On Differentiation: It's Not The Only Solution, But It's Part of It

DIFFERENTIATION: THE CURRENT PUZZLE
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My sixth graders sat up a little straighter when they saw the pink sheets in my hand. One asked, “Are those our verb contracts?” As I handed the papers out, students began calling out to each other. Questions like “What was your score on the pretest?” and “What does it say you need to work on?” rang through the room.

For many students, grammar is boring and irrelevant. In my classroom, much of what we do with grammar is embedded in our writing and reading; however, I handle some of the basics by giving pretests and then assigning activities and reviews for each student’s specific needs. This form of differentiation has worked well for my students and me for several years.

So I was surprised to read Dr. Jim Delisle’s column in EdWeek entitled "Differentiation Doesn’t Work."(link is external) This column shared Dr. Delisle's thoughts, along with supporting research, on why differentiation is NOT the cure for education's woes.

I'll admit—when I first read it, I found myself thinking, "Great. So what I've been encouraging and supporting colleagues in doing, as well as implementing myself, is really a waste of time and effort."

But here's the thing: it's not.

Ideally, in theory, differentiation is an amazing tool with powerful potential. Teachers identify the needs of their students and then plan tasks and activities at varying levels to meet the needs of the wide range of students in their rooms, and help those studentscontinue to learn and grow through these differentiated activities. This is the ideal.

However, the reality can be very different.

What Delisle was pointing out is that if we rely solely on differentiation to meet the needs of every single child, in every single classroom, we're doomed to failure in this effort. And he's exactly right. As Delisle notes, “Although fine in theory, differentiation in practice is harder to implement in a heterogeneous classroom than it is to juggle with one arm tied behind your back.”

The reality is this: the spread of needs in general education classrooms is huge. Given the economic realities of the past eight or so years, most general education classrooms are larger, not smaller. Teachers know that in a class of 28, there is likely to be a huge range of skills, abilities, and needs. And it’s more challenging to implement strong differentiated lessons and activities for 28 or 30 kids than it is for 18 or 20.

Of course, most teachers are going to do their very best. That’s who we are. When kids need something, we do what we can to help meet that need—whether it’s adjusting or adapting classwork, or providing lunch money so they aren’t hungry all afternoon. Wework hard.

Those of us who have been striving to routinely implement differentiated strategies in our general education classrooms probably know better than any of us that this approach is not the cure-all for education’s woes. It can be useful for certain students and certain lessons, but it is not a “magic bullet” in education.

My point is this: if we view differentiation as the one cure, the one “fix” that will allow all students to grow and achieve their maximum potential, we’re going to frustrate ourselves, our colleagues, and our students.

However, there are times and places when it’s effective and useful. Classroom teachers need to carefully consider their students, their students' needs, the standards they're working with, and how best to bring all that together. There is research that supports the use of differentiation and points to some very specific situations where it is most effective, such as this study(link is external) about high-achieving third graders in low-achieving schools.

Resources and Supports:

There are resources and supports available to help teachers use differentiation as one of many strategies. And teachers don’t have to do all this on their own. In fact, a study(link is external) by the National Research Center on Gifted and Talented points out that it takes a great deal of time, support, and the right kind of educational community to make differentiation happen in a diverse middle school. Teachers who are still working to use differentiation with high-ability students can find some good suggestions and strategies here(link is external).

One of my colleagues whose expertise includes strategies for teaching students with Asperger's once told me, "Once you've met a child with Asperger's, you've met a child with Asperger's." Just because a particular set of strategies works with one student doesn't guarantee that set will work with another student.

That's not true only of students who have an Asperger's diagnosis—it’s true of all students. The strategies that work with one class and subject will not necessarily be as successful elsewhere. It takes time to set up differentiated activities and lessons, just as it takes time to get to know those students and their strengths and needs.

Solution?

Perhaps the solution isn't to give up on differentiation. The solution may rest in how we structure our schools, classes, and teachers' work days. Perhaps with some innovative new thinking, we can arrive at solutions that will make differentiation and other teaching strategies more powerful and effective for students and their teachers. What do your experiences show you about differentiation? What do we need to make differentiation better?

Note: “Solving Jigsaw Puzzle”(link is external) by Yoel Ben-Avraham(link is external) is licensed CC by 2.0(link is external)

Schools With A Majority of African-American Students Are Like Prisons

Why Do Some Schools Feel Like Prisons?

 

Too Much Discipline Hurts Majority-Minority Schools

By Samina Hadi-Tabassum, Education Week

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Watching the protests and listening to the chants of "Hands up, don't shoot" following last summer's fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., fueled an argument that I have been making for some time with my graduate students and colleagues.

Rahm Emanuel

For almost two decades, I have been coaching and mentoring first-year teachers in Chicago's public schools; however, in the last few years, I have noticed a cultural shift in those schools with predominantly African-American enrollments. Some are turnaround schools that Mayor Rahm Emanuel's office has taken over because of low student test scores, as well as other complex challenges, including weak leadership and ineffective instruction.

When you enter these turnaround schools, there is often an eerie silence. You never hear children's voices in the hallways. Rather, you see lines of African-American children crossing the school with their hands behind their backs or their fingers pressed against their lips to indicate silence, and their eyes always facing front.

The monochromatic lines of uniformed children mimic prison lines, and the teachers' efforts seem focused on ensuring that students do not talk to each other and do not walk outside the line.

All day long, an immense amount of time and energy is spent making sure young African-American students are taught to obey.

In one K-12 school, when one of my graduate students had to go to the restroom, I walked her students to the cafeteria. Even in the cafeteria, children were not allowed to talk to each other.

I made the foolish mistake of having a conversation with a table of 1st grade girls when another teacher came over to me and yelled out, "You do not talk during lunch." At first, I thought the teacher was being sarcastic, but it was disheartening to realize after a few minutes that this young teacher, who was white, had been indoctrinated by her school to think that African-American and Latino children should not be allowed to talk at lunch. When the students were given time to actually act like children on the playground, they were often admonished for "acting like animals" when they returned to their classrooms.

Of course, my first-year teachers do not buy into this ideology of repression. But when I asked them whether their schools would have the same rules if the children were white, the young teachers responded with a unanimous no, coupled with the fear of losing their jobs if they, too, did not obey.

"When I asked them whether their schools would have the same rules if the children were white, the young teachers responded with a unanimous no."

Caught between educational theory that advocates for the whole child and a school culture that resembles a prison's, my first-year teachers have to make strategic decisions daily about what is best for their students and what rules they may need to subvert while avoiding the administration's gaze.

On this front, one of my graduate students, whom I'll call Angela, stayed after my class one day, quite upset.

I had taught my first-year teachers a literacy technique in which students come to the board and circle letters and sounds they recognize in a message written by the teacher. Then the students are told to put a square around a word they recognize and a triangle around a piece of punctuation, and to underline sight words from their classroom's "word wall." The interactive nature of the technique is what leads to its success.

However, when Angela was implementing this technique one day, a school administrator walked in and informally observed her teaching.

When Angela was finished, the administrator pulled her aside and told her she liked how the students identified the different parts of language, but that they were not allowed to come to the board to do so. Why? Because 1st graders make too much noise while at the board. Angela knew the suggestion was counterintuitive, and she knew that the noise her students made was from the joy of learning—a sound missing in turnaround schools. She came to me torn about what to do next.

Many days, after supervising my first-year teachers, I drive less than five miles to pick up my own children from their schools in Oak Park, Ill.—a middle-class suburb known for its diversity.

In the hallways of my daughter's elementary school, there is the cacophony of children laughing, running down the hallways, and slamming lockers.

On the floors, winter wear is strewn all over the place along with forgotten worksheets. In the cafeteria, the noise of children eating and talking can at times become overwhelming; so, too, the sight of discarded food on the floor.

Do we find this chaotic behavior tolerable and less threatening because the school is majority white? If these were mostly African-American and Latino children, would many administrators in the Chicago public schools and elsewhere not have tolerated it and perhaps even found it threatening?

Finally, when will turnaround schools take school culture into consideration and produce a school that enriches the whole minority child?

Samina Hadi-Tabassum is an associate professor of education at Dominican University, in River Forest, Ill., where she directs the English-as-a-second-language/bilingual program and works with cohorts of first-year teachers. She is writing a book addressing race relations in public schools.

Education Week

Where Do Biases Start? A Challenge to Educators

By Darius D. Prier

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Earlier this year, I was invited to speak to a few hundred African-American male high school students in Jacksonville, Fla. The young people there were searching for answers in the untimely death of their fellow Jacksonville resident Jordan Davis, 17, who was shot and killed at a gas station in November 2012 after playing what perpetrator Michael Dunn called "loud thug music."

Like the shooting earlier in 2012 of Trayvon Martin, another unarmed 17-year-old black male, this death represented a shocking example of some teens' sense of being trapped by a new kind of racial optics, what I call the "hip-hop gaze." This is when signs, symbols, and images in hip-hop (e.g., language, music, style of clothing), associated with urban youths in popular culture, unfairly convey trouble or criminality about black males to the mainstream public.

This term emerged from my previous research via a series of focus-group conversations with African-American male teens at a hip-hop-based youth center. The young students I spoke with felt teachers unfairly judged them with suspicion and fear based on the sagging of their pants and their wearing of do-rags on their heads, hoodies, and puffy "bubble coats."

Ultimately, students argued that their sense of style and aesthetics prompted teachers' overzealous efforts to suspend them even as they gave other students lesser punishments for the same offenses. After August's deadly police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., legions of disaffected young people who also embodied a hip-hop style protested in the streets, facing off against heavily armed law-enforcement officers as the world watched. All of this suggests that these young people have perspectives we need to hear.

The tragedies of Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, and Michael Brown remind me of what young people in places like the youth center in Jacksonville have been saying for years. They remind me that distorted racial representations in popular culture can influence a culture of punishment toward black males.

As a challenge to educators, I offer the following questions: How do we weigh hip-hop youth culture in relation to the punishment of young people's identity? Where do we, as educators, learn the stereotypes, prejudices, and biases toward students that need to be unlearned? What proactive, practical strategies might we as educators take in writing new scripts for how we think about African-American males, different from what the mainstream media tell us? What is the role and critical awareness of cultural context in relation to lessening punitive practices against African-American males in K-12 schools?

Preservice teacher education programs might be a great place to start addressing these questions. I offer the following recommendations:

"Distorted racial representations in popular culture can influence a culture of punishment toward black males."

• Study race and masculinity. The study of race and masculinity in relation to the punishment of black males must become an integral part of preservice teacher education curricula. There is a documented, patterned history in government, academia, and news media of developing racially coded narratives of black males being aggressive, dangerous, and menaces to society. These packaged narratives exacerbate negative practices toward minority youths in schools and the larger society.

Stop-and-frisk policies, stand-your-ground laws, and suspension and expulsion practices that filter students into the school-to-prison pipeline are examples of this. Subsequently, a historical analysis in the social construction of race and masculinity in relation to past and present punishment practices toward black males would give preservice teachers insights into the differential treatment of this population.

• Explore critical media literacy. A majority of the education students I teach at the university level come from isolated, segregated, affluent, white communities. Many desire to be teachers in urban school settings, but have had limited contact with communities of color. Subsequently, much of what they know about the black community comes from the radio, music, movies, or television. These media often provide a narrow characterization of black male identity related to crime, sports, and entertainment.

Therefore, teacher education programs should offer opportunities for students to engage in critical media literacy. Students should learn to examine how representations in the news and popular culture can intentionally or unintentionally reinforce stereotypical representations of black males as criminals in our subconscious. When preservice teachers develop the skill set for critically reading how the media as an institution possess the power to distort racial identities, they gain a new consciousness that counters the image of black males as thugs to humanize their perceptions.

• Pursue community engagement. Given the de facto segregated living conditions of many preservice teachers, social interaction with diverse populations becomes extremely important in urban teacher education programs. Unfortunately, the term "urban" has come to mean "black," and the term black has come to mean all that is dangerous, poor, and dysfunctional. Therefore, schools in urban areas have come to mean teaching dangerous poor black children and teens. These cultural-deficit labels come to typify how black boys and men are viewed within mainstream society.

To counter these narratives, I have developed relationships with community leaders in some of the poorest areas of Pittsburgh and host many classes and community forums in these areas. At these classes and forums, black youths become "teachers," sharing their experiences of institutional racism; the aftermath and effects in the trauma of poverty, violence, and racial profiling; and the impact of these challenges on their education experience in schools. Preservice teachers come away from these discussions developing empathy and understanding the emotions that emerge from institutional and societal neglect. These narratives become the unofficial curriculum to guide my students' thinking in how to develop positive pedagogical relationships with urban youths.

• Engage with hip-hop learning communities. For better and worse, many students see themselves through the prism of hip-hop culture. To disengage with it is to disengage with the soundtrack to their lives. Hip-hop is a culture upon which the very best of the social-political tradition, rather than its gangsta proclivities, can be mobilized into an educational medium. Being socially and politically conscious means expressing discontent with institutional inequality; promoting peace and unity; and empowering youth voices for social justice.

When young people recognize that teachers know something about their culture in a way that does not denigrate or demonize them, an immediate pedagogical bridge is made in the teacher-student relationship. For example, I have invited socially aware hip-hop artists from the community into my classrooms and students from my classes into local hip-hop communities. These invitations create co-learning opportunities. The artists perform, relate their lyrics to contemporary issues, and discuss the music's impact on urban education. These learning experiences open preservice teachers' minds about innovations in teaching and how to make the curriculum relevant to the lived experiences of urban youths. They also increase these future teachers' familiarity with the language, culture, community, and social and political context from which hip-hop emerges.

Moving forward, the challenge is to utilize contemporary events in popular culture as a canvas to educate preservice teachers about how race, representation, and masculinity in media can affect how we treat others, such as black males in urban education. When we do this cultural work in urban education, perhaps the Trayvon Martins, Jordan Davises, and Michael Browns of the world will not die in vain, and we will keep kids in schools rather than push them out.

Darius D. Prier is an assistant professor in the Duquesne University School of Education, in Pittsburgh. He is the author of Culturally Relevant Teaching: Hip-Hop Pedagogy in Urban Schools (Peter Lang International Academic Publishers, 2012) and is a consultant and speaker on youth leadership, popular culture, and urban education. He is working on a forthcoming book, The Media War on Black Male Youth in Urban Education.