Explanation: Tiering is an instructional approach designed to have students of differing readiness levels work with essential knowledge, understanding, and skill, but to do so at levels of difficulty appropriately challenging them as individuals at a given point in the instructional cycle. To tier an activity or work product:
- Clearly establish what students should know, understand, and be able to do as a result of the activity or product assignment
- Develop one activity or product assignment that is interesting and engaging for students, squarely focusses on the stated learning goals, and requires students to work at a high level of thought. It's a good idea to begin with an advanced level activity, because doing so is likely to raise the teacher's sights for other learners as well. It is also possible to start with a version of the activity or product that teacher and students have used successfully in the past.
- Think about the readiness levels of students in the class based on pre-assessment, ongoing assessment, and continually growing teacher knowledge of students' general skills levels (in reading, writing, math- or whatever skills are fundamental to the subject at hand).
- Develop enough versions of the original task or product assignment to challenge the range of learners. You may need to create one, two, three, or four additional versions.
- To create multiple versions of a task at different degrees of difficulty, refer to the following graphic. "The Equalizer" and ensure that the versions for students who continue to struggle with ideas and skills the task calls for are more foundational, concrete, simple, have fewer dimensions, and so on. To increase the degree of difficulty of a task, move one or more of the equalizer buttons to the right (making the task more transformational, abstract, complex, multifaceted, and so on).
No comments:
Post a Comment