Before consolidation came along, one of the buzzwords in Maine education circles was “differentiation.” Dr. Carol Tomlinson of the University of Virginia defines differentiation as the “classroom practice that looks eyeball to eyeball with the reality that kids differ, and the most effective teachers do whatever it takes to hook the whole range of kids on learning.” She describes differentiation as more than just a teaching strategy. She states that it is a philosophy of teaching.

Her philosophy of teaching puts the teacher as the “guide on the side” rather than the “sage on the stage.” This allows students to actively engage in education. They learn how to learn. Students at both ends of the learning continuum get what they need to progress. Education becomes fair to all. Fair doesn’t mean that everyone gets the same things. Fair means that every student gets what is needed to learn.

Effective teachers don’t find the differentiation philosophy to be different from what they practice every day. Standards-based teaching makes it a bit more difficult to practice because standards-based teaching expects all students to attain specific knowledge and demonstrate certain skills at the same point in time. Teachers and parents know that children learn different topics at varying rates. Some are like the turtle in Aesop’s famous tale who plods along steadily toward the goal. Others are like the hare in the same story, dashing ahead, taking a break, and catching up at the end. And still others have as many approaches to learning as there are students in the class.

So what’s a teacher to do? How does this get managed?

My favorite story to tell student teachers and parents about one way to practice differentiation is something that happened to me about 10 years ago. It was early September and I was teaching a phonics lesson on the “-an” word family. The class was generating words that would become the class list of spelling words. I was expecting to get words such as tan, ran, can, and, man. I was hoping to get words such as land, hand, handy and candy.

Max raised his hand. “Yes, Max, what ‘-an’ word did you think of?” Max Winter answered, “Antidisestablishmentarianism.” Thinking quickly, I asked him what it meant. “Being against the government,” replied Max. “Hmm,” I answered, not being sure of the definition myself. This was before ready access to a Google-type search, and first-grade dictionaries did not list the word. “Max, why don’t you go to the library and look up how to spell the word?” I directed.

While Max was gone, I continued the lesson on “-an” words. I did get words such as grand, stand, than. We posted the words on our weekly spelling wall. Max came back from the library with the 28 letters needed to spell this word. Max also admitted that the librarian helped him find out that it actually meant being against the separation of church and state. Max really didn’t want to talk about what the word meant (and secretly I was very glad of that) but he did think it was a very cool “-an” word and wanted it on the spelling wall.

The wall was divided into two categories: “have-tos” and “challenges.” Needless to say, antidisestablishmentarianism was placed in the challenges category. We never did get around to really talking about the meaning of the word, but every student wanted to learn how to spell that very long word. By the end of two months, everyone had.

The act of learning to spell that word taught my students many things. It taught them how to break words into syllables – all 12 of them. It taught them to listen for sounds. It gave them memorization practice. It gave them a personal goal that became a group goal. They helped one another learn the spelling.

These lessons carried over into other spelling and writing activities. Spelling became a collaborative effort rather than a competitive one. Collaborative learning practices spilled over into other subjects. The class developed the attitude that everyone could learn because if everyone in the room could learn how to spell that long word, then everyone in the room could learn anything.

That experience created differentiation as an expectation for my students. They had discovered that some people could memorize quickly, others needed to think, and still others needed to do something to learn. I couldn’t have formally taught these lessons. I could only manage the experiences so they became powerful lessons through class reflection and discussion. This is what differentiation is, and this is what it can do for a group of students.

E-mail me at conversationswithateacher@gmail.com. I want to hear about your thoughts and experiences with education.