Queen of the Quadratic

Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Time for Differentiated Instruction

Yesterday, I went to summer inservice about differentiated instruction. The district wants us to embrace "DI" as it's been called and use it in our classrooms. This methodology says that we should constantly be tailoring instruction to individual students. This sounds great, but I have a little problem...

Class sizes are about 30 on average and we have 6 classes a day. My arithemtic is a little shaky, but I believe that means I'll need to create and deliver 180 lessons (give or take) every day in the span of 6 hours. Granted I'd have the other 18 hours of the day to create these lessons, which means that I would have whopping six minutes per lesson. Now, during the class (50 minutes long) I would be able to spend 1 minute and 40 seconds teaching each student. I think it might take me that long to shuffle through the 30 specific lessons that I'd created for that class. Uh oh, I forgot to take role!

Truthfully, I already do a lot of tailoring instruction to students once I get to know them, but I can't say that I tailor it every day for each of them. When I get to know students, I can help them more effectively by asking the right questions. Overall, I believe I am doing a decent job of helping them learn to learn (which seems rather foreign to today's student).

Has this "DI" swept the country, or is it just something that's been embraced in my district? We seem to be on the cutting edge of every 'new' thought in education, be it good or bad. Most of the time, the powers that be select good ideas to embrace, but occassionally, they make a monumental mistake as well.

3 Comments:

Blogger Euclid said...

Who ran the training?

I attended a State affiliate ASCD meeting last spring and it was excellent. Nanci Smith from Arizona was the presenter and she was very motivational.

She has some handouts available at

http://e2c2.com/fileupload.asp

5:01 AM  
Blogger Mathematical Mary said...

Her name was Sara Lampe. She was actually very good, I just get a chuckle out of looking at it logistically.

8:15 AM  
Blogger Euclid said...

What was nice about Nanci Smith is she was a high school math teacher so it seemed a little more pertinent.

I find these darn workshops for k-12 teachers tend to be worthless for the 9-12 group.


BTW: I love this Queen of the Quadratic title.

10:48 AM  

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