He saw that I needed to learn at a different pace and even in different
directions than did some of my peers in his class—and he saw to it that my needs
were a part of his plans, as were the needs of my various classmates
Here is the real reason it's worth the bother to differentiate instruction in
the middle grades. Our success as teachers in helping students see themselves as
competent in the subjects we teach will affect the rest of their lives.
Differentiated homework can provide a great opportunity for students to "work
backwards" to master missing skills, to extend content to challenge advanced
learners, and to link applications of content to student interests
Teach more expository text that demands sustained reading. Websites promote scanning and skimming for information
by the end of 4th grade, students' reading should be half fiction and half informational. By the end of 12th grade, the balance should be 30 percent fiction, 70 percent nonfiction.
students today are asked to read very little expository text — as little as 7 and 15 percent of elementary and middle school instructional reading, for example, is expository…Worse still, [this reading is] too often of the superficial variety that involves skimming and scanning for particular, discrete pieces of information; such reading is unlikely to prepare students for the cognitive demand of true understanding of complex text.”