This summer I had to take a summer class. It’s the bane of teachers everywhere. Fortunately, it’s the last one I’ll have to take for the foreseeable future, and the class was relevant to my field. The book that was required for the class, luckily, was less textbook and more guide to assessing and preparing differentiated instruction. I was pleasantly surprised by how hands-on it was. Most books on pedagogy are very philosophical.
I fond that the strategies and ready-to-use forms are something that I can incorporate into my lesson plans rather than having to start from the ground up. Specifically, the author, Joan Gipe, pushes teachers to focus on what objectives they are trying to achieve, knowing whether the students have achieved the objective, and getting feedback from the students. It’s sad, because you’d think that teachers are already doing this. And most are, don’t get me wrong. But many times, with all the amount of content we are supposed to cover, random interruptions, it’s hard to remember all of those steps. It’s easy to fall into a habit of what one of my professors called, “drill and kill”. Teach the material, assess if they learned it, and move on. Sadly, as students, I’m sure we can all think of teachers who taught like this.
One of the latest “trends” in education, is differentiated instruction. Which basically means that teachers provide different ways for students to achieve the same goal, depending on their interests and needs. It sounds great in theory and as a student I would have loved it. Planning it is a bit of a nightmare because it all has to be done ahead of time. You have to anticipate students needs and interests. Using some of the suggestions in this book has helped me find a way to look for variety and options in my curriculum. I’m looking forward for school to start now so I can see how it’s going to work out.
All in all, I felt that this would’ve been a book I should’ve had in my education classes. It comes across as being written by a teacher for a teacher.It’s not a fun read, but if you’re an English/Language Arts/Reading teacher, then maybe check this out.