Differentiated -v- Personalized

At a previous school we seemed to go through a very long process (years) to eventually arrive at a place where the goal was to differentiate instruction.  My current school has jumped right in and even gone one stage further.  We have gone beyond differentiation and focused on personalized learning.  At first these may seem very similar, but they are in fact almost total opposites.  Personalized learning is child-centred.  Differentiation is teacher-centred.  Personalized learning focuses on the learner, differentiated learning focuses on the instruction.  In personalized learning, students come to understand how they learn best as they are active participants in designing their learning goals and deciding what they are learning, in fact they own their own learning.  In differentiated learning the students are more passive as the teachers have already determined the learning outcomes which are the same for the whole group of students.  Teachers have also selected the content, tools and resources that different students will use.

The US Department of Education defines the difference in the following way:

Differentiation refers to instruction that is tailored to the learning preferences of different learners. Learning goals are the same for all students, but the method or approach of instruction varies according to the preferences of each student or what research has found works best for students like them.  Personalization refers to instruction that is paced to learning needs, tailored to learning preferences, and tailored to the specific interests of different learners. In an environment that is fully personalized, the learning objectives and content as well as the method and pace may all vary.

As we have gone beyond differentiation and are looking at the individual child, the importance of using data collected about that child is of paramount importance.  Last week's staff meeting was devoted to working in groups to look at data we have and to ask what more we need.  Next week many of the teachers are participating in a 3-day workshop with trainers from the Data Wise group at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education.

The approach to assessment is also very different.  Differentiated assessment is assessment for learning. It is formative with the aim of aligning further instruction with helping students meet the pre-determined learning outcomes.  It provides the teacher with information about what the students know and can do in order to help them to design the next steps.  Personalized assessment regards assessment as learning.  It is the learners who self-assess and reflect on their progress and come up with their own new goals.  Because assessment is different, reporting is different too.  In personalized learning it is the learner's responsibility to identify their strengths, communicate their learning to others and to plan how they can develop further.

The differences between individualized, differentiated and personalized learning are explained very clearly in this chart by Barbara Bray and Kathleen McClaskey.

Photo Credit:  by Ken Owen, 2011 

Using Tech Tools for Assessment and Differentiation

Last year at school we had a good look at our curriculum and wrote Pre-School to Grade 12 learning outcomes for the different subjects/curriculum areas.  This year we are looking at assessment - how we are going to formatively and summatively assess the students on their learning journeys.  At the same time I've been thinking about how we can use technology to differentiate instruction, to help all students succeed in reaching these outcomes.

I've always favoured choice.  Students learn in different ways and show their understanding in different ways too.  As far as technology goes, some tools may be perfect for one student to show his or her understanding, but might not be right for another student.  Some students like to talk, some like to write, some may prefer to show their understanding as a graphic.  In IT I like to think we can support all the different ways that students want to show what they know.

Last year our Grade 3s got to the stage where at the end of the year students were able to choose what tool they wanted to use, and we would support whatever choice they made (see post supporting whatever they want to use).  These students are now in Grade 4, of course, and so it seemed that a good way to start the year would be to offer them the same choices for their first unit of inquiry.  In a planning meeting we decided that all Grade 4 students would get to explore Glogster as a possible tool that they might want to use, but that there would be choice given for the students who didn't want to make an interactive poster.  I feel the students have already been introduced to a variety of different tools last year. Perhaps students might now decide to make a video, a cartoon or a mind map rather than a "traditional" presentation, and even if they want to make a presentation there are many tools they know how to use, such as Prezi, Voicethread or Spicy Nodes.  It's up to them to decide what to use and how to use it.

Given this sort of choice, the technology the students choose will naturally lead to differentiation.  Even students who choose to use the same tool will use it in different ways to produce something unique and something that reflects their differing interests, abilities and skills.  They will all show their learning in the way that is best for them.

A couple of years ago, with our older Middle School students, I was teaching MYP technology and gave similar choices.  At that time I didn't even teach the students how to use the tools, this was part of their exploration.  I showed them some different examples of what could be done with the tools, their role was to dig deeper and teach themselves a couple that appealed to them, eventually choosing one for their assignment.

Getting back to our Grade 4s, another thing I'm shortly going to be introducing them to is their own blog.  Last year in Grade 3 all the classes had a blog and the students all used that.  Now I think it's time for them to start their own, to be able to collect their work in one place and reflect on it.  To be able to take this on with them as they move up the school.  I'm thinking of showing them Posterous (which I see has now been revamped into Posterous Spaces).  I'm thinking this blog may be a sort of ePortfolio, a place where students will be able to reflect on their learning, what they know, understand and can do. And this blog can also be a tool for assessment, and one that provides plenty of scope for differentiation.

Photo Credit:  Colours that reflect Joy  by Rilind Hoxha

Integrating Understanding by Design and Differentiated Instruction: focusing on the learning

The only way we can truly know what our students have learned, what they have understood, and what they still need to understand is with formative and summative assessment.  As teachers this should inform our teaching too, so that we can effectively differentiate.  Tomlinson and McTighe refer to effective assessment as a photo album, not just a snapshot of where a particular student is at a set time.  Reliable evidence of learning will involve using more than one assessment, more than just an end of unit test, and because our students vary in the way they prefer to show their learning and understanding it's important to assess in a variety of ways.

While it's easy to assess knowledge, it's harder to assess understanding.  Knowledge of basic facts is something you either know or you don't.  Assessing understanding is more a matter of seeing where a student is on a continuum and will often involve a student being able to apply the knowledge to a new situation.  This is where choice is very important:  some students may prefer to show this understanding by doing or making something, some may prefer to give an oral or written report, others may like to use something more visual.  To really assess understanding the student will need to make a choice of which way best shows their learning.  Tomlinson and McTighe state:  A totally standardized, one-size-fits-all approach to classroom assessment may be efficient, but it is not "fair" because any chosen format will favor some students and penalize others.  Recently when our Grade 3s were designing energy efficient buildings as part of their summative assessment for Sharing the Planet, they had the choice of making a model of a building and then photographing the model or designing it using Sketch Up.  There was also a booklet where students could write about the energy sources used to power their building, the materials they would use for building and tips for making their houses more energy efficient.

I've often thought that formative assessment is more important than summative assessment as it allows for feedback and the students can then adjust what they are doing and improve.  For the Grade 3 summative assessment students worked on the house design throughout the week.  They could get help and advice from their homeroom teacher as well as from me from an IT or design technology perspective.  We could ask them questions which would prompt them to think further about what they were doing.

The approach to this unit of inquiry and its focus was completely different from last year.  I think both the teachers and the students were all learners in this unit.

Photo Credit:  Selection 1 by Jim Manka-Taylor

Integrating Understanding by Design and Differentiated Instruction: focusing on the teaching

One of the most important things teacher can do is decide WHAT to teach - what it is essential for our students to know.  Yet learning goes much further than the simple retention or recall of information, true learning consists of organizing and using the ideas and skills embodied in the learning.  Because of this HOW to teach - the instruction - is also an important focus for teachers.  Tomlinson and McTighe state:

Attending to quality of curriculum while de-emphasizing  instruction may provide great mental stimulation for teachers, but is unlikely to do the same for the young people we serve.  On the other hand, attention to the quality of instruction without an equal emphasis on curriculum may provide novelty or entertainment for students, but it will almost certainly not result in durable and potent learning outcomes.

They go on to identify the attributes of good teachers, some of which I summarise below :

• They establish clarity about curricular essentials:  it's not possible to teach everything, so it's important to prioritize what is most useful and durable.  At the same time it's important to differentiate.  Giving struggling learners less to do is not helping them master the content or skills, giving advanced learners more of what they already understand doesn't help them either.  Curriculum based on enduring understandings, however, will give multiple entry points for the students, many different options for exploring or inquiry, and many different ways for students to show their learning and understanding.
• They accept responsibility for learner success and understand that if a student has not learned something this could be because the teacher has not taught it well enough - if a student is not making progress than the teacher is not teaching or reaching that student.  Great teachers know there are alternative ways of teaching and learning and that they need to find out which ones work for each of their students.
• They develop communities of respect by valuing the multiple perspectives of their students and help students to take responsibility for their own successes.
• They use many different ways of teaching - as Tomlinson and McTighe point out a dining room that serves only one or two items quickly becomes monotonous - different instructional strategies are more engaging for learners.

Photo Credit:  Listen and Love by Denise Carbonell

Integrating Understanding by Design and Differentiated Instruction: focusing on the content

Last week was a fairly tough one for me with meetings about learning outcomes where some teachers were visibly upset.  I struggle with the idea of a locked-down Pre-School to Grade 12 approach with hundreds of different outcomes that need to be assessed each year - clearly teachers are feeling stressed by the "overload".  I have never been a fan of a one-size-fits-all approach.  I do not like pushing square pegs into round holes.  I have been reading further about UbD and DI and how this relates to content.  It seems the crucial question is this:  how can we address the required content standards while remaining responsive to individual students?  Carol Ann Tomlinson and Jay McTighe state:

Despite all the good intentions and many positive effects, the standards movement has not solved the "overload" problem.  In fact, instead of ameliorating the problem, the standards may have exacerbated it.

The backward planning process is one way of trying to ensure that the desired results are at the forefront of planning.  At our planning meetings we do always start out by asking what we want our students to know, understand and be able to do by the end of the unit of inquiry.  We cannot cover everything - we need to decide what our priorities are and to focus on those.  We have to decide what content is worthy of understanding.  I know some teachers have a hard time with this one - there are things they love to teach and many activities they know are fun, interesting and engaging - but we have to make choices.  After my Project Zero summer school I remember ditching about 70% of the "activities" I was doing.  It was scary and liberating at the same time.

Jay McTighe refers to the "twin sins" of activities and coverage.  He says that the first sin is most prevalent in elementary and middle schools where the focus is often on activities - many of which lack long-term substance.  The second sin of coverage is more prevalent at the secondary level - where often the text book is seen as the syllabus that needs to be worked through.  I've seen this second sin in primary schools too, however, where teachers feel they have to have all students work through a particular spelling book, reading scheme or maths book by the end of the year.

Reading through chapter 2 of Tomlinson & McTighe's book I came across an interesting section about how we identify the big ideas and how we develop essential questions while at the same time being true to the standards or learner outcomes.  The strategy involves unpacking the nouns and verbs:  the nouns are the big idea and lead to the essential questions, while the verbs suggest how these understanding can be assessed.  This seems like a good way forward so next week I am going to have another look at the some of the learner outcomes and see if the big ideas and suggested assessments mesh in any way with our current units.

Photo Credit:  Square Peg by Simon Greig

Integrating Understanding by Design and Differentiated Instruction: focusing on the students

This year I've been thinking a lot about UbD and DI and recently borrowed a book from the professional development section of our school library on this very subject.  Written by the gurus of these practices, Carol Ann Tomlinson and Jay McTighe, I knew that this was a book I wanted to read when on the very first page I came across the statement:  beset by lists of content standards and ...... accountability tests, many educators sense that both teaching and learning have been redirected in ways that are potentially impoverishing for those who teach and those who learn.

At the recent ECIS IT Conference I was in a session where we were asked what factors could influence how well a student was doing at school.  We came up with many different things, only one of which was connected with the actual teaching.  In the first chapter of the book it was pointed out that effective teachers take account of the following:

• WHOM they are teaching - the students
• WHERE they are teaching - the learning environment
• WHAT they teach - the content
• HOW they teach - the instruction

If teachers lose sight of any one of these, the quality of learning is impaired.

Having read previous work by Carol Ann Tomlinson, I know she believes in teaching to the high end.  That all students benefit from complex tasks that encourage creative thinking.  She says that differentiation begins with what are too high expectations for many students - but that the purpose of differentiation is to support and enable more and more students to succeed at these very high levels.  Often it is a matter of allowing learners to express their learning in ways that best suit their strengths through varied products and performances.  Yet assignments often don't allow opportunities for diversity and students are often not encouraged to express diverse views.

The final section of the first chapter states:  Excellent teaching is of immense importance.  So is coherent, meaning-rich curriculum.  But in the end, education is about learning.  Learning happens within students, not to them.  Learning is a process of creating meaning that happens one student at a time .... However impressive our curriculum design, it will have to be implemented in diverse ways .... and in response to diverse learner needs .... or it will not result in learning.

The next chapter is all about the content and what really matters in learning.  I'm excited to be reading more.

Photo Credit:  Think Different by Guy Fawkes

Differentiated Assessment

This school year I've been thinking a lot about the type of assessments students are doing and about how these can be differentiated.  I've been trying to give students more choice in the IT they are using to show their understanding.  Here are some things I've been trying out as well as ideas that I still want to work on:

• Being more open-ended:  for example with our Grade 3s when they were doing narrative storytelling (adventure stories with that involved decision making) the task was the same for all students but the tools they could use were different.  The idea here is not to be too rigid in what the end product should look like, but to be sure that what we are assessing is the understanding, not the use of the tool.  As someone said recently "painting by numbers only shows how good you are at following instructions".  Often in the past I've given different assignments to different students, now I'm realising that we just need to give the students multiple pathways to a target and not a different target,  showing that there are different ways of getting to the same goal, letting the students choose which is the best way for them, and then providing the support and scaffolding the students need to succeed.
• Observing the process more:  In the past I've tended to assess the final product - and many students have ended up with a similar product which has shown very little about their IT skills or abilities.  The product is important, it must be relevant, but I've come to realise more and more it's the process that counts.
• Focusing on the learning, rather than the achievement: making sure that all students are challenged and are learning something new.
• Encouraging more reflection and discussion:  accepting all answers but then asking students why they think that or why they have done things in a certain way.

Photo Credit:  18 pans of paint by hddod

Differentiation - how do you plan for it?

When I start to think about differentiation - about all the many individuals I teach (over 300 of them) - it feels almost overwhelming.  How does a teacher plan to meet all the needs of all the students?  How do you make sure that every student is learning?  Here are some more thoughts based on the Differentiation in Practice book that I'm reading.

It's important for teachers to know the following about their students:
Student readiness -  this is the thing that I find most challenging:  if a student can complete a task effortlessly, he or she may not be learning.  If the work is too difficult, the student will end up being frustrated and also not learning.  The best learning takes place when a task is a little too difficult for a student's current level of knowledge, understanding or skill, but only when there is a support system that helps students to bridge the gap.
Interest - there are many ways to link what has to be learned with the students' own interests.  However the best teachers also help students to develop new interests.
Learning style - working in collaboration with others, or working alone, for example.

How can teachers adapt the curriculum to meet the needs of their students:
Content - teachers need to keep constant WHAT all students need to learn, but need to modify HOW students access the content.   For example this might mean varying the reading level of materials.  Sometimes teachers need to vary WHAT the students are learning, depending on their readiness.
Process - teachers can vary the activities that students do which lead them to their knowledge, understanding and skills.
Products - teachers can vary what students can do to show their knowledge, understanding and skills.

Photo Credit:  Crayon Tips by Darren Hester

Differentiation - what does it look like?

This post is based on the book Differentiation in Practice by Carol Ann Tomlinson and Caroline Cunningham Eidson.

Last year some teachers from school went on a workshop in Rome about differentiation.  It was great to have a talk about this workshop with one of the teachers on her return.  Now I'm reading about what a differentiated classroom looks like.

1. A strong link between assessment and instruction - pre-assessment is very important and forms the basis on which lessons are planned.  Assessment, both formal and informal, is ongoing throughout the unit of inquiry, so that teaching can be adjusted to ensure students are making progress.  It's important that there is choice - more than one way of students being able to show what they know, understand and can do.
2. Clear learning goals for all students and a good knowledge of skills and understanding that precede and extend beyond the grade-level curriculum so the teacher can help students make up their learning deficits or can challenge those who need their learning extended.
3. Flexible groupings - sometimes whole class, sometimes individuals, sometimes based on similar learning needs or interests and sometimes mixed-readiness groups.  It's important students have the opportunities to mix with a wide range of peers.
4. Flexible use of time, space and materials 
5. Students are involved in the workings of the classroom - for example making class rules/essential agreements, helping other students, keeping records of their goals, doing various class jobs - all of which contribute to a sense of community.
6. The emphasis is on individual growth and on students achieving their personal best - each student is stretched - tasks are difficult but achievable.
7. Teachers have high standards for their own personal growth
8. Teachers work with specialists to meet students' needs - second language teachers, learning support teachers, gifted education teachers and counsellors are all partners.

Photo Credit:  Colors by Brian

Who, what, where and how

One of the activities we did at the Project Zero summer institute I attended was to debate what was more important - what we taught or how we taught.  The participants got into 2 different corners of the room and had to persuade those in the opposite corner to join them by explaining their thinking - some people did change after listening to the arguments.  Me, I sat in the middle with 2 others. We couldn't decide.  On the one hand what we teach is so important - the choices we make about what is important for our students to know, understand and be able to do, the choices we make to concentrate on conceptual understanding rather than just knowledge of lots of facts.  On the other hand, how this is taught can be the make-or-break for students.  The whole time teachers are making choices - they are balancing the needs of the students and the requirements of the curriculum, or, as Carol Ann Tomlinson says, the are addressing the who, where, what and how of teaching.

Who:  a classroom is made up of diverse individuals all of which affect learning:  gender, culture, personal interests, ability, experience and intelligence.
What:  this is the knowledge and skills students will need in life.  For some students who are missing critical understanding and skills the teacher will need to backtrack and give additional instruction, for other students they need to be challenged and encouraged to move forward.
Where:  the learning environment is very important if students are to feel the classroom is a place where they are valued and can become the best they can be.
How:  each student needs to be taught in accordance with his/her readiness, interests and learning style - at times whole class teaching, at other times small groups.  It's important for students to come to know what works best for them.  It's the how of teaching that really determines whether or not a teacher is differentiating and meeting the needs of all the students.

Photo Credit:  Water Drop Photography Tutorial by Steve Wall

Digital Storytelling 4 different ways

At the end of September I started working with our Grade 3 teachers on digital storytelling.  The aim of this for me was that each class would explore a different Web 2.0 tool for telling a story, and that it would be the choice of each class teacher which tool the students would use (see earlier post).  My underlying aim in all this was that this team would come to appreciate that learning looks different between each class, and that eventually it will look different within each class too.  Before this year our Grade 3 team had worked together for a number of years and were comfortable with doing things the same way, but this year with one of the team out on maternity leave and another class with a teacher who was new to the grade, it was time to shake things up a bit and have the teachers try some new and different things.

The assignment for all classes was the same - students would write a narrative story that involved decision making.  Each teacher worked on the structure of a story, characters, settings and so on.  One class decided to use comic strips to tell their stories.  This was made using Bitstrips.  The class learnt about how to show different facial expressions and tell a story with dialogue and just the minimum amount of words.  We talked about how your brain processes images thousands of times faster than words and how important visuals are in telling a story.

Another class decided they wanted to work on characters and settings and used the lovely artwork provided on the StoryBird website.

Another class wanted to use animation.  For this we used the ZimmerTwins website and had the students make animations after first drawing up storyboards that would show action, setting and speech.  These animations were also excellent.  Unfortunately the class signed in as a regular account, rather than a VIP account, which makes it difficult for me to show an example of how these stories ended up.  The students, however, had a great time and were very engaged in their stories.  Below is an example from another class that also made an animation about decision making - in this case making healthy decisions.

ZimmerTwins

Finally one class decided to use photography and had the students set up scenes.  They then used VoiceThread to tell the story orally.  This was an excellent activity as it involved a lot of different skills.  Even more impressive is the fact that most of the students are not native English speakers and some have only been in the school for a couple of months.

So what we ended up with was 4 very different ways of telling a story and the Grade 3 teachers all learned a lot in the process.

For our current unit How the World Works, students are researching different natural or man-made disasters and will make an oral presentation as their summative assessment.  With this unit I have also given the teachers a choice about what presentation tool the students will use.  Some teachers have chosen Prezi, some have chosen SpicyNodes and one is going to let her students decide which tool they want to use.

I'm really excited to see how giving both teachers and students choices in how they present their work is leading to an enormous improvement in both the quality of the work and the motivation of students who are actively engaged in their learning.

The student work linked to here has been published with the support and enthusiasm of the students' parents.  

Decisions, Decisions

This year the ICTL Department has come up with the following goal:

To develop and encourage different ways for students to show their understanding using technology.  

Our plan is to expose students to a range of different tools, which could also be used in summative or formative assessments, so that students have a choice in how they best show their understanding.   Our aim would be to do this for a minimum of 2 units of inquiry this year in Grades 2, 3, 4 and 5.  This is already being done for one unit in Grade 5, with ICTL support of the PYP Exhibition.

During our first unit of inquiry with the Grade 3 students I have already tried to introduce the idea that students may choose different ways to show their understanding.  I decided to introduce this to our teachers by using digital storytelling to support the narrative adventure story writing being done in class with all 4 classes of Grade 3 students, but using a different Web 2.0 tools with each class.  I gave our teachers a choice about which tools they wanted to use with their students.  The aim was to show them that we all have different ways of showing what we know and that it's OK that the way of doing this is not the same across the grade level.  My hope is that once the teachers are comfortable that they can choose to do things that are different from their colleagues, that they will let their students choose to do things in a different way from the other students in the class too.


One of the teachers in Grade 3 is also the Primary Drama Coordinator.  She decided she wanted to have the students use drama to tell a story, to photograph each other showing the relevant parts of the story and then to put these photos into VoiceThread and have the students narrate the story.  Another teacher was working on settings - she was having the students use art to create lovely watercolour paintings of the settings.  She decided she'd like to continue to use art and chose Storybird as the tool for her students to use for making an online book with the story art provided on the website.


One of our teachers decided she wanted to use animation.  She chose to have her students use ZimmerTwins to write a story about decision making.  The final teacher had her class create characters in Bitstrips, which could then be turned into a comic strip.


The task for each class was the same and I used Jason's Ohler's book Digital Storytelling in the Classroom to go over a visual story map that all students would be following:

The task for all students was to make a story that had an introduction which would include the setting and the characters.  The character would encounter a problem that would cause some conflict and would eventually transform him or herself in order to find the solution for the problem.  There would have to be a conclusion to the story.  This story map reinforces the central idea of  the unit of inquiry which is "The decisions we make can cause and resolve conflict".

All of our students have explored the Web 2.0 tool chosen by their teacher.  Soon they will be ready to create their stories.  At the end of the unit I would like the teachers to share how the students created their stories and talk about the plus and minus points associated with the tool they chose.  By sharing these tools with the rest of the grade I'm hoping it will let the other teachers see some different possibilities that they could use with their classes later in the year for other writing assignments.  Already the teachers are enthusiastic about the choices they have made.  Hopefully they will come to understand how enthusiastic the students will be once we give them choices and ownership of their work too.

Photo Credit:  Decisions, decisions by Garrett Coakley

There are numerous pathways to understanding

One of the joys of working in an IB World School is the emphasis the IB places on learning how to learn. The PYP curriculum is broken down into the written curriculum (what do we want to learn?), the taught curriculum (how best will we learn?) and the learned curriculum (how will we know what we have learned?). As PYP teachers, therefore, we have to give equal attention to the content, our pedagogy and assessment.
This year I’ve had a number of conversations with friends who are teaching secondary students about the “dumbing down” of the curriculum. Some of these are colleagues I used to work with when I was teaching in England, who are concerned about the standards of the GCSEs and A’Levels in England being lower in recent years; some of them are colleagues in international schools who are worried about the number of students they are teaching with special needs and how we are meeting these needs. One of the words that has cropped up frequently in these conversations is “rigor” (or the lack of it). Sadly, some of them have even referred to differentiation as the “dumbing down” of the curriculum.
In my holiday reading I came across a quote from Alfie Kohn:

A lot of horrible practices are justified in the name of “rigor” or “challenge”. People talk about “rigorous” but often what they really mean is “onorous” with schools turned into fact factories. This doesn’t help kids become critical thinkers or lifelong learners.

If we accept that there are many ways to learn something, differentiation should be making the learning more stimulating and meaningful for students at a level of challenge appropriate to each of them. It should not involve “dumbing down”, however there is no point in a student struggling to learn or show his or her understanding in a way that is too difficult, when he or she may be able to do this in a simpler way more appropriate to his or her abilities. For teachers finding ways to do this is challenging - in fact finding ways of meeting individual student needs is one of our greatest challenges as teachers and something that we cannot just change overnight. Many teachers are also concerned about the amount of time and work it would take to differentiate their classrooms. In their book Making the Difference, Bill and Ochan Powell make the point that differentiation shouldn’t involve adding something extra:

It is, in fact, a different way of doing the same thing – but from the perspective of the learner, doing it more effectively and more efficiently.
Earlier this school year several of my colleagues went to Rome for a differentiation workshop with Carol Ann Tomlinson. As I travel to school with one of these colleagues, we had many great discussions about this workshop in our drives back and forth. I didn’t attend the conference, so this is second hand, but the main message I got from these discussions is that developing a differentiated curriculum is a slow process. With 6 units of inquiry, we should perhaps aim to differentiate one unit in the first year, and then another the year after. Colleagues in the same team may well be working on differentiating other units that we can then share. My aim for next year as an IT teacher, therefore, will be to ensure that during the course of the year, each grade level has at least one unit where the students have a choice in how they use IT for the “finding out” part of the inquiry cycle, and a similar choice in how they use IT for showing what they understand.

Photo Credit:  Crayola by Thomas Hawk

What sex is your brain?

The BBC website used to have a quiz on it called What Sex Is Your Brain? It was an interesting little quiz involving various tasks and reacting to various (very similar) images of faces. A couple of months ago I attended a workshop in Munich with Dan Pink, looking at the differences between the left and right sides of the brain. I was interested to learn that some of these are gender based.



As a child growing up in the 1960s I had a pretty traditional upbringing. I wore skirts and dresses and played with dolls. My brothers wore trousers and played with cars and train sets. All of us went to single-sex secondary schools. During the time I’ve been a teacher I’ve heard over and over again that boys do better than girls in science and maths. This wasn’t an issue when I was at school, as there were only girls so we were all expected to do well in those subjects. Looking back I would estimate that there were as many girls who were interested in and who chose to study science subjects as there were who chose to study languages and arts. Of course some subjects were not offered at all at my school: woodwork, metalwork, technical drawing and so on. In the country as a whole, however, I would guess that in the 1960s and 1970s boys did better than girls and probably went to university in greater numbers.



I started teaching in the early 1980s – the schools I worked in were all mixed and girls and boys did all subjects together (I remember, for example, the boys doing needlework, sewing some amazing embroidery onto their denim jackets). At the time I was full of lofty ideas and would have laughed at anyone who said boys did better than girls in the sciences – I would probably have argued that boys and girls had the same opportunities and would do equally well. My actual experience, however, was that the girls tended to do better in ALL subjects (though I didn’t actually teach either science or maths at that stage). I put this down to the fact that the boys tended to be more inattentive and restless than the girls, and the girls tended to be more conscientious, to concentrate and get on with the tasks. I sometimes also wondered, especially after I started teaching technology, if the girls did better because I was a woman and was acting as a positive role model for them.



More recently it seems that “girls are the new boys” as one UK newspaper put it. There is a gap between the achievement of girls and boys in most Western countries. Boys are more likely to drop out of school than girls, and next year it is predicted that 60% of students studying for degrees will be women. So we are back to the age-old question: are the brains of boys and girls different and is it nature rather than nurture that accounts for these differences?



Brain research has shown that the male brain is more asymmetric than the female brain and that it is more specialized. Studies of stroke victims show that females seem to use both hemispheres of their brains for language, whereas males use the left more. Other studies have shown differences in brain development – areas of the brain that are involved in language and fine motor skills mature earlier in female brains, whereas spatial memory matures earlier in male brains.



Girls have often been described as having “face to face” friendships – they talk together, share personal details and so on as their language skills are more highly developed. Boys, whose early development is more spatial, have been described as having “shoulder to shoulder” friendships – they are more likely to be involved in sports or playing games rather than engrossed in conversation. Clearly these differences in the brain make it easier for girls to sit still and concentrate in class, especially when the activities involve a lot of listening or language.



More studies have shown that the human eye and ear varies between males and females too. Boys are more sensitive to movement, girls are more sensitive to colour and texture. This could explain why girls find it easier to include lots of visual details in their writing. Girls also have more sensitive hearing than boys which could be why boys are louder and why girls appear more distracted by noise in the classroom.



Boys and girls react differently to competition. This could be because there is more oxytocin in girls’ brains – this has been called “the bonding chemical”. With less oxytocin in boys’ brains they are more likely to be risk-takers, impulsive and aggressive and more competitive.



Looking at all the medical evidence, therefore, it would seem that nature is more important than nurture in determining success at school – but this is probably because of the way schools are set up and the way classes are managed making them more friendly to the female brain. Currently, with more than 100 identified structural and chemical differences between the male and female brain, it would seem girls have a learning advantage in schools. However as teachers we have a responsibility to make our classes more “boy-friendly” and to come up with different activities that help boys to focus and concentrate, as well as different assignments that will enable them to show what they know.



(Final thought: I’ve just watched University Challenge, Oxford –v- Cambridge, and out of the 8 contestants 7 of them were young men. Does this disprove my idea that girls do better than boys at all levels of education I wonder, or is it a reflection on boys being more competitive?)

Photo Credit:  Their World by RossWebsdale

G & T (part 2)

Having written a little about gifted and talented students a few days ago, I’ve been asking myself how it’s possible to define G&T. I have heard teachers in the past who referred to these students as being the top 2-3% of students, but I’ve been wondering how this has been measured. Today I came across a diagram that seems to give me some answers. This diagram is based on the work of Renzuelli’s Three Ring Conception of Giftedness.

Evidence of Ability: abstract thinking, high levels of verbal and numerical reasoning, rapid information processing, applying learning to new situations, making connections to real life situations.

Evidence of Creativity: original and flexible thinking, making new connections, taking risks.

Evidence of Commitment: focused attention, enthusiasm, involvement, sustained interest, perseverance, setting high standards.



In addition to the above, it seems that gifted students should be producers of knowledge, rather than just consumers of knowledge. This is because they have managed to find new connections.



One of the interesting things I’ve been reading about gifted students is that many of them may actually be under-achievers. For example they may be bored or switched off the tasks given to them so may not show much commitment. Also, because a lot of classroom work may be easy for them, they may not have fully developed their problem-solving abilities or be very responsive to new challenges. Because they have not experienced much failure, they may not know how to cope with it or how to reflect on and learn from a bad experience.



How to teach gifted students is not something that I’ve thought about a lot during my teaching career. Perhaps the fact that I started off as a secondary teacher and then moved down to primary has given me a few extra resources for dealing with some of the high achieving students I have come across over the years. What I realized this year, however, is that not all primary teachers have this experience and many of them may be overwhelmed. I’m thinking in particular about teachers in the upper grades of primary school. For example, a 5th grade teacher with a student who is working at an 8th grade standard in maths may not have the experience of secondary maths to fall back on in order to enrich the lessons for that student. This teacher is probably not a maths specialist and may feel unsure or inadequate when dealing with a student who is gifted in maths. A secondary teacher who teaches throughout the secondary school and who has a 6th grade maths student working at a 9th grade level is probably in a better position and may have a lot of resources to give that student enrichment work.



In most of the schools I have worked, both national and international, the focus of the special needs/learning support department was to support the students who were struggling, with little support for the students who needed to be accelerated. I’ve never been in a school with a G&T programme and I’m not sure I really agree with it, but I am wondering now what is the best way to support gifted students in their regular classrooms.

G & T

For about half of my teaching career the only meaning the letters G and T had for me was the gin and tonic I would have when I got home from a day at work. It was only after being a secondary teacher in England and the Netherlands that I moved into middle school education and came across an American colleague who had been a gifted and talented teacher in his previous school.


Having a gifted and talented programme was entirely new to me. As mentioned in a previous post, I had spent a number of years in remedial education, but in my schools in England and in the international school where I worked in Holland, there was no real focus on the students who were at the top end of the spectrum. Back in the early 1980s when I was a newly qualified teacher, the closest thing to a gifted programme was the fact that the school where I worked was streamed by ability. The school was in a town called Knottingley, and the way the classes were streamed was that the “top” class was K, the next one down was N and so on. Right at the bottom was my remedial class (4Y). Later, when it became not so politically correct to label the classes in this way, they took on the surname of the teacher so my class became 4M – the students, however, still always had the feeling that they were at the bottom of the pile.


One of my brothers was seen as being a gifted student when he was at school in the 1970s. Again, there was no provision for this at his school, but the head teacher (who had studied astrophysics at university) did withdraw him for some lessons in order to teach him privately. I suspect quite a bit of the motivation for this was that the head of this suburban school in a fairly deprived area of east London wanted the kudos of getting one of his students into a “top” university. My brother did end up going to Oxford to study astrophysics and whether or not he would have done this without the intervention of his head teacher is open to debate.


I still know very little about the gifted and talented programme offered in some schools so all I have are questions about effective or desirable these programmes are. Of course students who have already mastered the current content (in maths for example) or who master it very quickly need to be stretched further, otherwise they will actually be learning less than others in their class for whom this content is new. But my questions revolve around whether or not this could be better accomplished in a regular classroom instead of these “special” students being withdrawn. Surely it must be possible to offer enrichment options or different activities for those students? And surely it must be possible to give more support to the teachers who are providing these extra opportunities to gifted students?


(In the case of my brother he dropped out of Oxford after a year and a half and went to Southampton University where he completed a degree in engineering.)

Photo Credit:  Gin and Tonic by Pedro Moura Pinheiro

Thoughtful and thought-provoking teaching

This past year at school I have been talking more and more about giving students choices about the way they show what they know. Oftentimes I have been in collaborative planning meetings where teachers have been discussing a summative assessment for their unit of inquiry and the discussions invariably centre on just one way of assessing the students – so that it looks the same for all and can be assessed using the same rubric. Even when teachers have come up with great central ideas, they still find it hard to come up with differentiated summative assessments that allow each student to show his or her understanding in a unique way.



Of course, the first and most important task for us at these planning meetings is to have a good central idea. Because the PYP is concept based rather than topic based, it’s important to come up with concepts that have “enduring value” – they will still be as important 20 years in the future. The first time I ever dealt with the idea of concepts rather than topics was when I was working at the International School of Amsterdam in the early 1990s. Up to this time, as a social studies teacher I had been given a text book and had basically used this to teach the class for a whole year. Suddenly instead of a year devoted to ancient civilizations, or one devoted to 20th century history, we came up with concepts such as “revolutions” that could be studied across time, including the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, the Russian revolution and so on. At another school where psychology was also taught as part of humanities, students studied the “Lucifer effect” (what makes ordinary people do bad things?) and because humanities also included history students had the choice of looking at various events that demonstrated the Lucifer effect such as the genocide in Rwanda, Russia under Stalin and so on.



In the same school in her English lessons, my daughter also worked on concepts. These included things like “rags to riches” themes with stories ranging from The Ugly Duckling through to The Elephant Man and “monster” stories that ranged from Beowolf through to the script of Alien. Two years on, she is still able to remember the concepts covered and what’s more she can read a book or watch a film and see how closely the story fits with these themes.



From these few examples it’s clear to see that differentiating around a concept is far easier than differentiating around content that must be covered. In the case of the Lucifer effect, students had a choice about what to study, in the case of my daughter’s English lessons students also had a choice of literature and also of media (as they could choose to watch the movies).



This year I’ve also been concerned with trying to differentiate on the product that students create to show their understanding – this product should also reflect their interests and learning styles. For example our Grade 4s studied the concept of belief systems, which gave them a choice of what they wanted to investigate. They had a choice of 3 different ways of showing their understanding . Some students chose to interview someone of a particular religion and then to write about the interview. Some students chose to find images and then to record a VoiceThread showing their understanding, others decided to write a script and record it as a movie. Years ago, when I was a 5th Grade teacher we also used to have a weekly book sharing session. Each week one student chose a book they had recently read that they wanted to recommend to other students in the class – this meant that during the course of a year each student shared just 2 books they had read. They could share this book in many different ways – some chose to make an oral presentation, some chose to make a board game, some chose to make a comic strip, others came dressed up as a character from the novel and some students decided to make a shoebox diorama of a scene in their book. When I look back on the book sharing sessions I see them as being so successful because each student was able to share his or her book confidently in whatever way they wanted – students used their strengths and therefore produced high quality work. One of the biggest successes of this was a boy who struggled all year with his reading and writing, but who was respected by the rest of the class for the amazing “graphic novels” he produced based on the books he had read. If he had been asked to write a summary of the books he would have struggled with his writing and therefore would not have been focused on the content of what he was trying to get across and would not therefore have made a very convincing recommendation. For Max, the greatest measure of his success was that other students chose to read the books he had illustrated.



In allowing students to make choices about how best to show their understanding, it is very important for the teachers to develop good questioning techniques to encourage all students to develop higher order thinking skills – it is these open-ended questions that will allow multiple entry points into the subject and that will allow students to access the concept at their own level. It is these questions that will be challenging and thought-provoking, which in turn will lead to the students being motivated and thoughtful in their inquiries. In addition, to address the concerns of teachers who want to end up with just one rubric to use with all students on their summative assessment, this is possible with a concept-based curriculum such as the PYP. The rubric assesses the understanding of the concept, which should be the same for all students, even when the content, process, product or learning style of the students and the way they have reached their understanding of the concept may be different for them all.

Photo Credit:  Smile at a Stranger by 1Happysnapper

Learning Outcomes -v- Differentiation

This year at school we have started to focus on drawing up learning outcomes and to this end the curriculum leaders have begun to use Atlas Rubicon to map the curriculum.  At the same time some teachers have attended a workshop on differentiation with Carol Ann Tomlinson.   On the face of it, it might seem that we are moving in two different directions:  on the one hand developing standards and benchmarks for the knowledge and skills expected at each grade level, which would require some sort of standardised assessment and on the other hand looking at each student's achievement on an individual basis and allowing each student to express his or her knowledge in the way he or she chooses.

This year some students at school were involved in stardardised tests - my 10th Grade daughter, for example, was involved in ACER testing last October for mathematical literacy (which gave a measure for quantity, space and shape, change and relationships and something called uncertainty which appeared to measure her grasp of statistics and graphing), reading (which measured her retrieval of information, interpreting and reflecting) and writing (which measured her performance in writing a narrative and in exposition/argument).  The tests were from the Australian Council for Educational Research and apparently the results show how she measured against other students in international schools.  Although it was interesting to see the results, they were of very little use to us as parents - the narrative reports written by her subject teachers were what we were really interested in.  At my school there was no "teaching to the test".  In fact, since my daughter was new to the school this year, her scores were no reflection at all on the teaching and learning that was going on at the school.  However in other schools I have definitely heard of teachers being put under pressure to prepare students for these tests (the results of which are made public to the parents) and in the weeks before the tests this preparation has influenced the class instruction.

Many, many years ago, when I was also a classroom teacher, I also had to administer some standardised tests:  the Iowa tests.  In my international classroom with almost no students from the USA, and with many students who were not native English speakers, the tests did seem to be very unfair, in particular the maths paper which had American measurements on (such as lbs and oz) which were a complete mystery to my students.

I'm not totally against benchmarks, of course - in fact in my subject (IT) I have drawn up benchmarks for  various IT skills from K - 12 (though this is under constant revision).  Benchmarks allow the teachers to know what is expected - however differentiation should allow students to reach these benchmarks in different ways.

Back to my holiday reading .... today I have read further into Bill and Ochan Powell's book Making the Difference.  They have drawn up a graphic organiser for differentiation which has Knowing Your Students on the vertical axis and Knowing Your Curriculum on the horizontal axis - there are therefore 4 quadrants.  I have tried to reproduce a simple version of this below:

The Beginning Teacher lacks experience of the curriculum and probably has not had enough time to develop many different instructional strategies.
The Relationship Orientated Teacher has a deep knowledge of the students but lacks advanced knowledge of the curriculum - this teacher creates a wonderful, supporting classroom atmosphere and is popular with the students.  Learning activities may be fun and engaging but may lack depth.
The Subject Orientated Teacher has an excellent knowledge of his or her subject and knows how to teach it so that students do well in exams.  This teacher teaches the subject, rather than the students, yet often has the reputation of being one of "the best" teachers because of the exam results or because of being given the brightest and highest achieving students.  This teacher often uses a limited range of instructional strategies.
The Differentiating Teacher has knowledge of the students and the curriculum, comes up with clear learning goals and has a wide range of instructional strategies.  In this classroom there are challenges, but they are not too difficult (which would result in frustration) and not too easy (which would result in boredom).  This teacher is able to judge the "readiness" of each student and can adjust the tasks accordingly to encourage the students to move forward at a pace that is suitable for them.

I like this model, which clearly shows that there is no contradiction between having learning outcomes and being able to differentiate the instruction - in fact standards and benchmarks and differentiation are complementary!

Caring and Differentiation

After the comments based on my last blog post, I've been thinking some more about caring over the past few days and how a caring teacher will be one who creates a differentiated classroom to respond to the needs of all students.  In order to clarify some of these thoughts, I have gone back and read a chapter from Bill and Ochan Powell's book Making the Difference, which I first read during a series professional learning community meetings in a previous school where this issue was discussed.

Bill and Ochan describe a differentiated classroom as "a place where teaching and learning are flexible, purposeful and respectful."  It's interesting that they come back to the word respectful, which is something else I've been thinking and blogging about recently. The word respect comes from the Latin word that means "to look again" and a respectful classroom is one where the students are given "equal opportunities for the development of conceptual understanding".

Carol Ann Tomlinson points out that differentiation involves flexibility of instruction, activities and assessment to fit a diverse group of learners.  Therefore the caring teacher will be listening to and observing his or her students and will change the method of instruction, the time allowed to do the task, the materials, the content, the groupings of the students and the means of assessment so that each student can be successful in reaching the learning goals.  Bill and Ochan describe this as the teacher "purposefully designing and orchestrating the multitude of classroom variables to achieve the maximum learning of all students".

Bill and Ochan are writing from their experience in international education.  Over the years there has been an increasing need to differentiate in international schools as the student population in those schools has changed dramatically - at one time they served the diplomatic and business community where the students had a good level of English and were all expected to go to university after they finished school.  Some of these international schools were satellite schools of private schools in the UK or the USA and educational standards were based on those of the home country and they were therefore selective schools with inflexible curricula.  Nowadays many international schools have large numbers of students who arrive without speaking any English at all.  Some of their parents only have a rudimentary knowledge of English too - in fact on a number of occasions I have been in parent-teacher conferences where the student has had to translate everything for his or her parents.  For some of these students the only place where they speak English is at school, for example last year I taught a Taiwanese student for IB Geography who only ever spoke, read or wrote in English at school.  In my 22 years in international schools I have seen a big increase in EAL (English as an Additional Language) learners as well as students who have learning disabilities.  In one school where I worked the father of one of these students got elected onto the Board and then became Chair of the Board and pushed through policies that allowed more inclusion of and support for these students.    Several of the schools where I have worked have had debates about what "excellence" in education is:  is it just academic rigor and getting a certain percentage of the students to "top" universities, or is it one that includes all students and strives for each student to reach his or her potential, whatever that may be?

When I worked at the International School of Amsterdam we had a visit from Thomas Armstrong who ran workshops for the teachers on multiple intelligences.  Some years after that the school started to send teachers to the Project Zero summer institutes and later started using the visible thinking routines.  It was fantastic to be part of these initiatives, which profoundly changed the way I taught as they raised awareness in the teachers that their preferred learning and teaching style may well not be the preferred learning style of most of the students.

Carol Ann Tomlinson challenges teachers to reach ALL students and to do this not by looking at what the students cannot do (ie they have ADHD so can't sit still for long, or they have a learning disability so can't write etc) but to focus on what the students CAN do - what their interests and strengths are.  Teaching that takes account of the diverse needs of the students often enriches the educational experience for all the students.

Bill and Ochan Powell maintain "effective teachers can teach most children".  Many schools run learning support programmes that happen outside of the classroom in the hope of trying to "fix" the problem and then return the students to their regular classes.  In one school where I worked there was a programme called Fast ForWord, a reading intervention programme (which always seemed to be called Fast Forward and sort of implied that the students doing this programme would improve quickly - the Fast ForWord website claims the progamme "gets the brain fit for learning").  Now I don't want to discuss the merits or otherwise of this computer based programme, but only to comment on how this affected the students who came to me for the IT lessons.  As Fast ForWord happened at regular times each day, the students were withdrawn to do it and missed whatever was happening in their regular or specialist class.  It didn't fit neatly into our schedule, therefore students came and went during the lesson.  Sometimes they just got started on something and had to leave it and go out to their FFW activity, other times they came in mid-way during the lesson, having missed all the instructions, brain-storming and so on had had to "catch up".  At the end of the school year we were always given statistics about how much improvement the FFW programme had made for the students.  My personal feeling always was that it was the class teacher who had worked with those students for most of the day, caring about them and differentiating the curriculum for them who had made the most difference, not anything that happened when the students went out to a special programme.  Bill and Ochan argue that removing children who learn differently gives classroom teachers very negative messages:  that they don't have the skills to teach those students and that the education of those students is not their responsibility.  In fact they argue that "the most important asset in a school is the teaching faculty", effective teachers are effective with students of ALL achievement levels and that "strategies that define and comprise good teaching are applicable to ALL children".

Photo Credit:  Be Yourself by Victor Nuno