THE QUESTION: Story and Beliefs
Overarching question
How can partner work be used to serve the purpose of differentiated instruction?
Story of the question
(Frankly, it is hard for me to separate the “story of the question” from my “beliefs regarding the question,” but here goes:)
In the fall semester, I have had the opportunity to learn a lot about classroom practices that aim to support all students becoming engaged learners and practitioners of active inquiry in the classroom. While I have gotten the opportunity to observe and experience some of these practices in the classroom, there are many others which I have encountered far more in my own classwork than while doing student teaching. Therefore, I wanted to take advantage of the Term III lessons to introduce and analyze some of these practices into my work within the classroom.
In the end, I became interested in combining two concepts which I feel strongly I would want to make use of in my own classroom someday. On the one hand, I wanted to choose lessons that would revolve around collaboration – something I have hardly gotten to observe in my fieldwork classroom. On the other hand, I also wanted to teach lessons that could provide the opportunity for differentiation – something clearly needed yet rarely seen in my classroom, which includes 28 third graders whose assessed reading and math levels range from kindergarten to fifth grade.
Thinking about collaboration, I decided to focus in on partner work as a form of collaboration that might be smoother to begin with than larger-group collaboration for students who have only done independent work in the classroom. As for differentiation, I decided to pair together students whom I believed would not normally be placed together if they were being paired according to assessed academic proficiency in the relevant subject. So, for example, for literacy I paired students with substantially different reading levels; for math I paired students with different scores on recent math assessments; for science and social studies, I was a bit more informal (since they’ve had little instruction or assessment related to these topics), but tried to go by my impressions of their general classroom standing (which is not scientific and probably a poor categorization method for everyone involved, which was partially the point of my using and quickly disregarding it).
My combining of these two concepts was both practical and academic. On one hand, since my class was so heterogeneous, I wanted to embrace rather than avoid dealing with that. On the other hand, I was inspired by readings we have done arguing that collaboration can be a tool for supporting diverse learners – which I will discuss more in the next section.
Current Beliefs Regarding the Question
As I briefly mentioned above, I have strong feelings about both collaboration and differentiation, and was eager for the opportunity to explicitly focus on both. The importance of differentiation for a classroom as heterogeneous as my own seems self-evident; the value of partner work as a tool for achieving this was more complex but ultimately something I became convinced was worth exploring.
Prior to entering this program, I already felt strongly about collaboration as a worthy goal to aspire to, towards creating a strong classroom community that promotes student inquiry and engagement; however, across my classes it has become quite clear that collaboration can be a critical tool for student learning. In Math, we focused on Math Talks and collaborative investigations as model practices where students can learn from one another; in Science, we read about the importance of argumentation and discussion for helping students extend and deepen their own inquiry and understanding (Michaels et al., 2007);[i] in Seminar, we considered the creation of collaborative and inclusive classroom environments as an important part of the Responsive Classroom model (and I believe that successful peer collaboration is essential in any classroom where the teacher hands over some degree of responsibility to the students, as we have been discussing in seminar recently). Further, readings and discussion from Teaching Diverse Learners supported the notion that partner work can have unique benefits for students with disabilities as well as English Language Learners.
Taken together, I have found that these arguments paint a convincing portrait of the potential of collaboration, not only as a tool to support student engagement and learning (both for learning content, as well as learning the skill of collaboration, which is of course vital in real-world contexts), but also as a tool that, if used correctly, can serve the goal of supporting students’ unique needs within the classroom. There are many ways that collaboration can support the cause of differentiation. To name a few: students still struggling with particular skills can benefit from seeing their peers (rather than a teacher) work with those skills successfully; students who are fairly proficient with a skill or concept can deepen their proficiency through the act of demonstrating or modeling it; groups working in tasks that require a variety of skills which may not all be relevant to the underlying lesson can achieve success even when individuals may not have all the necessary skills (for example, a social studies task that requires students to discuss a topic from a book will be inaccessible to students who cannot read the material, but this can be changed when they are collaborating with strong readers who can help make the material accessible and ready for discussion).
Michaels, S., Shouse, A.W., & Schweingruber, H.A. (2007) Ready, Set, SCIENCE! Putting Research to Work in K-8 Science Classrooms. National Research Council. Retrieved from http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11882
How can partner work be used to serve the purpose of differentiated instruction?
Story of the question
(Frankly, it is hard for me to separate the “story of the question” from my “beliefs regarding the question,” but here goes:)
In the fall semester, I have had the opportunity to learn a lot about classroom practices that aim to support all students becoming engaged learners and practitioners of active inquiry in the classroom. While I have gotten the opportunity to observe and experience some of these practices in the classroom, there are many others which I have encountered far more in my own classwork than while doing student teaching. Therefore, I wanted to take advantage of the Term III lessons to introduce and analyze some of these practices into my work within the classroom.
In the end, I became interested in combining two concepts which I feel strongly I would want to make use of in my own classroom someday. On the one hand, I wanted to choose lessons that would revolve around collaboration – something I have hardly gotten to observe in my fieldwork classroom. On the other hand, I also wanted to teach lessons that could provide the opportunity for differentiation – something clearly needed yet rarely seen in my classroom, which includes 28 third graders whose assessed reading and math levels range from kindergarten to fifth grade.
Thinking about collaboration, I decided to focus in on partner work as a form of collaboration that might be smoother to begin with than larger-group collaboration for students who have only done independent work in the classroom. As for differentiation, I decided to pair together students whom I believed would not normally be placed together if they were being paired according to assessed academic proficiency in the relevant subject. So, for example, for literacy I paired students with substantially different reading levels; for math I paired students with different scores on recent math assessments; for science and social studies, I was a bit more informal (since they’ve had little instruction or assessment related to these topics), but tried to go by my impressions of their general classroom standing (which is not scientific and probably a poor categorization method for everyone involved, which was partially the point of my using and quickly disregarding it).
My combining of these two concepts was both practical and academic. On one hand, since my class was so heterogeneous, I wanted to embrace rather than avoid dealing with that. On the other hand, I was inspired by readings we have done arguing that collaboration can be a tool for supporting diverse learners – which I will discuss more in the next section.
Current Beliefs Regarding the Question
As I briefly mentioned above, I have strong feelings about both collaboration and differentiation, and was eager for the opportunity to explicitly focus on both. The importance of differentiation for a classroom as heterogeneous as my own seems self-evident; the value of partner work as a tool for achieving this was more complex but ultimately something I became convinced was worth exploring.
Prior to entering this program, I already felt strongly about collaboration as a worthy goal to aspire to, towards creating a strong classroom community that promotes student inquiry and engagement; however, across my classes it has become quite clear that collaboration can be a critical tool for student learning. In Math, we focused on Math Talks and collaborative investigations as model practices where students can learn from one another; in Science, we read about the importance of argumentation and discussion for helping students extend and deepen their own inquiry and understanding (Michaels et al., 2007);[i] in Seminar, we considered the creation of collaborative and inclusive classroom environments as an important part of the Responsive Classroom model (and I believe that successful peer collaboration is essential in any classroom where the teacher hands over some degree of responsibility to the students, as we have been discussing in seminar recently). Further, readings and discussion from Teaching Diverse Learners supported the notion that partner work can have unique benefits for students with disabilities as well as English Language Learners.
Taken together, I have found that these arguments paint a convincing portrait of the potential of collaboration, not only as a tool to support student engagement and learning (both for learning content, as well as learning the skill of collaboration, which is of course vital in real-world contexts), but also as a tool that, if used correctly, can serve the goal of supporting students’ unique needs within the classroom. There are many ways that collaboration can support the cause of differentiation. To name a few: students still struggling with particular skills can benefit from seeing their peers (rather than a teacher) work with those skills successfully; students who are fairly proficient with a skill or concept can deepen their proficiency through the act of demonstrating or modeling it; groups working in tasks that require a variety of skills which may not all be relevant to the underlying lesson can achieve success even when individuals may not have all the necessary skills (for example, a social studies task that requires students to discuss a topic from a book will be inaccessible to students who cannot read the material, but this can be changed when they are collaborating with strong readers who can help make the material accessible and ready for discussion).
Michaels, S., Shouse, A.W., & Schweingruber, H.A. (2007) Ready, Set, SCIENCE! Putting Research to Work in K-8 Science Classrooms. National Research Council. Retrieved from http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11882