Jeff Colosimo
All right, I assume we're recording. So good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to, well first of all, Happy New Year. I hope the New Year is off to a fresh and fantastic start for everybody. So this is our first webinar in our continued series of fantastic people that we happen to work with. My name is Jeff Colosimo. I am the co-founder, and CEO of Eduplanet21, and we're excited today to have Carol Tomlinson presenting for us, or with us.
Just a few housekeeping slides before we get the webinar started, and then we'll jump right into it. So I am going to share my screen here.
So again, the title for today's Webinar is, The Role of Curriculum in 3 Dimensional Differentiation, again, and Carol will be on in a few seconds here with us just a few housekeeping things. So while the webinar is in process, we will have cameras and people muted. But do remember that there is a chat and Q&A feature that if any of you guys have questions and so forth, we may not address them through the presentation, but we'll address them after the presentation, as everything concludes. Also just to let you know a very frequent question, we are recording the session as well as handouts that we have.
All registrants will be getting the recorded session and handouts after the session. So for any reason you know, you have to leave early, or whatever may happen, you will be getting the information necessary.
Just again to introduce Jeff Colosimo, co-founder CEO of Eduplanet 21, and we have some people on our team, a lot of people on our team joining us here today, but just very quickly. If you're not familiar with Eduplanet 21. We are an Ed tech company based in Pennsylvania. And we focus exclusively on what we call a curriculum management software platform. That's all we do. And basically, we kind of help schools take control of their curriculum.
So basically the idea that we provide the technology that teachers need most to be successful.
So again, we're not going to spend a lot of time talking about Ediplanet. We do want to get the webinar started. So at this point, Carol, I am going to stop sharing and turn this session over to you.
Carol Ann Tomlinson
Great, and so I will try my hand at sharing, and see if we can launch here.
Jeff Colosimo
You're off.
Carol Ann Tomlinson
Good, almost there. Great! Now we're there, I guess.
So welcome. I'm delighted to have a chance to spend some time with you today talking about the work that Eduplanet does, at least indirectly, in trying to help teachers continue to grow in expertise in some really really critical areas of successful teaching and learning. The title of my session, which you probably have seen now 12 times, is the Role of Curriculum in 3 Dimensional Differentiation, and you'll see what that means in a few minutes if you don't already know.
So when Jay McTighe and his colleagues work with folks on Understanding by DesignⓇ, one of the first steps that they do, one of the early steps, is help teachers decide what is truly essential knowledge, what's truly essential understandings and what is truly essential skills on that ever twirling hamster wheel of trying to get us to stop covering a million things which we have so much information to show. It is exhausting to everybody, and not very fruitful in the end. When I do the work that I do which is interesting, Jay and I sort of began this work almost at the same time, we had come at it from similar backgrounds, but at about the same time, and not really surprisingly, we were singing the same song pretty much in the separate work that we did.
Rather than calling these KUDS essential knowledge, essential understandings, and essential skills, I abbreviated them as what kids should know, understand, and be able to do (KUDS).
We'll see a little bit more about that overlap later. So at the end of the session today. I hope that you'll know a little bit better, acknowledging the fact that this is about a 45 min presentation, key elements of differentiation, 3 dimensional differentiation, including foreground differentiation, background, differentiation, and underground differentiation.
I'd like for you to at least be familiar with the terms of pedagogy, of poverty and a pedagogy of plenty, and what those represent.I’d like for you to understand a couple of things, one differentiation is a multifaceted learner, centered model for planning and implementing learning opportunities that extend the academic, intellectual, affective, and social capacities of each learner in a classroom that's a mouthful. But that multifaceted learner center part is particularly important. and I'd like for you to be thinking a little bit about this insider understanding, and that is that meaning rich curriculum which certainly applies to Understanding by Design is really a non-negotiable element.
If our goal is to achieve equity of access to genuinely have a strong, meaningful life, shaping learning opportunities for every student that we teach. It's a goal of differentiation, and I think of Understanding by DesignⓇ as well. It's sometimes called a pedagogy of plenty, and we'll look at that briefly. And what I'd like for you to be able to do as a result of this time together, again, 45 min so I can't build the world on it - is to be able to think a little bit more broadly, deeply, and accurately, about differentiation, and the interplay between differentiation and the goals of Understanding by DesignⓇ.
So I'm gonna start by talking with you a bit about what differentiation is and what it isn't and why it matters.
I'm going to start with what it isn't, which seems pretty pessimistic, and may be, but these are things that I hear about differentiation all the time, from schools all over the United States, from schools all over the world. And to me this is sometimes diametrically opposed to what I think differentiation is, and sometimes just no reason to put it in the foreground.
For me, it is not grouping students by what we perceive to be their ability in school. I could spend a really long time on all of these points, but I won't. My goal is not to find out who we think is smart, and who we think isn't, and serve them accordingly.
But to move further and further and further in inviting kids to come into the highest quality, learning that we know how, and becoming capable of supporting them, lifting them and getting there. It is also not ability grouping within the classroom. Okay? So I have to have a mixed ability classroom. But that's okay, because I can still do bluebirds. The kids who get it fast, the buzzards, the kids just can't do it. And the wombats who aren't even birds. They're just in the middle. Everybody thinks they don't need anything special. They sort of sit there and want to hide, and that's it to me again, that's antithetical to what differentiation is really about.
I made this one a little bit bigger. Obviously, for emphasis. Differentiation is not an add on to teaching. It's not like, okay. I know how to do everything. I'm going to keep doing all of that the way I always have. And now I'm supposed to add a little differentiation here and there, like a little salt and pepper as we go.
Differentiation, understood fully, is a model for changing our teaching, all of it in a way that puts us in a much better position as professionals to follow the advice of the experts in our field who do ongoing and often pretty good research to support our work. It's not an add on. It's remodeling. It's not mostly for kids with identified learning needs, or kids who are identified as advanced or gifted. Though I hear both of those arguments made in various places. It should never be giving more work to kids who are advanced or dumbing down the curriculum for students with learning challenges, and both of those things are alive and well.
It should not ever be thought of as a lesson plan, for every learner that's distinct that's not feasible would not be worthwhile if it were feasible.
It is not a set of instructional strategies. That's not to say that we can't use instructional strategies, because, of course, we need some in the classroom. But the general sense is, you show me 6 strategies that will let me differentiate, and I'll be fine. I'll be differentiating.
And Jay would say this about Understanding by DesignⓇ as well. It's not incompatible with standards, or goals, or learning intentions, or whatever you call those things.
So what is it? Or what should it be?
Well, it's understanding, upfront, that human beings are individuals, and that they learn individually that we should be planning with the student in mind rather than mostly, or only the students. We say the students like this, the students love it. When we do this, the students papers were lousy this week, and we spend so much time talking about them as though they were one thing that we fall very quickly into teaching them as though they were one too, and we have so much evidence now in an age of neuroscience to show us why, that's not a good way to go.
Differentiation is trying to be attentive to a kid's academic, intellectual, affective, and social development, because all of those things are key parts of a student's development.
It's learner centered. We think about the learner first, not a pacing guide, not a test score, but what will benefit the learner and that learner and this learner? And how do we make those things happen?
It's respectful teaching respecting the personhood of every student that we have and the capacity that every student has that necessarily is still largely hidden from you. When they're young. It's responsive teaching. It's responding to their cultures, their languages, their points of entry into a curriculum, their interests, their aspirations. And it's often subtle in the background.
I had a teacher in France ask me a few summers ago, kind of with the little edge on his voice, “Does differentiation always have to be in your face?” And I said, “Can you tell me what you mean by that?” And he said, “Well, my principal says that every time she comes into my classroom, If she's there as much as 15 min, she has to see me differentiate 3 times, and I think a lot of the best work I do, she won't see, because I don't want it to be seen all the time”.
I'm voting for him.
David Sousa, who writes about the brain and its function in learning, told me once that he saw differentiation as attempting to see the classroom through the eyes of a student.
I was really glad, he said, ‘a student’ and not ‘the students’, because, of course, the students don't all see the classroom in anything like the same way. The model that I work with is - and this is true for what Jay does as well - is based on our current best understanding of research from psychology, pedagogy, neuroscience, and occasionally anthropology and sociology as well.
For me, it's a way of being in the classroom, a way of talking, a way of watching, a way of concluding a way of flexibility. And it's important to say to teachers and leaders of teachers
that differentiation, like almost anything that's worthwhile in life - it is a skill learned over time. You don't have a workshop in school, and now everybody's got it. It's a skill set that we can learn by studying students systematically trying different approaches over time, reflecting on what works most effectively, for whom and why, and building on those insights.
We'll tell you a story briefly, because I know from experience, and you probably do, too, that you'll remember the story and nothing else that I say in about 2 weeks. But it's one of many key moments in my life that has been influential in my thinking.
When I had been at the University, I'll back up by saying that my first life was teaching in public school, and I did that for 21 years in high school first, and then flipped over and directed a Child Development Center in preschool, and then landed in Middle School, which was my briar patch, the place that I was really meant to be.
And then I went to the University unexpectedly, and everything, of course, got turned upside down and backwards there, and that was a great learning experience for me. The middle school that I spent the longest time in is still my great love, and always will be. But
when I was new at the University I didn't go there to do anything with differentiation. In fact, it didn't even have a name yet, as far as those of us who practiced it in the school where I was, we just called it by the name of the subject we taught.
But when I got to the university there was more conversation about differentiation going on, and so maybe the 3rd or 4th year I was there, which was my 24th or so, 25th year in education. A young woman was hired to be a differentiation coach in a school district. That was about an hour to an hour and 15 min away from the University where I was, which was the University of Virginia. She called, and she said, Here's who I am. Here's this new job I have. “There's nobody here to talk to about that, and I'm not sure I'm doing this right. Would you mind if I came over and met you for lunch, and we could talk about it?”
She had no idea how hungry I was to talk to somebody about that stuff, too. So we had a first lunch, enjoyed it, and she said, “Can I come back every once in a while?”, and I was as excited as she was. When we had our first conversation, we had a very close alignment of what we thought differentiation was, why it mattered in the classroom, and so on.
The first time after that that she came back she sat down and looked kind of discouraged, and she said.
“I don't really think I'm doing my job.”
And I said, “well, tell me why.”
And she said, “well, I'm working with 5 teachers intensively now, and others on the side with other things she was doing in regard to differentiation”. She said, “two of those teachers just don't like their students, and I don't think I can teach anybody how to differentiate if they don't like the kids.”
And I said, “I think you've got a point there. So let's talk about that.”
These conversations that I'm going to share with you briefly, didn't necessarily happen in this order. But another time she came back, and she said,
“You know. I'm pretty sure I'm not doing my job right.
And I said, “Can you tell me why that feels that way?”
“Well, the teachers don't really understand the curriculum they're teaching, and it's kind of flat and shallow, and I don't know I just can't make myself show them how to differentiate that stuff that's turning kids off instead of on.”
And I'm thinking, well, I think you've got a point. We went through that another time, and her conversation was, “I think maybe I'm not doing my job because the teachers aren’t differentiating.” And when she said the teachers. It was one or two that she was concerned about. Not everybody is teaching and differentiating instruction, but they have absolutely no idea who's learned what in the past.
“And I think I have to start working with them on how to use formative assessment so that they really can meaningfully differentiate something.” So we went through that step by step, over a period of maybe 9 months. I don't know how the conversations benefited her, but they benefited me greatly. When I left public school teaching, I would have told you that differentiation was an instructional model that was designed to help teachers
understand the strengths and the needs of very diverse student populations in a way that helped them create instruction that was going to be responsive to those students. That was how my colleagues and I were conceiving it, and there's still core truth in that. But this conversation that I had with the young teacher, as well as numerous other conversations and observations, I kept expanding my thinking. So in the beginning I might have said to you that I should differentiate and I did use this definition. By the way, a lot of differentiation is shaking up your classroom in the beginning. Just shake it up. You give kids more ways to take in the information they need to learn more ways to process or make sense of, or own that information. And give them more ways to show you what they've learned. If you can do this, you're going to be heading in a good direction.
Now, if I had to give somebody a definition that was about that length, I would give you one that probably sounds simpler, and I think it's much more complex. Here's what I'd say now.
“Differentiation is creating conditions in the classroom that are most likely to maximize the academic, intellectual, affective, and social growth of each student in that classroom.”
It sounds simpler, maybe. And it's wonderful because it doesn't say you have to do it this way, that way. Differentiation doesn't have a recipe, but also has a richness to this definition that is both rewarding and challenging. And it's that way for me as well as for other people.
My favorite definition of differentiation right now, and I'm going to do this quickly. You will have a handout if I'm making you crazy, and you want to come back and look at this faster than you can right now is one of my graduate students, he actually was not a graduate student. He was an undergraduate in a master's class. He came to me one day, and he said, “Carol, I don't think I understand differentiation.”
I said, “well, you know you really shouldn't yet. We've only been here 2 or 3 weeks, and I wouldn't expect you to understand everything, Adam. We're just launching. So be patient with yourself”. He said. “No, no, I don't mean what we do here - that makes perfect sense to me. What I read makes perfect sense to me, but something's off. I know I've got something wrong.”
So I said, Well, how about if you go back to your room sometime when you have a chance this week and write me a paragraph about what you think differentiation is, and I promise that as soon as you send it I'll read it and get back to you, and we'll have a conversation.
Well, I didn't hear from him during the week, and I don't know whether I'm the only adult brain soul. But by the time he came into class next week so many things had happened. I sort of lost a little track of that conversation, and he came up to me again just as class needed to start, and he said, “here!”
I looked down at the thing he was handing me. It was a stack of stapled papers that was at least half an inch thick, maybe only a quarter. But I think more than that.
I said, Adam, what is this? And his face fell.
He said, you told me to write down what I thought differentiation meant, and this thing could have been the first chapter of a dissertation.
And I said, “wow, Adam, I'm so sorry I didn't mean for you to do that much! I just meant for you to give me sort of a sense of where you were”. He said, “no, I needed to do this. It was important.”
He was synthesizing what he read. And remember, now, this is following the conversation I just told you about by 5 or 6 or 7, 8 years.
Here's what he said. He began by saying, “differentiation is a sequence of common sense decisions made by teachers who have a student first orientation.”
And I said, Adam, tell me what you mean by that.
And he said, “well, I do think differentiation is just logical. Every piece of it follows a step in logic. But I think that's more likely to happen when the teachers think about students in the foreground. I said, Keep going on that last part for a minute.
And he said, “well, in my experience”, and he's a senior in college who has just finished his student teaching, so his experience is not great, but it mattered to him, and he's trying to make sense of it, he said, “I teach with some teachers who come to school every day, thinking first about the faces and the names and the personalities of the kids they teach.
and I teach with other teachers who come in every day thinking only about the content they're going to cover. And I think it's that first group that's more likely to differentiate.”
I think Adam was right. I don't think he would be any more incorrect today than he was 20 years ago. Here's what he said, “If we're going to get every kid to maximize their capacity, I think the very first and most important thing we have to do is create a classroom that that kid's gonna come into every day feeling really great about being in there, feeling safe, seen, heard, supported, respected, honored” and he went on to talk about some things he thought we had to do in the classroom to make that happen.
Then he said, “I think we've got curriculum wrong. We think it's a bunch of facts that we have to cover because they're going to be on a test. But I think curriculum is about opening up the world to people and helping them understand not only what an amazing world we live in, but also how amazing we are with the human gift of learning, and I think curriculum's killing that right now.” Then he said, “if you're going to spend enough time building that environment all year and really trying to make the curriculum an inspiration to kids, I think it is necessary to do formative assessment. So you know where the kid that you care about is so much relative to that information that you care so much about.”
And then he said, “then I think once you have that formative assessment information.
you see, ways in which you couldn't see before. Formative information and you can adjust what you're teaching and how you're teaching it because of kids, various cultures, languages, interests, beginning points, aspirations, and so on.
And finally he said something that was really powerful for a young guy, he said. “You know.
I think until we learn how to orchestrate a classroom, how to manage it, how to make it run flexibly. We can't do any of those other things.”
I would have kissed Adam if I had not thought that was grossly inappropriate and embarrassed him to death. But this was just for me, an amazing synthesis of a young guy, and he's saying 10 years later what the young teacher said when she came to me.
Differentiation isn't just about instruction. It has to be about the whole picture. So at one point I began working with some teachers that I was working with by trying to do a graphic of what I thought Adam had said, because we remember the visual things. I found this graphic online and began talking with teachers about what Adam was talking about, with learning, environment, with curriculum, with assessment, with instruction, and all of that bounded by teachers who understand how to be leaders of kids and managers of routines.
And I was so happy with this until some folks in workshops kept coming to me, and we're teachers are polite. So they'd come up during a break and say, you know that graphic that you used of the cogs that can't work. Originally, I thought they were telling me the ideas couldn't work, and that was, I was feeling really skunked. But come to find out, they were all science teachers, every one of them who said something about that to me. Once I started asking a science teacher, and what they were saying is, “these wheels can't turn the way they're drawn.”
That was a problem. So I retired this graphic and then found this one online. And for me this is a beautiful thing. I'm a geek, and this is a thing of beauty. And this, for me, is a graphic of effective teaching 101, and of effective differentiation, certainly. But I think one of the things I've learned over time is that if you don't have a foundation of effective education
across the board, everything else is going to be diluted.
So differentiation is understanding the interdependence of environment, curriculum, assessment, instruction and leadership and management turning together. It's a system.
and when one of these aspects becomes enhanced, it improves the whole mechanism. If one of them slows down or speeds up or jumps out of the frame. The whole thing's gone.
A very interdependent system, and all of those elements are really important. So the aim of differentiation for me is again using each of those elements, environment, curriculum, assessment. instruction, and leadership of students and management of routines
in the most positive and productive ways that our profession knows how to use them
to maximize each student's intellectual, academic, affective, and social capacities.
That's a bunch of stuff.
I'm not going to go through this with you now, but in essence this is a little more practical when you get a chance to look at it. If we look at what research tells us, it tells us that a learner is stronger, more productive, more motivated when the environment has the traits listed here. Now, when the student experiences the curriculum in the ways in the second column, and when the teacher uses assessment in ways that are described in the 3rd column.
and when instruction through the eyes of the student feels like the 4th column, the classroom leadership and leadership of students and management of routines is critically important. And sometimes I use that separately as a 6 element, and sometimes I integrate it into the environment.
Not a topic for today, too much got way, too much to try to hop through, anyhow. I was doing a presentation once at a conference, and I did several presentations, and I guess this woman had come to several of them, and I think she's kind of tired of hearing me. And after the session was over she looked at me with some disdain, and she said.
“Do you think everything in a school is about differentiation?” I had never considered that before, so I paused for just a minute, and I said, “this may not be the answer you want, but yes, I kind of do think so because I think all of these things we have to learn and grow together. Differentiation certainly can't work if we have a toxic environment or curriculum that bores kids to death, or seems pointless, or if assessments are all about judging kids rather than coaching them, or if instruction is filling out worksheets most of the time, and so forth. So I do think most things in schools are attached to differentiation, and vice versa.”
John Hattie, who, many of you will know, is one of the preeminent researchers of the last 15-20 years wrote this about differentiation.
“Many methods commonly affixed to differentiation are indeed similar to excellent teaching.
The importance of an invitational learning environment curriculum designed to help students make sense or meaning of the world around them, providing clear and unambiguous learning intentions, continually checking for student understanding, planning instruction around patterns, revealed formative assessment information creating classroom routines, that balance, stability and flexibility.”
Hattie is a very interesting man to me. He studies a lot of things really deeply and he pays really close attention to differentiation, and he gets it. He understands it. And he said to me once, I think most of our research meaning his team is actually about differentiation. We don't call it that way, but call it that. But it's about doing what maximizes the students' potential. This last line, though, and I'm gonna show it to you on another slide is the kicker on this for me.
Differentiation is about building learning conditions and pedagogy from which all students benefit. In other words, he's saying, see those things in the paragraph above differentiation. Does those, or at least advocates doing those. And, in fact, if you want all kids to have a richer education, that's exactly what you have to do.
So again, differentiation is about building learning conditions and pedagogy from which all students benefit. So those things are that I've several of them don't seem like differentiation, but in fact they really are.
He and I were writing back and forth a couple of summers ago, and I guess I was in some of my usual frustration. Sort of asking, “is it too much to expect that schools will support their teachers in learning to do all those things? It just seems to me like that's something we owe the kids that we teach.”
And he said, “we ask our kids to come to school for 15 years longer than the sentence that some get for murder.” So I agree, and what he was agreeing with was something I had written. Differentiation is a commitment to learn and to teach in accordance with the principles and practices of quality teaching. That is, the standard delineated by our profession. To ensure that quality, teaching, and learning are the entitlement of every young person who has no option but to spend the bulk of their days with us.
So I'm gonna do this really quickly, because I'm gonna run out of time faster than I can afford to. For me, we owe our students a pedagogy of plenty. One in which the kinds of things I've been describing to you are happening in the classroom.
We owe every one of them classrooms with teachers who commend and practice empathy, deep respect for, and belief in, the capacity and ability of each kid to learn in that classroom, and for each kid to do excellent work.
We owe it to every kid, an education that reflects our best professional understanding.
We owe it to each kid to have a persistent focus, not on covering a pacing guide, but maximizing the academic, intellectual, affective, and social capacities of each learner.
We owe them classrooms that are responsive to their various strengths and interests and cultures and needs and aspirations.
We owe it to every one of them to create an education that provides equity of access
to genuinely excellent learning opportunities for every learner.
We owe it to every one of them to prepare them as individuals, to have a stable, satisfying, contributing, and productive life beyond school.
That's a lot. But for me, that's what teaching is about. And that's what this multi faceted
approach to differentiation is.
So I'm gonna skip some stuff now, which I do a lot because I always think I can do more than there's time for.
So I want to talk with you really, briefly, about 3-Dimensional Differentiation. This is an organizational way of thinking about stuff.
It occurs to me that when you really look at all the things that we advocate in differentiation, it really seems like they just keep popping up like weeds. There's so many of them, and some of them don't seem like differentiation.
So recently, I've been working with the idea that differentiation has 3 dimensions.
There are 3 lenses that we can use to look at differentiation - foreground, differentiation,
background differentiation, and underground differentiation. I'm gonna try to show these to you super quickly. So I can use a couple of examples that attach to UbD and DI foreground. Differentiation is what you and I mostly think of as differentiation. If you have a sense of a teacher talking with kids about best ways to make the classroom a good fit for everybody about taking their own next steps, about having a chart on the wall. That shows you where you need to go sit in the classroom to do whatever you need to be doing now, to take your own next step about having different kinds of materials for kids to use in different ways about giving them choices of ways to express what they're learning. That's foreground differentiation. It's the stuff that many of us would see, recognize and say, yeah, that's it.
Background differentiation, on the other hand, is the practices and routines that and beliefs that we have in a classroom that allows great stuff to happen.
So, for example, curriculum is background, a background factor.
Formative assessment is a background factor deeply connected, both of them to differentiation, but not differentiation themselves. When kids in a classroom know how to get up and get materials and go sit where they need to and get help when they need to, because the teacher's busy, and what to do if they finish something early, and how to help a kid next to them without telling them the answer. That's classroom leadership of kids and management of routines. It isn't differentiation, but it facilitates differentiation.
Underground Differentiation is particularly interesting to me. Underground Differentiation is that teacher and what that teacher brings to a classroom that makes it shine and bloom, and the teacher gets better and better with those aspects of him or herself over time
is how a teacher uses a voice. It's how a teacher manages throughout a very complicated day to be respectful of every kid in the classroom. Even if the answer they gave to the question seems silly, or if their behavior is not helping anything at all. It's the way a teacher models empathy. It's the way a teacher has very high standards for him or herself, models that for kids consciously and expects that of them. So that's the teacher.
What we think of as differentiation is only foreground stuff, but the background and underground stuff is immensely important. We tend to forget those 2 at our peril. I think maybe this just helps us organize it better.
So I'm gonna show you 2 things here and not do much with them, because I have one. I have to do foreground differentiation again, pose questions like these 5, and I'll give you just a minute to look at one or 2 of them, not all encompassing. But these would be great questions for us to think about as teachers. If we want to reach each of our kids and do what we think of as underground differentiation. What the teacher brings might ask us to consider things like these. I can give you time just to look at them briefly.
Background differentiation again, is where the curriculum fits, and I would ask us to think about questions like these again for just a second. I want to look now with you at some examples, at least try to do one or 2 of them that relate directly to Understanding by DesignⓇ, not surprisingly. Understanding by DesignⓇ, is the model that I use when I'm working with teachers on differentiation. Like everything else, teachers are a varied group.
Sometimes I meet with teachers who have a really sophisticated understanding of differentiation, I'm sorry, of Understanding by DesignⓇ, and sometimes I meet with teachers who are more “What? No, I've never heard of that. Oh, I have to cover the pacing guide. No, no, I can't do this understanding stuff.” They have to have all the background knowledge first.
In case you're interested later, this is sort of a basic framework that I try to start with. If I have teachers that are starting off because you have to start where kids are to move forward, and you have to do the same thing with teachers. And you'll see when you look at this, that I'm really asking the same thing. Understanding by DesignⓇ does sort of tailored and streamlined for a beginning. I want to show you now for the next 5 min or so, and whoever it is that's gonna give me a prompt, I do know where I am, and I'm gonna stop in about 4 or 5 min, maybe 6. So I'm good to go.
With teachers with whom I have worked on the curriculum piece, always with other pieces, too, but teachers who say, you know, my kids, this teacher said to me one day, in the beginning of the year, she said. “I want to show you something that I did over the summer with my curriculum. I teach history, and my kids hate history. For the most part they think it's a study of dead people. They don't know any of these people that I'm mentioning. They don't really have any sense of all the things that came before us, and they need to know those things, but they can't unless they can make some kind of sense of it, and it doesn't seem like a thousand facts to memorize. And then you move on.”
So on the first day of school, she said to her kids, “guys, I'm so excited to have you in history this year. It's like a giant story of our country - a bunch of little stories that could happen to people like us. And did that make a bigger story about who we all are together? And here's the best thing you're going to find. History is really easy to learn. And here's why history is all about peeps.”
And she wrote that on the board vertically, and the kids are looking at her like why are there stories about baby chickens. And so she said, “these 5 things, everything we study this year is going to be about one of these 5 or more than one: politics, economics, aesthetics, people and social issues.”
Throughout the year kids worked in small groups to come up with their definitions of these things, and they improved their definitions as their understanding grew. A kid came to class one day and said, “You know this peeps thing kinda makes sense to me. My dad and I were watching the news last night, and if I'm not crazy, that newscast was about peeps.”
Another kid came in one day and said, “I think the peeps thing is kind of getting to me. We read a short story in English today. I mean, like, it was a short story, and I'm pretty sure that story was about peeps.” A kid came in one day later and said to her, “You know that peeps thing. You could talk about life in the school by using peeps.”
All correct, and much better than covering the pacing guide. What's the goal to do the richest work? We know how to maximize kids' curiosity, their cultures, their interests, their strengths, their intellect, their affective needs. This is much closer than let's do the pacing guide.
Another teacher, once in a big workshop, came up to me at lunch, and she said, I'm so sorry if I looked like I wasn't paying attention. Teachers are, I don't know, We're beset with guilt. Somehow what I couldn't make myself say to her was, “you were so far back I didn't even know you were back there”, but that would have been worse. She handed me a piece of paper that looked better than this one does, but this is my rendition of it. She said “I was really paying attention, but suddenly I understood what my subject is about, and this is what I'm going to put on a big poster in the front of my room.” She said, “I teach Earth science, and what I see now is that it's an umbrella of change. We're studying the umbrella of change, and we study it through a variety of funnels. We're going to study change in our world through oceanography, geography, meteorology, and ecology. No matter which of those things we're studying? It's going to be about change. And we're going to ask these questions, how does the earth change? Why does it change? When does it change? What changes the earth? Where do changes occur, and what are the effects of the change?”
This is conceptual thinking. It isn't the whole model of Understanding by DesignⓇ, but it is right at the heart of what you're wanting teachers to begin to work through, piece by piece, and step by step.
Wes Taylor was a high school teacher, and he brought me this one day, as he was trying to figure out what to do to make his curriculum understandable to kids, motivating students, organizing for them. And he drew a concept map, not just a series of concepts like peeps, but a map which you can read as a sentence from top to bottom. It says, “history is transmutation. It's the ebb and flow of stability and change seeking a balance. It creates historical cycles with roots in the past and ripples in the future.” You can see that ebb and flow of stability and change with roots and ripples through the arts, or politics, or economics, or science, or philosophy, or religion, or football, or almost anything else. But, guys, here's the coolest thing: you go undergo transmutation as personal change.
And when he was going through this with me the first time, I thought. “That is the best definition of adolescence. It's the ebb and flow of stability and change, seeking a balance
with roots in the past and ripples in the future, and suddenly they become history.”
He can tell you what they need to know, what they need to understand, what they need to be able to do. Most importantly, he understands how to align those with the standards. He understands how to help kids tap their own interests and experiences and cultures in these things, and it's a different world than we're going to do chapter 13 today.
I need to stop now because I'm already late and told my host not to stop me. And there are 3 or 4 examples here that I hope you will take a look at. They're a little more self explanatory than the ones that I shared with you. But here's my last thought for you.
The goals and practices of differentiation and Understanding by DesignⓇ are interdependent and mutualistic. If you aren't attending to foreground differentiation,
Understanding by DesignⓇ will not work as well as it should for a lot of kids.
If you're not paying attention to the quality of something like Understanding by DesignⓇ, which is so rich and research based, and so likely to give kids the promise they need
with the other elements, including formative assessment, which Jay always includes. His model does some foreground stuff, some background curriculum, stuff, formative assessment, and instructional pieces, not so much the learning, environment, and classroom leadership and management. But those things are interdependent and they're mutualistic. Both models benefit from the presence of the other, and the coaching of the other. And kids benefit when those and the other elements are present in their world.
So now, if you haven't suffocated from hearing one voice. What, 40 min? How about some questions!
And I hope some of you put some in the chat box. If you haven't, please go ahead and do that and I think somebody is probably going to look at those questions and feel them for me.
Kelsey Jaskot
You got it, Carol. So we did have one come in so far “does this 3D division relate to your previous standard content, pedagogy and interest, division.”
Carol Ann Tomlinson
I'm sorry read that to me again. I'm trying to do 2 things at once, and that's never very fruitful. Read it for me again.
Kelsey Jaskot
No problem. Carol. Does this 3D division relate to your previous standard content, pedagogy and interest division.
Carol Ann Tomlinson
Well, that's an interesting question. Certainly, in almost every field of work that you have,
In my case 45 years ago, it is still relevant to the work that's happening today. But blessedly, I've had a chance to grow through those years. So I retain the stuff that still is supported by research and makes sense, but continue to try to stretch the fabric. And I think 2 things that I've written about in the past that this participant is relating to is that early on I talked about why we might differentiate. Research gives us at least 3 factors that we see in a person that impacts their learning. Their readiness is a huge feature. We have lots of research over many decades that tell us if the curriculum and instruction are misaligned with a kid's entry point. We've got big problems. The second thing that research tells us is useful to tap when we're designing. Instruction is for kids’ interests, passions. They're good at things that they just are itching to know more about. Those are huge motivators. And so, if and besides that, we learn from our experiences. If I can help a kid see why this thing in science, or literature, or art, or anything else, attaches to their world and their experiences, they learn it better. There's a good bit of research that still remains on that. The 3rd one is a little long for us to go into today. But there, in the beginning I talked about learning styles. This was 50 years ago, 55 years ago. And the short version is that since that point, the idea of learning styles has been sort of debugged by experts in several domains of study as not being a valid concept. Neuroscience, certainly, but psychology, sociology are the same. And yet always those people say it's not that we're saying. Everybody learns the same way. We're saying this learning style thing isn't the right way to talk about it. So that went through a couple of iterations for me. Now what I talk about is learning preferences, and we have strong research on this. If you give a kid a choice of ways to process something, a choice of ways, to show you what they know, a choice of working alone or with somebody, and it changes over time and with the context it still makes really good sense to say, yes. I should be thinking about where a kid is readiness wise, what their interests are, and options for making sense of and expressing this stuff. The second part, I think they were talking about is, as I can see, the chart in my head, they said. Those are what you can differentiate. I'm sorry. Why, you might differentiate. The second part of the chart is how you might differentiate, and that is, you can differentiate, content. The stuff you're trying to get kids to learn, or how they take in that stuff. And that's usually the one that we go for. You can differentiate the process. How the kid makes sense of things. And you can differentiate products, how kids express learning after they've had time to master something. And so what you're always thinking about is okay, why am I needing to differentiate stuff now. And which of those elements would I differentiate? And I think that's the genesis of the question that you had. And so yes, that's still very much a part of my thinking, and I'm working on a revision of how to differentiate instruction and academically diverse classrooms which will be going, I think, into its 4th version now, and that still will be absolutely front and center.
Kelsey Jaskot
Thank you very much, Carol. “How much do you weigh standardized testing to help differentiate instruction compared to informal assessments, observations, etc.”
Carol Ann Tomlinson
I'm sorry. Repeat that for me one more time.
Kelsey Jaskot
Sure. How much do you wait? Standardized testing to differentiate instruction compared to informal assessments and observations.
Carol Ann Tomlinson
Yeah, you know you, you can take this with a grain of salt. If it helps you, you can just decide that I'm not in touch with the world. I don't think we have done anything in my 55 years in education that has been as harmful to as many teachers and kids, and to understanding of our profession as using a standardized test to measure the worth of a kid, a teacher or a school. Jay McTighe has a wonderful analogy that he's been using for years, and I don't think there's a better one. He said, “you know, if we did things right, we would understand what it means to eat healthily, and we would understand what it means to get good exercise, and we would understand what it means to eliminate harmful things in our environment, and we would do that all the time.” And then once or twice a year, we go to the doctor and the doctor tells us how we're doing, and if we're not doing something very well, then, we'll try to fix that the next time around. What we're doing now is practicing for our physical, and I truly have a neighbor whom I have great affection and regard for, who, when she knows she's got about a month before her next appointment, goes out and walks like a crazy lady. It's not going to sustain itself after that appointment's over. She's practicing for the physical. Standardized tests are kind of the ‘physical’. But what we're doing now is putting kids and teachers on a nerve wracking hamster wheel starvation diet and saying, that's it. And if you have a kid with a learning disability, a kid who comes from deep poverty, a kid who's experienced trauma, a kid with a learning disability, a kid who's really smart and understands the meaning of life better than we do. 1,000 different kinds of kids sign off on that stuff. They don't think they can. They don't think it's worthwhile. We have teachers dropping out of the profession in droves and saying I can't. You're telling me to differentiate, and you're telling me I have to be on exactly the same page of the pacing guide that the guy next door is. What I'm talking about is living a healthy academic life, and then every once in a while, checking in with the doctor and the standardized test could be one measure of checking in with the doctor, but so could student work, and so could meaningful observations. It's not that I think standardized tests have no place in the world, but we have made them the world, and that's damaging. So I think what Jay and I are trying to do, and other people as well, of course, in the profession is say, let's talk about what really good teaching and learning looks like, and see what might happen if we actually paid attention to that instead of covering the pacing guide. If that's heresy, it's probably a good minute to sign off.
Kelsey Jaskot
There you go. So we have one last one. And then I'm gonna kind of take the reins here for a second. But this is a great segue. Where do you see technology and innovation, integration and the role of differentiation and backwards design, especially as it is seen as just devices, or another thing to add.
Carol Ann Tomlinson
Well, you gave me 2 options, is it for this or this? And the answer is, yes, it depends on what you do with it. It could be this or this. We tend, have always tended to say, oh, this new technology is so cool, let's just use it without saying what for, or why, or do we even know how to use it? Are we asking which aspect of the world we want it to impact? Or how do kids develop those skills? Or are we trying to replace the teacher with it?
Jay does some fascinating work on his own right now, playing around with AI and sends it out to a large mailing list. And what he keeps suggesting is “can this machine do this?” He asked 2 bots to write a poem, and then gave them another prompt, and in both cases they wrote poems that I would be really impressed if they came from a very capable High School senior, and it took them 3 seconds - took them 3 seconds to write that thing. So the deal is, do we help kids use the bot to write their papers? Or do we use the bot in some way as feedback for them? Or a resource that compares and contrasts possibilities? If we just let them loose, or if we forbid it in the classroom, I don't think that's useful. If it becomes the teacher, and that's been a real failure, as far as I'm concerned. Plug the kids into this math program kind of thing, and they will flourish. Where does he flourish on some of those things? So it's a tool. They're both tools. AI is a powerful tool, and we have an opportunity to make sure it's powerfully wonderful. Instead of powerfully harmful teaching them the ethics of it, getting them to look at the pros and cons would be a wonderful thing. Let's do something that's gonna carry through with your whole life. But if it becomes, you know the teacher, I'll just get the bot to do this, and then I don't really have to do very much work anymore. And I'm not as optimistic, but they can do things for you like that. I'm not saying it can't. But we need to know that it's a tool, the most powerful one we've ever had, and we have lots of deep thinking to do about it, and to do with our students at all ages. And then it could be amazing.
Kelsey Jaskot
Well, said, yep, absolutely. We've been having that conversation a lot. So I appreciate your thoughts on that.
So, guys, I know there are a couple more questions out there. What we're going to do here is to just kind of switch gears here for a minute. I'll work with Carol, see if we can get you some answers on those last couple as we go. But I did want to talk to you just for a minute about how you can continue your learning on differentiation within Eduplanet.
So I'm actually gonna share my screen. Carol, do you mind if I kind of take over, you may have to stop sharing. There we go. We're good, right?
And all right, hopefully, you're all seeing my screen. So if you liked what you heard today from Carol. One of the things I do want to mention to you is within Eduplanet. We've worked with Carol to develop what we call a professional Learning Institute, right? So Eduplanet is one of the softwares that really combines professional learning and curriculum design all in one place. And that's really the value of the platform, and one of the one of the key things that I like to highlight. So guys, what this looks like is basically an online asynchronous course, each learning path is about an hour to an hour and a half anywhere from what are just some of the key concepts of differentiation, giving you a little bit of an introduction. You can see, then, that moves into things like the learning environment, the curriculum right playing off of what we were discussing today as well as formative assessment and what that looks like with instruction in the classroom as well. I highly highly recommend it. The folks that have taken this course call it a masterclass from Carol. So like I said, it is. It's very well liked. Very highly used across all of our customers as well. So I just wanted to mention that it's a really great learning opportunity. If you're looking to advance that learning within your school or district.
Carol Ann Tomlinson
Can I? Can I ask you one question? You asked. You raised a question, and I thought you were asking one of your colleagues, and if you were, if you were, just drop it. If you were asking me, I should have responded. And didn't. You started by asking for ideas for continued growth with differentiation. Did you ask me for some ideas or.
Kelsey Jaskot
Oh, no, I was actually just kind of showing what your Institute looks like. So all is good.
But if you have, yeah, just do that in a second too.
Carol Ann Tomlinson
Okay.
Kelsey Jaskot
Awesome. No, you're good, Carol. So that's just kind of the quick little snippet. You'll see different videos, discussions, and reflection opportunities here within the Institute. So a really great learning experience for you. Aside from that, we did talk a little bit about Understanding by DesignⓇ today and curriculum design. So Edu, plan. It does just make it really, really easy to design an effective curriculum, and one that I like to call guaranteed and viable. As we get down to that unit level as well. But you can see it's just a little bit of a wizard approach to getting you anywhere from designing a course and really starting to get down into your units of study as well. One of my favorite parts about Edgelanet is that we are partnered with Jay McTighe, who's the co-author of Understanding by DesignⓇ. And the platform has been used to embody really that UbD framework. It walks you through the 3 stages of Understanding by DesignⓇ, really defining your learning goals here in Stage One, you know, building out your assessments. And Carol just spent, you know, a good bit of time talking about formative assessment where those play in right, and mentioned that Jay ties into that as well. Great opportunity to build those out and share that with your staff across your district as well as any learning activities here as well. This can be used in a variety of ways. It's customized for your district, and one of the prompts that we do have within each learning activity is really to get you to think about what are some of those extensions, modifications, and a lot of our schools have added different ways of differentiation here as well. So again, highly highly recommended. If you have not seen Eduplanet, maybe you've been using it for a number of years, but if you feel like you're not using it to the best of its ability, please contact either your customer success manager, or reach out to our sales team. We'd be happy to kind of chat with you a little bit more about ways in which Eduplanet might be able to support your efforts, too. But, Carol, I do want to give you a second, too, to jump in. If you do have any additional learning opportunities. I just wanted to give you the mic for a second, too.
Carol Ann Tomlinson
I'm sorry I'm missing something, Kelsey. Try me again. I'm sorry to be sort of out of it.
Kelsey Jaskot
No, it's okay, I said, if you did have any additional learning opportunities for furthering differentiation. I just wanted to give you the mic for a minute, too.
Carol Ann Tomlinson
Yeah, no, I can give you a list of things books, and Eduplanet is on it, of things that people can use as resources if you'd like me to to send with the handout when you do. Not necessary, but it's got it. If you'd like one.
Kelsey Jaskot
That'd be wonderful, Carol, and then we can shoot that out to all of our registrations as well. Just make sure everybody's got access to those resources that'd be great. Thank you, Jeff. I'll turn it back over to you.
Carol Ann Tomlinson
I'm good. Thanks for being here this afternoon. It's an honor to spend time with people who are in the midst of a very complex world of education. It's wonderful every time people show up for something like that, because your world is overly challenging.
Jeff Colosimo
Yeah. Well, thank you again, Carol, for taking the time to do the webinar with us today, it's greatly, greatly appreciated. So you know, thanks to everybody for attending, we will be sending out the recording to everybody that registered for the webinar as well as information, and how to get in touch with us if you would like additional information about the Institute that we showed you or any of the Ediplanet products. So again, thank you for joining us today. Thank you once again, Carol, for the fantastic webinar, and we hope you hear back from everybody shortly. Everybody have a good day.
Carol Ann Tomlinson
Delighted, and I appreciate the opportunity.
