Leadership for School-Wide Differentiation

• In Event: Differentiated Instruction and Complex Instruction: Intersections and Differences to Teaching and Learning in Heterogeneous Classrooms

Abstract

Differentiated Instruction is an instructional model that synthesizes research and practice from a variety of educational spheres to provide teachers with a way of thinking about and addressing student variance in readiness, interest, and learning profile. A primary goal of differentiation is enabling teachers to address academic diversity in a systematic and grounded way within a heterogeneous setting rather than resorting to ability grouping and tracking to do so.

Five key underpinnings of differentiation are:
1) Ensuring a classroom environment that supports students in the hard work of learning,
2) Providing high quality curriculum designed to enable students to use what they learn,
3) Using persistent pre-and formative assessment to understand a learner’s current proximity to key goals in order to make curricular modifications
4) Planning instruction in response to evolving assessment information in order to address student readiness needs, interests, and learning preferences, including use of flexible student groupings, and
5) Demonstrating teacher leadership to create a community of learners and demonstrating flexible classroom management to ensure opportunity for students to learn in ways that are effective for them as individuals and as a group.

The model of differentiation builds on a constructivist framework and draws on research and practice from areas such as special education, multicultural education, reading/literacy education, gifted education, mindset, and educational assessment.

The Study:

This study examined how leaders at two schools that advocated heterogeneous instruction supported teacher understanding and implementation of differentiation to ensure fidelity to the model. In that context, it also explores teacher understanding and implementation of Differentiated Instruction.

These case studies used “local groundedness” to reflect teacher and leader understanding of a broad change initiative in a specific context. Over a two-year period, we interviewed administrators, professional development leaders and teachers, as well as conducted observations of classrooms and coaching sessions conducted by leaders.

Data were analyzed in three phases based on the Miles and Huberman (1994) model: data reduction, data display, conclusion drawing and verification.

We found that teacher change required for differentiation is challenging and requires persistent, focused support from leaders to facilitate change. The ability to lead and an in-depth understanding of the goals and mechanisms for change enabled teachers to think beyond preconceptions about student capacity to succeed academically and their own capacity to teach in heterogeneous settings.

To this point in educational practice, there appear to be three basic approaches to dealing with student differences: (1) largely ignoring the differences in terms of instructional planning and implementation of instructional plans, (2) tracking students based on perceptions of student ability to attend to perceived ability differences, and (3) planning for student differences with the assumption that heterogeneity is normal and desirable. In a time when student variance is increasingly the norm in schools, and given the ineffectiveness of the first two approaches, it seems important to create and understand the impact of models designed to guide teachers in developing classrooms that provide equity of access to excellent learning opportunities for the broadest possible range of students.

Author

• Carol A. Tomlinson, University of Virginia