Kmareka.com

As a middle school teacher I often faced classrooms of thirty plus students with ability levels that spanned four to five different grades levels. There was so much variance in ability, skills and academic preparedness that I might as well have been teaching in an old-fashioned schoolhouse with a row for each grade level.  I was always told that the answer was differentiated instruction.

The problem was most of my administrators had little advice on how to do this.  One year, my principal promised to present the staff with a well-differentiated model lesson, and instead he delivered an incredibly-challenging single-level, single-strategy lesson and asked the staff to journal about how infuriating an experience it was to sit through a lesson that didn’t meet our needs.  He said the point was to promote greater empathy for our students and motivation to work harder at differentiating- still he offered no answer on…