Tiering to avoid tears: Developing assignments that address all learners' needs
In this video, three
teachers from Raleigh’s Baileywick Road Elementary School discuss how tiering
has benefited their students. . About
the video
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How do we differentiate and still remain fair?
How do we meet all students’ needs and still address the Standard Course of
Study? Furthermore, how do we develop every child’s full abilities given the
heterogeneous nature of our classrooms? Most importantly, how do we do all of
this without losing our minds, or crying a lot, or losing great teachers from
the classroom?
Rethinking the role of the teacher
The answers are not simple, but they do require
our rethinking the role of the classroom teacher. Such re-conceptualization is
a particular problem in education, where every teacher spent at least sixteen
years observing teachers before becoming a teacher her- or himself. And while
those years spent as a student typically don’t involve conscious observation
of teaching methods, they do leave indelible images that are difficult to
re-envision. These embedded images are almost always dominated by whole-class
instruction with very little — if any — differentiation. The same images exist
for parents and administrators, compounding the problem.
Additionally, educators
are given confusing messages about the role of the teacher. Most of the public
thinks that if teachers only taught the Standard Course of Study, all would be
well and children would be successful. Few things are farther from the truth.
Our job as teachers is
not to teach the Standard Course of Study.
Our job is to ensure
that the Standard Course of Study is mastered.
If we define our role as
teaching the Standard Course of Study, we ignore the needs of all students who
do not understand or master it when we teach it, as well as all students who
had already mastered it before we taught it. That eliminates the needs of fifty
to seventy percent of any given classroom. There is nothing fair or equitable
about focusing our energies simply on teaching the Standard Course of Study.
However, if our job is
to ensure that all students master the Standard Course of Study, our classroom
will look dramatically different. Instead of everyone doing the same thing,
students are doing different things at the same time. If we base our rationale
on even one truth with which everyone agrees, it is that children learn at
different rates. The reality is that there are many reasons for
differentiating, but this one truth should be enough to help us recognize that
we need to do something different for different learners at any given time.
In this video, teachers
at Raleigh’s Baileywick Road Elementary School discuss how creating tiered
assignments has benefited them as teachers.
Tiering: What is it?
One way of achieving the goal of meeting
multiple needs simultaneously is to tier instruction and assignments. In short,
tiering involves teaching or applying the same Standard Course of Study
objective in up to three ways to meet the needs of students at three levels of
preparation: 1) students not yet ready for that grade level’s instruction, 2)
students just ready, and 3) students ready to go beyond.
Tiering is more than a
singular strategy. It is a concept that can be infused into small-group
activities, differentiated homework assignments, learning centers, learning
contracts, and even advanced classes. The greatest role tiering plays is in
preparing a teacher for any given day’s activities by requiring that each of
the three degrees of student readiness — not yet ready, just ready, ready to go
beyond — are planned for and addressed in that day’s instruction.
In this video, teacher interviews and classroom footage explore
the practice of creating tiered assignments.
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