techleadership

Customizing your teaching to suit each child makes eminent sense. Kids are different, they learn differently, so we should teach them differently, right? But when you're staring out at 20 or 30 students as individual as snowflakes, you may find yourself asking that ever-daunting question: "How?" The short answer is: one step at a time. Teachers at Forest Lake Elementary School in Columbia, South Carolina, have made it their mission for the past decade to differentiate instruction for their diverse students. They started small, and they've grown and honed their strategies each year. Here are their tips -- combined with some advice from Edutopia bloggers and members of the Edutopia community -- on how you can get started. And please use the comments field below to ask questions and add your own suggestions!

Self-Publishing the World As We See It They ways we viewed and read the news was previously distributed to us through a filter.  Publisher, editor, advertisers, and corporations decided what we should watch and read when it came to content. In some ways, the classroom has followed a similar path. Look at the world now when it comes to news. We are all publishing to the world around us in blogs, tweets, posts and…yes…even Instagram selfies. Our brains are no longer designed to sit back and take what is given to us. We want to create and share what we see and learn too. Classroom Outcome:  This is one area where I feel that education has excelled, but there is still room for improvement. We’ve always encouraged students to write and report on what they think or believe. As students, we learned to play the game of “know your audience” when it came to writing a paper for a certain professor. Our purpose was writing for writing’s sake. Now we no longer have to limit ourselves to one recipient. Our students have access to a global audience and don’t have to write just to please one teacher. They can write based on what they see and believe to be true.

Ravitch (2004) described the existing failure of many reform efforts as, “… forgotten innovations [that] continue to live in schools where they were introduced with great fanfare . . . schools are like archeological sites; digging would reveal layer after layer of fossilized school reforms and obsolete programs” (as cited in Jones, 2007, p. 189).

The roundtable theory (RT) is a shared leadership theory for school change. Gabriele (2002) explained RT as distributing leadership and learning equally across participants. Involving stakeholders in the decision-making process through shared leadership can lead to higher levels of commitment.

Change will affect staff regardless of the change theory chosen or the changes proposed. Bueker (2005) stated, “One of the most difficult aspects of implementing a whole school reform is striking a balance between proper program implementation and individual teacher flexibility” (p. 411). Bueker noted that empowering teachers, treating teachers with professional respect, and providing structured and continuing support for staff, could minimize the negative effects of school change.