Enhanced Differentiation Needs a Change in Testing

November 17th, 2014

Differentiation is an essential feature of ensuring all students obtain a high quality education. A teacher uses differentiation to construct and implement instruction at levels appropriate for each student in his or her class. Historically, students were taught lessons at grade level standards, without much support for students that were below or above these benchmarks. Guided reading groups may have been created, but remained stationary throughout the entire school year, unresponsive to students' needs in reading. This type of instruction has only increased the achievement gap for students from all backgrounds.

Teachers need the flexibility to adjust their classroom year to year based on the needs of their students. For example, one year a first grade teacher may have the majority of their class performing at grade level standards for math where it would be appropriate to teach a first grade lesson with scaffolds to support the students who have yet to reach that benchmark and challenge those that have already met that benchmark. However, the next year the same teacher may have the majority of their class either far below or above benchmarks where it would be much more appropriate to forgo the whole group lesson and instead commit to small group lessons with individualized instruction. It is also important to note that the same students who are below grade level standards in math may be above level standards in reading. With a high level of differentiation and scaffolded supports in the classroom, students are able to make incredible gains, sometimes more than a year' worth of progress, that can help close the achievement gap.

This type of differentiation requires a lot of foundation in terms of resources and staff to support these groups as well as professional development to provide teachers with the most recent research regarding flexible groupings of students and the scaffolds they can provide to help with instruction. Teachers need to learn how to provide regular formative assessments to see what strengths students have developed and what areas they still need further support in. If teachers are given the time they need to update and adjust their groups, then they are more likely to do so more often.

Unfortunately, standardized testing has made this type of differentiation substantially more difficult. Instead of having ample time to adjust the instruction and flexible groupings as needed, teachers are required to subject students to multiple standardized tests. In many schools, all students are required to participate in these tests, despite any special needs. In order to complete these tests, teacher often must relinquish multiple hours if not days of instruction. This occurs at all grade levels from kindergarten to 12th grade. Some teachers have reported having to complete different tests for state and district requirements when often these tests measure similar, if not the exact same, things.

Ideally, in the future, the demands of standardized testing would be reduced which would enable teachers to spend more of that time providing individualized instruction for their students. In terms of groupings for math, teachers would develop centers and instruction related to the main strands of the Common Core State Standards. This way students are working on content that is slightly challenging, but with teacher support while in small groups. Then when teachers are working with other groups, the students are working on math activities that they can work on independently to provide further practice on the same content.

The same sort of structure would be provided during literacy time, with different areas of focus. Teachers would group students based on their needs in terms of where they are as a reader. This may mean working on letter sounds, blending and segmenting phonemes, reading sight words, or higher level skills like asking and answering questions related to the text or identifying story structures. Some students who are strong word decoders, may be unable to answer questions about the text due to their oral language skills. These students would be grouped with students who have similar oral language needs, but perhaps not the same reading level for some of the time, while also getting instruction at their reading level. Teachers need to consistently check in with students to determine their reading level, in addition to their retelling, summarizing, and comprehension abilities. While not working with the teacher, students would have independent work at their level to complete.

Differentiation is a critical key for improvement in education in the future. Teachers will need the support of the state, administration, and their peers in order to provide the best possible instruction for their students. Within schools, teacher collaboration can also greatly increase the degree of differentiation available to students. When teachers are able to share students, even more differentiated groupings are possible. Differentiation is one effective variable in the challenge of closing the achievement gap and doing justice for all our students.