell that your students are just in different places. One of the quotes I liked from this it's just says teachers aren't or students aren't split apart. They're being pulled together by a question. And okay, I want to share some of the strategies. Some of them are probably review for all of you. Some of them are review for me, but I liked how they were put together. One of the strategies it talks about, often is an idea of a transfer question, where basically you've shared something in a lecture, in something through discussion, and you want to open it up for class discussion. Use a transfer question that's pretty open ended, that allows students to then apply that concept to a new context. So for example, a math example that they have is, where might we see multiplication in nature? An English example is, how does figurative language show up in music that you listen to? A science example is, if tectonic plates keep moving, how my earth what my earth look like in a million years? And I thought that was interesting, because that. Transfer allows the students to share whatever context they're interested in, and I see that often when we have students in our maker space, that when students can relate it to themselves, that's a really great way for them to ground what they know.
Julie Cunningham:Right? Kind of reminds me of when you ask students for background knowledge before beginning a new topic. So what do you already know about tectonic plates? Or what can you tell me about tectonic plates? Or what have you learned previously about or why do you think they're important? Or whatever your sort of introductory question discussion is to a new topic, it kind of reminds me the same thing, except that you would already have talked about that topic in your classroom, so students might have something to latch on to exactly.
Ashley O'Neil:And the other thing that I thought was interesting about this was doing multi layered questioning in that regard. So he calls it playing basketball with questions, which is basically where you start with a pretty surface level question. And maybe that's their view. Like yesterday we learned about ratios, right? Or Yesterday we learned about this aspect of the Civil War. And so you ask a surface level question that says, hey, who remembers what a ratio is? And that first question is a definition which is pretty surface level, but it gets the conversation rolling. And then you have students kind of pass the content around the room where students can add on. So okay, we know what a ratio is now. Thank you. Now, how does a ratio differ from a fraction so then another student can add on, and that's just a little bit more of a more in depth question, right? You have to both understand a ratio, not just parroting or reading it from your notes. You have to be able to understand both concepts and then compare them, and then a transfer question might be okay. So where do we use ratios in real life? And again, it's that open ended, because students could take it in a lot of different places. Everyone gets to hear that full sequence a surface level, a deeper and then a transfer everyone participates in it. But then the differentiation is there are questions at varying levels that allow students to access or include themselves right at whatever level they are.
Julie Cunningham:Yeah, I think there's, of course, this is, like you said, a short article, but for me, some of the nuances are all three of those questions have a right answer, and so, like, how right or wrong do I want to be when I raise my hand to participate? So that, to me, is some of the nuance of I understand what the author is saying about the varying levels of the questions and how they might make students feel more or less successful in terms of participation. But also, I think maybe if there's a way in which you don't have to be right or wrong when you answer the question, or maybe it's just that the classroom is a safe space, and so it's okay to be wrong right, and everybody feels safe in how they answer the question. But for me, I'd be looking for some of the questions to have maybe less of a
Ashley O'Neil:right and wrong answer. Like, I also think that gets at and again, like the limitation of an article, right? But we talk a lot with some of our STEM Ed scholars, with Corey on building on what we know. And I think it's that that beauty, or the teacher skill that's not here, maybe implied is the follow up question. So what happens if someone gets that the question, quote, unquote, wrong. When it says, like, what's how does the ratio differ from a fraction what that teacher does next? That nuance, yeah, is a part of both the classroom culture and then their own adeptness, knowledge of the student, knowledge of what the right move is, that keeps the conversation open so that child learns from it right, and is maybe building on their strength. So figuring out what was right in the question, or what was their thinking right, and
Julie Cunningham:the teacher's knowledge of the content right? Because you can't pivot fast enough if you don't, if you don't have a good sense for how is a ratio different from a fraction right? That that hesitation might say to some students, well, it wasn't quite right. So can you fix it? Maybe not really. What you mean really? What you mean is, yeah, there was a lot right with that answer. Let's just see if we can tweak the piece that isn't maybe quite what I was expecting.
Ashley O'Neil:Yeah. And I think if I had to, like, hazard a guess as to who the audience was or who this author maybe had in mind for this article, it definitely feels like this author is thinking about when I have kids, maybe who are ready to move on, or at a more advanced level at that that point. And I don't want to split them up, and I don't want to put this into like a teach students teaching other students situation. I want to keep them together and create a dynamic classroom discussion. I think thinking about varying that response complexity is a good place to start, and at the end of the day. A I think also forces the teacher to be really thoughtful about the questions that they have. I don't think that this could be done without a lot of practice, without some advanced notes on their part. Of like, here are the questions. Here's, am I thinking about the various layers of complexity? I think I agree with you. I would add an open ended question, or an opinion question or something that's not there at the moment.
Julie Cunningham:Yeah, yeah. And if you've taught this more than once, or you done your homework before teaching it, and you know what to expect for common misconceptions or preconceptions in the material, then you're probably going to tweak your some of your questions, maybe your higher level questions, right? To get at some of those, well, students maybe understand most of the material. They're still maybe have some different ways of thinking about the finer points, right? So I think yes, you would take notes for yourself and say these patterns show up and or look at what other teachers talk about is how this content works in their classrooms, and plan your questions accordingly. I almost feel like too it was maybe between the picture and just maybe my own background in teaching like, I feel like it was intended either the questioning skills were most appropriate for maybe a general classroom environment and or, like I could see it like, where you make A lot of levels right in, like, maybe k6 classroom, and make reading groups, or you make math level groups. And this is a way of saying we don't have to think about levels, because everybody can participate at whatever level they're at, and that by the time someone like me would get them in chemistry, or you'd get them in a really specific math, algebra, geometry, course, you'd have much more uniformity in your clientele. Now, of course, you'd still have, you'd still need to differentiate, but it maybe wouldn't be the same.
Ashley O'Neil:You would never be thinking of leveled literacy groups anyway.
Julie Cunningham:Yeah, right. So, right. So there wouldn't, there wouldn't be such a large continuum of maybe different skill sets at that point.
Ashley O'Neil:Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I think this example reminds me of that. So this is giving sentence starters, and the recommendation is, so if you want to do a turn and talk with your neighbors, give sentence starters at varying levels, which, again, there's some some homework implied in this that it does, doesn't explicitly talk about, like, you know, the levels of your students, you can match a sentence starter, well, to the various students in your classroom. You can do this in a way that's not clearly like, Oh, you're getting like, level one question, and I'm a level four question or whatever, right? But that is another interesting way. And I think one of the reasons I kept gravitating toward this article, even though I think it is a little bit narrow, it is kind of specific, is that I don't you don't always see teachers or articles that come forward that are focused on keeping students together and Building off of strengths and saying I recognize and acknowledge that there's different levels in my classroom, and I also think that all of the students can benefit from hearing from each other. One of the quotes he says in here is, like, when you split up students like this, you can often send unintended signals, like you belong in the advanced group, or you are on the level three track, or you're somewhere in the middle, right? And so then students internalize these labels, and teachers spend their valuable time rotating, figuring out that schedule, versus allowing everyone to be offered these questions at various levels, and then building from like a string space thing, I think that one, I don't know if this is near the end, and it has like curveball high performers and rare exceptions. And these are just some, like, additional layering options. One is to talk about, like, a lot of these, I think, are a way of saying you have a high performing student or a student who's ready to move further. How can you do something extra that isn't automatically more work, right? And so many of these, I think, are geared toward allowing more choice, opening up the question, giving them an opportunity to extend with something that's interesting to them, personally, which I'm interested in. But the second to last one says give approximate feedback. And I was curious if what you thought of this one, so I'll read it to you. Says provide a key without confirming correctness, so that students must monitor and adjust their own thinking. For instance, place a dot next to a step and say, check this part without revealing whether it's right or wrong. And I'm wondering what you think about that one, because that one gave me pause.
Julie Cunningham:It kind of reminds me I play a lot of cribbage, and so if you play a lot of cribbage, you. Don't you're supposed to help the person that you're playing against if they miss points. That's like, something that we would say encourages, like, Are you sure? Or do you want to recount your points? Or like, Are you like, do you want to recheck that, instead of saying, Oh, you left two points on the table, right? Because they're still your opponent. But that's kind of what it reminds me of just as a as a funny point, I wouldn't want to do that to somebody who had some at all right. Like to say, check this part, but I mean, I guess you could say, maybe take another look at this example and see if you can refine it without saying,
Ashley O'Neil:here's the here's the parts that are great and ready, and here's the part, yeah, I just feel like, as someone who was like a very much the I got everything right, I was the teacher's pet in every like, version of that narrative in school. This would have given me such a complex right, if you were putting dots next to things. And it could have, it was ambiguous,
Julie Cunningham:yeah, no, right? It should be ambiguous, I think. But I think you could say, without saying, here's the part that you need to fix. I think you could say, yeah, something about, I want you to take another look at and see if you can maybe refine this a little bit, yes. And I think maybe if you told the student like I'm always all about, of course, I've mostly worked with older kids, like telling them why I'm doing it right. Like you're, you're perfectly capable of fixing this without me telling you what's wrong. So I want you to go back and take another look at it. And if you really get to the point where you're so frustrated and you can't look at it anymore, then come see me again. But for now, I think, I think you can handle it. Why don't you go look like, without it being, yeah, I wouldn't want it tricky, right? Yeah. Like you're trying to catch them or trying to,
Ashley O'Neil:yeah, and their learning is so it's in a bit of a fragile state, right? Like, they're, they haven't cemented anything yet. They're still in the process. And if you threw that at me when I was in the process, it would, I think it would do more. It would be more confusing. That would be constructive. And I like what you're saying. I don't think we have to spell out for kids exactly what they should work on or look at or check on, but I do think that we should be clear to say, you know, here's where I think this is going really well. Here's where I wonder, you know, what could Why don't you take a look at this section and see how it differs between these two sections, right? And you don't have to give them a 123, fix.
Julie Cunningham:I also think like, if your sort of overall message in your classroom is that most of what we're doing in here is practice, right? Like, so then this just becomes a rough draft. And if this is a rough draft, then my feedback is to you, I think that this rough draft could be a little bit different before it's your final copy. So I want you to take another look at this part of it. So if, if that's sort of your whole like how you approach work in your classroom, where students mostly are almost always get to fix things, to improve, to demonstrate to you that their learning has changed, then this could just become another example of that, rather than but if everything in your classroom is about right or wrong and points, then this feels a little bit more like trickery. Yes, you know. So I think it's some of it speaks to sort of the overall how you've
Ashley O'Neil:set up your classroom. Yeah, right, yeah, yeah. And what type of content, right? Like, if it is a math problem that's pretty straightforward and you put a dot next to it, if you put next right, and you have a second grader, and it's a double digit addition problem, and everything like it is correct, all those things, and then you put a dot next to it,
Julie Cunningham:and you don't say, what? Show me another way that you could solve this problem, yeah. Or you just say, check on this. I would like to see more of your thinking process in your work, right? Or if you don't say something like that, then yes, it just becomes like a yes, a trick or a game. And there's no reason for classroom work to be Yeah. That I do think, like this article takes on a tough topic. It's tough to teach people how to ask good questions. It's tough to be good at it. It's tough to to, I think write an article that you know holds these nuances and gives really tangible examples, so, and especially in a not very many pages of, I mean, people write books about it, right? Like, so, so in a short article, like, I think that they've done there,
Ashley O'Neil:yeah, I think it was a good starting place, or a good review of things that maybe you already know. So, yeah, I thought that was an interesting find. So if you're interested in it, we'll obviously link the article in our show notes, and you can check it out. There are a couple companion things. He mentions the Frayer model. If you're familiar, not familiar. You can check that out there too. So.