Assignment 4A - Differentiating Content, Delivery and Assessment

I understand this particular assignment deals with differentiating content, delivery, and assessment, and those items are up for contention in just about every class that I take at National University.  So for this assignment, at the risk of receiving a poor grade, I am going to explain my own personal experience to help define what it all means to me as a teacher who strongly believes in differentiation.

I was steadfast in producing a pre-test that was connected to a post-test for a lesson that I wanted to conduct regarding the environmental hazards of plastic versus the human benefits.  I used a simple KWL chart to determine background knowledge, interest in what students wanted to know, and factored in what they should learn.  I had a worksheet crated to help support a 1/3-model classroom, which included remedial learners (including ELL), on-task learners, and gifted students.  I felt the level of understanding would translate itself through our general textbook.  The concept was a little more important than the content, but I was determined to make it real.  I could easily relate the teaching strategies to the standards because for science they are imbedded in the scientific method that we continually use for our experimentation and research.

            So I started posing questions ahead of the pre-test.  An amazing thing began to transform in the class.  Students began to ask me questions that I did not have reliable answers for in return.  So I began to write down on the board the multitude of questions that were coming up from their own personal interest into the subject.  For example:  Why aren’t plastic bags illegal?  Why can’t we tax people who use plastic bags?  Shouldn’t we have a biodegradable type of plastic that we can use?  Why does fruit rot in plastic bags and make plastic melt?  Are you saying we may even be drinking plastic particles?  Do animals die because we use too much plastic?  These were just a few of the questions that engaged my class.  So I let the conversation continue and progress.  Language was not even a barrier.  I simply let those students whom needed more time to explain their position or pose their questions have it.  We clarified as needed.   I even had vocabulary worksheets accompany the discussion for more affluent dialect.

            Then one of my students suggested we get into groups and make it a research project to determine problems and solutions that might help our environment.  I let them have at it.  We broke up into both heterogeneous and homogeneous groups based solely on interest and ability.  At this point in the project, I honestly could not tell my gifted students from my remedial learners.  The interest was so peeked and everyone seemed highly motivated to seek out their own facts and to verify their own opinions for solutions, I just ran with just about any idea that related to science.  Again, the project was still easily relatable to the standards of middle school science.

            The next session, we ironed out some of the ideas and challenges that kids were facing through design of technology and from other fact-finding sources.  Questions were being raised about chemical reactions, water table measurements, clarity of drinking water, global pollution, water pollution, landfill mining, the lists for finding the truth was astounding.  I didn’t have to ask students to do extra work, as they were already doing it.  I opened the sources to writing letters to manufacturers, to viewing reliable and biased websites to find out how they influenced consumer belief, to performing their own experiments to determine results, and even to counter some beliefs I let students argue and bring in examples during class time to help direct their position.  It seemed like answers generated more questions.  I noticed that my students began thinking, arguing, taking sides, and learning bias and discretion.  I was just a moderator to this learning.

            The outcomes were far more interesting and explicit and focused and met the content standards far more than I ever could have imagined if I remained on task with my original written lesson plan.  At that moment, I realized that real learning is a natural, uninhibited, and genuine connection in the classroom.  It was truly driven by pure curiosity and interest.  There were no answers in the back of the book to support meaningless equations.  But indeed there were equations that needed to be answered.  The beauty of this delivery was it was self-propelled and assessment was on going as more questions were raised.  It was real and tangible as opposed to being mainly theoretical.  Some students used visual aids that did not necessarily need them.  Some who did need them chose to speak with their own words instead.  Certainly it lead to a few dead ends, but the intellectual journey was individual and persistent as they tried. The skills it developed may not have been standardized or predictable, but that is what made it so interesting to those doing it.  It was a marvel of displaying the paradigm shift needed in modern education.   The shift of creating a learning environment that relates to real social and emotional problems that concern humanity today.  The shift to differentiating content, delivery and assessment all built in through asking a few simple questions.