Day 14: Differentiation

September 28, 2015

In just about every single one of my college classes related to my major we have learned over and over about differentiation. We've read about it, watched videos on it, and developed hypothetical scenarios of how we would differentiate. Well, I've finally been able to witness real life differentiation for the last few weeks. For this post I am going to limit the discussion to reading groups.

There are 8 students in my class, they are broken into 4 groups of 2 based on their reading level. The students range from the lowest group struggling to decode CVC words to the highest group breezing through Magic Tree House and Junie B. Jones chapter books. The students have a reading textbook series, leveled readers, sight word lists and vocabulary words that are all differentiated for their level. Some students start right at the beginning of the reading textbook series, while others skip ahead many stories. Although that the text may be a lower level for the higher groups, there are important comprehension skills and strategies that need to be taught. The students have a hard time understanding that and just want to read more challenging books. The leveled readers are assigned to the students based on the "level" they are on. There are different assessments used to determine the level such as DIBELS and DRA's.

The vocabulary words are assigned by story. So naturally whichever textbook story the students are on determines their vocabulary words for the week. Lastly, their sight words come from the Dolch list. The lists are numbered and each contain ten of the 220 words. List one contains 10 words from the pre-primer list, while list 22 contains words from the third grade list. Students are given a sight word assessment to determine which list they will begin on.

Have students on so many different levels could definitely get confusing. My co-op however does an excellent job at keeping everything organized in binders, folders and plastic bin organizers. I definitely wouldn't categorize differentiation as an easy task yet but I feel much more confident about doing so in my own classroom after seeing it work so well in real life.