I’m Five Teachers at Once!

Abstract

This chapter explores an idea enchanting the educational world known as “differentiation.” When a teacher “differentiates” a lesson, she considers the different abilities, cultural histories, learning styles, and interests of all the students in the room. Johnny is a visual learner. Carlos has not yet mastered reading. Joyce likes to move around. On paper, differentiation is a great idea, but only so long as the intellectual range of the classroom is small and manageable. But teachers are often in situations where the abilities of their students vary by four, five, and six grade levels. With so many different ability levels to teach in the same room, instructors find it almost impossible to provide sustained, properly executed lessons for every child within a single class period. Differentiation is often used by the Administration to paper over serious deficiencies in students who have not acquired even a minimal proficiency of their prior grade level’s standards (or proficiency in the standards of the prior two, three, or four grade levels). In the end, differentiation as currently practiced forces teachers to do more with less and ultimately masks the extremely serious problem of too many underprepared students in a single room at once.