View Content #27913

Stephanie Knight, CASLS Assistant Director

         The heterogeneity of any given student population can be difficult to contend with in the classroom, particularly when it comes to considerations related to diverse cognitive and physical needs. The most obvious way to contend with said diversity is to differentiate based on the difficulty; the learners who perform the highest are given the most challenging work, and other learners are provided with easier tasks.

         While this approach may seem logical, it neglects to recognize learners as intellectuals; it likely perpetuates the status quo. Learners who perform well get to experiment and extend their knowledge, while those who don’t perform at the same level are forever stuck gathering and evaluating information. If they are never given the opportunity to think and process beyond that box, they will likely remain entrapped in it forever.

         To promote more equity while still allowing for differentiation, I offer the following three suggestions:

• Practice and model higher-order thinking skills as a class: Use a think aloud protocol to show learners how you reason through texts and problems at hand. Ask your learners to do the same; this approach allows them to cultivate intentionality, interact with critical content frequently, articulate their points of confusion, and build awareness of learning strategies.

• Differentiate expectations (in lieu of tasks), but only in secret: Spanish I was only offered as a standard class in my school district, and as such, the learning needs in any given classroom were expectedly varied. The first year, I handled this reality by using three separate rubrics with differentiated expectations for my learners. I quickly realized that execution of these rubrics mattered; if learners realized that I had lower expectations of them than their peers, they quickly became discouraged. As such, I developed an approach to using the rubrics in which the learners were not aware of how they compared to other learners (the criteria were differentiated, but there was no other indication that one rubric might be different than the others). I saw increased engagement and the development of a growth mindset.

• Protect high-level engagement: Language learning is simultaneously cognitive and social. One way to ensure that all learners engage socially and in higher-order thinking is to scaffold. For example, some learners might need sentence starters to begin communicating. Other learners may need to connect a central concept to something with which they are already familiar in order to engage in higher-order processes. For ideas of how to operationalize these approaches, check out the AVID website (https://www.avid.org/).

Differentiation is difficult, and certainly some approaches that I articulated here don’t fully contend with neurodiversity and physical limitations. However, if their spirit is embodied, the spirit that all learners CAN DO more and achieve more, we will be one step closer toward achieving equity for all of our learners.