Re: Teaching to the Correct Level of Difficulty--
Posted by: dc on 10/25/09
It scares me (and most teachers) silly, I think, which is why I
initially resisted doing this for my evaluation project. I was
afraid that it would be too challenging for me and might ruin my
otherwise very good evaluation record, but some cajoling by my
supervisor and her supervisor convinced me to try it.
The many levels of differentiation after the pre-assessment is
daunting. The asst. superintendent said at most, you need to
have 3-4 levels and group them accordingly. That seems fine for
reading maybe, but for all new content with all subjects? They
initially wanted me to commit to that and I refused to put that
in writing. I committed on my evaluation paper to do it with 3-
5 new content lessons per week throughout the year and that's
what I'm going to try to do. But it's HARD (am I whining?!) I
looked at my pre-assessment this weekend and the only question
any of them could answer was "give an example of a number
sentence", but that's the fourth step in my task analysis, so
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do now? Do I teach the first
three steps, then when I get to that fourth step, opt out some
of the kids from the lesson to go write some challenging number
sentences or some alternative activity, and then bring them back
in when I'm on the fifth step of the lesson again? This is
where it stumps me (like you said, Judy) the implementation of
it all. The responses I get back from my admin are: "The more
you do it, the more you will find that it actually SAVES you
time." I am willing to open my mind to that, but how do I get
there!!!? Help, Judy, Jan, Brad, and ESIA members reading this!
