Differentiation in the classroom

At our Staff Conference on Monday, 16th July, Donna Sweeney from St Pauls will be speaking to us about the importance of teachers knowing their students as individuals and employing a range of flexible teaching strategies in responding to them. At the end of her presentation she recommends the following three resources that I have ordered for the ISC and they  should be here early next week.

You might also like to re-acquaint yourselves with the two blog posts below from last year that covered pedagogies that personalised learning.

Visible Thinking

Teacher Channel Videos

 Visible Thinking is a research - based approach to teaching thinking,begun at harvard's Project Zero.It develops students' thinking and comprehension abilities.The book contains a varied collection of practice,including thinking routines -small sets of questions or short sequence of steps - as well as documemtation of student thinking and comprehension.

 

In this book Dylan Wiliam stresses the importance of formative assessment as a key process for increasing teacher quality whilst having the biggest impact on student outcomes.  This book offers over fifty practical techniques for classroom formative assessment that every teacher will be able to implement into their regular classroom practice. Formative assessment strategies include classroom questioning, learning intentions, productive feedback and collaborative learning.

This book,focussing on Years 9-12,  explores  how  teachers incorporate differentiation principles and strategies throughout an entire instructional unit. There are annotated lesson plans for differentiated units in English, mathematics, history, science, art, and  languages.There are  Samples of differentiated product assignments, learning contracts, rubrics, and homework handouts.An overview of the non-negotiables in differentiated classrooms and guidelines for using the book as a learning tool