Journey Towards Differentiation

When I first took on my current multi-age assignment, I intended to follow the model that the other multi-age teachers in my building used. I would teach the younger students math while the older students worked independently, then teach the older students math while the younger students worked on their own. It sounded so easy, but I quickly found out that the reality was incredibly difficult. Teaching two separate curriculums simultaneously means spending double the amount of time preparing and teaching lessons. Trying to fit two separate math lessons into the finite number of hours making up a school day means that students receive half the instruction that their peers in straight-graded classrooms recieve. Grappling with this reality is where my journey towards differentiation really began.

The first realization that I had was that I was trying to cover too many topics at the same time. One group might be working on addition while the other had moved on to geometry. Then the geometry group might move into money and the addition group would work on place value. All this jumping from concept to concept made planning quite crazy. I decided to try simplifying things by teaching only one conceptual strand at a time. If one group needed to work on geometry, we would all work on geometry. When it was time to study addition, we would all study addition. This made it easier for me to concentrate on planning at least.

My next realization was that even with a stream-lined curriculum I couldn't do everything. Determined to create a nicely coordinated curriculum map, I lugged all my new curriculum guides home and spread them out on the floor of my living room. At the time, my schoold district had adopted the Investigations in Number, Data, and Space (Dale Seymour Publications, 1995) curriculum materials supplemented by the Scott Foresman-Addison Wesley (Pearson Education, Inc., 1997) math curriculum. The first- and second-grade Investigations programs each came in six-volume box sets. The first- and second-grade Scott Foresman series each had four hardcover volumes worth of teachers’ guides and eight paperback volumes full of reproducibles. Looking at this huge amount of material--all thirty-six volumes worth—quickly overwhelmed me once more.

There was something about all those stacks of guidebooks that I found particularly scary. Because I knew that my school district had officially adopted these materials, I felt responsible for teaching every single lesson, using every single reproducible, assigning every single homework set, and investigating every single topic. I felt responsible, and yet I also knew that it was impossible. One teacher with one grade level might attempt the task. One teacher with two grade levels in one classroom absolutely could not. I began to doubt whether teaching math in a multi-age classroom was realistically feasible.

At lunch a few days later I decided to share my worries with another teacher in the building. He had been teaching for many years and the past ten or so had been in multi-age rooms. “Don’t worry about what’s in the guide books,” he told me, “It’s too much. No one could ever do it all.” What a relief to have this acknowledged! “Just teach the Standards. That’s what you‘re ultimately responsible for.”

This advice proved to be incredibly freeing. Rather than feeling that I had to cover every page in each of those thirty-six curriculum guides, I simply had to ensure that I addressed each of the standards. At this point I began to see the curriculum guides reference books for lesson ideas and materials, rather than a complicated puzzle.

Deciding first to teach only one topic at a time and then to focus on the state standards allowed me to develop a curriculum map that was friendlier for the multi-age teacher. However, it did not get me around the fundamental challenge of differentiating instruction. I still believed that differentiating instruction in math meant teaching different lessons to a younger group and an older group, but teaching two math lessons every day, while less difficult in terms of planning, was still logistically challenging. I found that I was worrying less about what I should teach and more about how to schedule in two groups, keeping one group busy while the other was having a lesson.

My most important realization came out of the concern was that I was shortchanging my students out of instructional time which led to me to discover that teaching small group lessons is only one way to differentiate math instruction. After plenty of trial and error, I have come to believe that teaching small groups is one way, but not the only way, and often not the best way. I have found that whole-class open-ended investigations can challenge almost all students simultaneously, while tiered tasks-- tasks which are fundamentally the same, but adjusted for different levels--can be assigned as independent work. I have found that the same problems can be done independently or with support from the teacher, and that whole class instruction can spiral, introducing topics to some children while others are reviewing. In my opinion, it is these other structures for organizing instruction that make differentiated math instruction possible. I am hoping to share more here about these alternatives to the standard small group structure and to offer a glimpse into what these structures look like at work in my classroom.