Episode 237: Differentiated Instruction

Andy Psarianos

Blast off

Robin Potter

Blast off is right. Welcome back to the school of school.

Adam Gifford

I love the fact, sorry Robin, you're going to do an introduction. I love the fact the audience don't even know that it's counting down for us, right? So the thing starts, Andy blasts off. Right, so there was a five countdown. Right, sorry Robin, that'll be quiet. You introduce.

Robin Potter

That's right. Yes, so welcome back to the School of School podcast where we blasted off into another episode and I'm with the usual suspects. Yes, and it is the name of a movie as well. Adam, Andy, how are you?

Adam Gifford

Really wonderful, thank you Robin.

Robin Potter

Excellent! Well, Adam, you sound like you're having a very good day. I like to hear it. Probably because we've been talking about the philosophy of mastery in a couple of other episodes. We were talking about problem solving and relational understanding. We are now at our next, as Andy says, snappy discussion of differentiated instruction.

Adam Gifford

Yeah.

Robin Potter

So I'm just thinking of the three of us. If we were in a classroom, it's more than likely that we are not all quite at the same level at the same time. level meaning just, you know, taking in what the teacher's explaining to us. And typical of Andy, he's, you know,

Andy Psarianos

Way behind.

Robin Potter

No, no, he's way slightly ahead. Slightly ahead as in he seems to understand something more so than me. So I, and I think this happens all the time in the classroom. You have children at different levels that, and when I say levels, just means, you know, they're just grasping things at different times. And sometimes some students seem to be grasping the concepts a little bit more than others. So...

That is, I think, what we are talking about. Right, that's the problem that we need to be solved. Yeah. I can see Andy's already keen to share his knowledge. So here we go.

Andy Psarianos

Yeah, that's the problem, right? That's the problem that teachers face, right? yeah, so, and I... Well, no, but I think, so what I would emphasize here is that it seems like some pupils are maybe, let's say there's a perceived ability difference, okay?

by the teacher. Okay? And I use the perceived ability. I never use the word ability first of all. So first of all, I think this is a really important point that everybody needs to understand and you know, I've seen rooms break out into arguments about this point, but I think it's a really important point. You can't tell what somebody's ability is. You can't measure anybody's ability. That's just forget about that. Ability is not the right word.

Robin Potter

sure.

Andy Psarianos

So if you're going to use the ability, you have to use the word perceived in front of it, right? Like you as an observer think that this person has this ability, but you don't actually know because if a child is underperforming, may just because they don't like you, right?

It has nothing to do with what they're capable or not capable of doing or if they're having a bad day or whatever it is, right? So ability is not the right word. So what is the right word, right? Well, if you're thinking about a classroom, what a teacher doesn't should never think about ability. What they should be thinking about is readiness. That's the word. That's the word that

Adam Gifford

Okay.

Andy Psarianos

who I believe is the, without a doubt, absolute 100 % world expert on this is Carol Ann Tomlinson. I think she's from the University of Virginia. She is the expert. She's the one that's researched this and written about it. And that's the word that she uses. And I think 100 % that is the right word to use. Okay? So.

What did Carol Tomlinson tell us about this? Well, she basically said that students vary in three key areas. Readiness, interest, and how they like to learn. So some kids like, our teacher's going on again. I'm going to shut off.

while other kids are like, wow, the teacher's talking. Wow, I'm gonna better pay attention, right? So that's what we mean by like learning profile. some, know, they don't all behave the same way in different circumstances.

So those are the, that's the variance. Readiness, their interest, are they even interested in this topic and learning profile and what she calls the learning profile. Those are the things that vary with pupils in the classroom. And then in response, the teacher could do a bunch of different things, right? To meet her objective or his objective for the lesson for that day. And that's really Carol Tomlinson's entire framework. So I think what's important there to understand is that before you can even think about what you're

to do about this problem you need to understand that there's more than one reason why children don't appear to be ready for today's right or are seemingly ahead of everybody else

Adam Gifford

What Andy touched on there, which I'm to pick up on immediately, is considering that before the lesson starts. And it might not sound like anything. That might sound like, isn't that obvious? But it's these sorts of things that feed into, I suppose, same... That readiness can also be attributed to us too.

Right, so we need to be ready to respond to the assessment data, to the reactions that we're getting from the class in front of us. We've got 30 individuals, which means guaranteed you've got 30 children who will be at a different place throughout the whole lesson. It's a constant because they're constantly unique. So you're always going to have that. So how do you develop, know, how do you prepare yourself so you can address those areas? And what are the different aspects of the variables in the lesson?

The more you can see, the more you understand, the more you can prepare yourself. If it's just simply a delivery model and you think there are no variables, these are my 30 children, I need to teach them this, they're going to regurgitate it back to be verbatim and that's a successful lesson done. And I repeat that all the time. We're in big trouble. We're in really big trouble because we've not taken into account any of those things. And in the model where I've got nothing that's direct teaching, you've got to teach children to count one, two, three, four, five. You can't just say, here's five numbers. You decide what order they're in. Explore. There's certain things that you've just got to say, hey, two comes after one and three comes after two. It's just the way it is. Someone decided that many, many years ago, and that's just the way it is, right? That's the how it works. So I think it's those types of things where you've

You've got to be ready to respond. You've got to understand what it is that you're doing. And you've got to consider these types of things before you even think about what's in, you know, before you go live, if you like, with the lessons.

Andy Psarianos

Yeah. Yeah.

Robin Potter

But do you think our teachers doing this? I mean, obviously some are, but.

Adam Gifford

I'll give you an insight, Robert, and I'll answer it really quickly. When I was trained to be a teacher, and I think I had really good teacher training, by the way. I think it was really excellent. I remember doing one of my first placements, and this is what was told to me. You only need to put a lot of effort into planning for your English. If you can do primary school maths, you can teach it. So don't waste your time on it.

So there you go. Sorry, carry on Robin, keep asking. But that gives you an indication of have things changed beyond that? I don't know. They have, they have, but that was the thing. That was a lot of thinking at that time.

Robin Potter

Yeah. Yeah.

Andy Psarianos

Yeah.

Robin Potter

Yeah, well and quite honestly, know, when we're talking about this and you both are... Andy made a big deal about, you know, we don't talk about someone's being ahead, you know, it's all the teacher's perhaps perception that that student is ahead. I mean, how do you just go against what I think a lot of people just naturally do, which is kind of, put...

people into categories, right?

Andy Psarianos

We, so you, yeah, so what we defined was kind of like, okay, so we know that, we know that, when we talk about the readiness, we're usually talking about their current skill level and understanding of a topic, right?

Robin Potter

Sure.

Andy Psarianos

So, so, you know, they're not all going to be at the same level of readiness, but also some of them are not going to be interested at all what you have to say or in the lesson in general. So what are you going to do about that? What are you going to do about the fact that some, some pupils just like to learn in different ways, right? So this is the, this is the natural environment of a teacher. This is the natural environment of a classroom. So the question is, okay, in response, what do you do about it?

Robin Potter

Yeah.

Andy Psarianos

Right? That's the skill of a teacher because those things are for sure going to happen in your classroom. It's not a question of whether or not it's going to happen. That will happen. You're going to have a variance in those things. So now what do you do about it? Well, there's lots of strategies. You know, some people say, well, we'll put all these seemingly, you know, slim, seemingly more able pupils, seemingly more able pupils over here. Right. And then we're going to put those who are struggling, we're going to, we're going to go over here and we're going have some easier to do.

And in the middle of the class, well, they're gonna, we're gonna teach them the lesson that we intended to teach. Right? So that, you know, that's one quote unquote strategy and maybe the most common one historically, right? But we know that's a bad idea. And that's where we got to get into learning theories to explain that. But this is really like mostly Vygotsky is going to give us the answers for these things. Right? And maybe that we talk about that in another episode some other time, but

Robin Potter

Yeah, which... Right.

Andy Psarianos

But you know, in principle, that would be, I guess, you would call differentiation by content. So you're gonna teach these three different groups different things. Okay? That's not usually, that's usually not the best strategy. So then the other thing you can do is vary by process. So varying by process would mean doing things like scaffolding. So, okay, these pupils here are struggling.

So I think I'm gonna give them some manipulatives to help them. I think they need manipulatives. think we're gonna vary how we're learning the concept. So I'm gonna give them place value counters.

that scaffolding, right? These guys here, they don't really need them and that's okay because they have a secure understanding of place value. So they don't need them and that's okay. They've already happily working in the more abstract form. So you're not teaching them a different lesson.

You're just helping them with some scaffolding. You're using a particular representation to scaffold the lesson. That's by process, right? The other one is, you know, can vary the learning environment, right? So, you know, when people talk in Canada, it's a big thing about like the thinking classroom, right? So thinking classroom is really about the learning environment. It's like this idea that if you change the learning environment, you're get more kids engaged in thinking and stuff, okay? So that's where that falls into, right?

And then you've got this this idea which is really the most important one For mastery is that you're varying by product and by that what we mean is that you're varying not what you teach the children But what your expectation is about how they can demonstrate what they have learned Okay, so we're more advanced pupil We should be able to do more in depth analysis of what's going on they might be able to say so like let's say you know earlier on in a previous podcast we said okay two plus two equals four let's just say that that was our example okay so it's like whatever that's grade one right or year one so a a pupil who is who is just able to do it in a more abstract form may just be able to say two plus two equals four. Maybe they'll do something like count on their fingers or whatever, but they'll be able to do that. That's kind of like your average pupil, right? You're struggling ones, you may need to give them counters. And you may need to act it out on the table in order for them to understand what's going on. And that's scaffolding for the more, those who appear to be struggling with the concept, right?

A more advanced pupil, okay, I'm gonna throw in something that's not appropriate for grade one, but let me give you an example of extension. just trying to come off something off the top of my head. You might say, two plus two equals four. Interesting that two times two also equals four. Isn't that interesting? Why is that? Write a thing in your journal or are there other numbers where that's true and what are they? Wow that's a really tough question and why are they also giving you the same thing and then now that sends the pupils into a whole kind of other you know deep understanding into the essence of operations right so those are all kinds of things but we're still staying with two plus two equals four we're just really... Yeah, so that my last example is quite an extreme example, but still, you because in grade one, we wouldn't have done multiplication, but you know, well, that's an interesting bridge, right? You know, that's a hard question to answer. Not that it does give you the same result, like the sum and the product are the same, but why are they the same? Ooh, gotta think about that one.

Adam Gifford

And the last thing to add to that Andy is that's where there is such a deep flaw in what I was told when I started teaching in one school. If you can do primary school maths, you can teach it because I can, I know that two plus two equals four, but saying that to a child and that's all I can give them. I'm so limited as a teacher.

It is far more sophisticated, the preparation and the understanding of the mathematical idea and how the same idea develops over time, which is something that's one of the wonderful things about mathematics is that you never get rid of that idea. It expands and expands and expands and expands. So being able to see that expansion before you step into a classroom is so incredibly powerful in terms of a teaching tool.

Robin Potter

Yeah.

Andy Psarianos

That's right. That's right. Yeah. that, so that, you know, but,

you know, so for this idea of teaching to mastery, where we have an emphasis on problem solving, we have an essence on both instrumental and relational understanding, keeping in mind that relational understanding is the more important of the two. The other important thing, and this is a teacher skill really, is how do you deal with a classroom which

You have 30 individuals who are all at different levels of readiness, interest, and have their own ideas about what they like and don't like as far as being taught. How do you deal with that? That's a skill for teaching. It's most, well, one of the most important skills for teaching if you want to teach the mastery.