Differentiation, Grades and High Expectations

Something I keep wrestling with is how to give differentiated grades when I give differentiated instruction.

I just attended a seminar on Differentiation and Equity. It seems like the information I get is always from folks teaching lower grades and non-technical subjects. I was pleased when the presenter ventured close to my territory with an example from Science. http://www.angelamaiers.com/2008/08/differentiation.html


For an English Language Learner (which is one dimension I differentiate along) the presentater gave the following examples as an expected and adequate response:

Native speaker: Matter changes on earth most often as a result of chemical processes.
New English Speaker: Matter changes.

Question: What does it mean to give a "A" to both students?

The answer supplied was that the ABCD grading system doesn't provide adequate descriptions for this case. A 4321 system would be more appropiate. (gee - wouldn't you think 4=A and so on? N0. 4 means meets the standard, 3, 2 and 1 are degrees of approacing the standard).

So the New English Speaker might get a 1 for his answer to indicate that progress has started towards the standards. But she wouldn't feel the New English Speaker deserved a D. No better suggestion than change the grading system was forthcoming.

-------RATS----- I was hoping for the answer!!!

Here's my current thought. Let's agree on terms first.

Differentiation means we provide many paths to our students to reach the SAME goals.

I’m going to offer this definition without citation. Mostly because I can’t find a brief citation to note, and also because I don’t think the definition is controversial.

Accommodation can include CHANGING the goals to accommodate a students abilities and needs.

“Accommodation may involve the use of modified instructional techniques, more flexible administrative practices, modified academic requirements (emphasis mine), or any compensatory activity that emphasizes the use of stronger, more intact capabilities or that provides modified or alternative educational processes and/or goals. “
Chapter 6
SPECIAL EDUCATION FOR INCLUSIVE CLASSROOMS Price, Mayfield, McFadden, and Marsh Copyright © 2000-2001 Parrot Publishing, L.L.C.

I think the reason I struggle to know how to give a differentiated grade for differentiated work is because that ain’t what I got. I got work done by students that I have given an accommodation to.

It is a real problem to name what’s being done with the name of accommodation because it brings up issues of equity, having high expectations, and not discriminating. I 100% agree that we shouldn't label ESL students as "special needs" which the accomodation tag implies As a matter of principle I would say that a teacher would really not be allowed to provide an accommodation that involved an modification of an academic requirement short of directions from a special ed authority. And yet, I think that’s what we do. I think the example of the two different answers that are deemed acceptable in the science class is an accommodation and that’s why it’s hard to talk about grading it. I’ve got another example from an educator who’s IN the classroom and I think it illuminates the same point.

(Ed. Note, I used the term “High Expectations” above. Whenever I write "High Expectations" please genuflect upon reading the term. The term is a non-negotiable matter of faith in our modern education creed and should be shown god-like respect. Terms like "Achievable Expectations", "Realistic Expectations", "Obtainable Expectations", and "Sensible Expectations", are anathema.).

I ask the reader to consider the following excerpt “differentiating the Islamic empire”. The author finds differentiating for “readiness” to be the hardest. This is a secondary teacher with a Master Teaching License. His ‘out’ is that he allows the students to choose which of the tasks they will do under readiness and so he eliminates the equity issue. I wonder if the smarter students might not choose the easiest task! (DO YOU THINK!!!????) and thus lower the expectations for everyone.

The writer avoids this trap as follows:
assertion #1: The critical element in this lesson was that I gave students a choice.

but

fact #2: the "A" students were expected to select one of two assignment choices I had perceived as challenging

HELLO! That’s making an accommodation for the non-A students. In educspeak we would prefer to say we were enriching the A students.

Whatever you call it the question remains.
A student takes the 1st readiness task and performs to expectation.
A student takes the 5th readiness task and performs to expectation
What grade does each student get? I DUNNO! The point is not addressed by the writer. I think that each student who does any of the 5 tasks and meets all points in the rubric should get an A. But they haven't all acheived the same high expecation - hmmm - thus my conundrum. What do YOU think the grading should be?????


From: http://www.education-world.com/a_curr/voice/voice143.shtml

DIFFERENTIATING THE ISLAMIC EMPIRE
After the students and I had read and discussed some of the background information from our textbook, I devised a day of differentiated comprehension activities. I attempted to combine all three aspects of differentiation: topical interest, readiness, and learning style.
Topical Interest. Each student would choose to focus on one of two topics, each a state instructional indicator.
· How ancient Baghdad developed into an opulent society via trade (rather than conquest)
· Cultural contributions of the medieval Arab/Islamic world
Readiness. For me, the critical stumbling block toward readiness differentiation has always been How can I present different levels of instruction without making any student feel inferior?* For this lesson, I developed five activities from which students could choose. I developed activities with the students' classroom grade averages in mind. For example,
· With my "A" students in mind, I created the most abstract assignment: I presented 17 objects that symbolized lifestyle advances in Baghdad or scientific and/or cultural advances spurred by medieval Islam. The objects ranged from a croquet mallet (representing the invention of polo) to a test tube (symbolizing the introduction of chemistry). Students could select any ten items and write an explanation of how each was representative of a milestone.
· I gave another assignment with my "A" students in mind: Write a poem to demonstrate your knowledge of one of the two instructional indicators. (See Topical Interest above.)
· With my "B" and "C" students in mind, I presented two other assignments: Create a display board related to either of the topics/indicators, or draw pictographs to represent key Arab contributions or elements of affluent life in Baghdad.
· At the other end of the spectrum, with my low-average students -- and a specific one-page segment of the textbook text -- in mind, I gave the following assignment: Read page 126 and create a bullet-point list of Arab/Islamic contributions.
Learning Style. The assignments targeted a couple of Howard Gardner's intelligences. Comprehension and writing promote linguistic intelligence. The display board and pictograph activities targeted visual/spatial intelligence. In addition, with the possible exception of the last activity, all the choices challenged students to use high-level thinking skills to create a product.
The critical element in this lesson was that I gave students a choice. No student was kept from "climbing the ladder." While the "A" students were expected to select one of two assignment choices I had perceived as challenging, the other students had five activity options.
On the day set aside for this activity period, I met with each task group to clarify lingering questions about instructions and expectations, and to give students an opportunity to share some of their ideas. Students had the entire period to complete the activity. Many students ended up completing their work at home.


*Note - I submit that this teacher has trouble offering easier requirements to students without making them feel inferior for just the same reason that I have trouble knowing what it means to give the same grade to differentiated work. He has actually given an accmodattion to his lower performing students. He does NOT have the same thinking standard and therefore learning standard for them. I COULDN'T DO ANY BETTER and I feel just as conflicted. I submit it's because we're not allowed to give the right name to what we do.

G's response

Interesting thoughts you've left. Here are few points of clarification about "my position" vis a vis the Chomsky versus Skinner debate:
As you've tumbled, there is much more to this than meets the eye, but from an instructors perspective it's a great place to start and it provides a handy schematic narrative for understanding a dauntingly complex set of shifting ideas. Making it a struggle between the forces of good and evil is a seductive if overly hyperbolic approach. Eveeryone likes to take a position and of the two, these days, the Chomskian looks so much more resonable almost forty years later.
I'm sure that neither Skinner nor Chomsky managed to get it right, but that's how scientific inquiry goes: one reliable accepted wisdom is suddenlty the emperor without the clothes and now there's a new kid in town and everyone flocks to touch his mantle. That's pretty much how it was for Chomsky, even though his linguistics has fallen to the wayside somewhat and been undermined by new ideas.
Despite the problems with Chomsky (the insistence on making language a science as amenable to ineluctable laws as physics), his problems are not nearly as profound, intellectually as Skinner's. I think Vygotsky's work might be described as Skinner with more sense of "I" and the creative human impulse. Then there's MK Halliday, the English linguist single handedly creating modern functionalism (form always follows function).
Lingusistics was dominated until recently by very formalist approaches to language study. Of the two - Chomsky and Halliday - the latter offers much more to teachers because he provides 9by extension) insights into the purposes of language - the functions - which, from an educational standpoint, is a much more useful approach.
I'd like to bring Halliday's work more to the forefront of 5030 but I haven't figured out how to do it yet.
I also think you'd really enjoy this new book which captures the essence of everything that's going wrong for Chomsky's legacy these days: it's Christine Kenneally's book "The First Word". i can't remember the last time i enjoyed a linguistics book more. Also, for a brilliant peek into the history of Chomsky's hegemonic control of modern linguistics, read "The Linguistics Wars" by Randy Allen Harris. It gives you all the dope on who kicked whom and what all the original fuss was about. it turns out that Chomsky was a very jealous god indeed.

Chomsky - Skinner, I get it.

Well I finally got what G's been hammering at me on for a year, first last fall in my language/literacy/culture class and now this summer in language acquisition.

I couldn't figure out G's extreme posistion on Skinner. What it took was a reading of the history of psychology to put it all in perspective (Leahey), and then a reading of Chomsky's original review of Skinners Verbal Behavior.

I now get why it's such a big deal and how wrong Chomsky thought Skinner was in his extension of rat behavior to human behavior. Now I still think G sort of dismisses Skinner entirely, when it's really just Verbal Behavior where Skinner went over the top.

But in any case, I am now ready to stop demanding a fight whenever the subject comes up.

Thanks for bearing with me through the learning curve G.

Chomsky's paper can be found at http://cogprints.org/1148/0/chomsky.htm
BF Skinner's book is available from the B. F. Skinner foundation (and amazon.com)

I HAVEN'T ACTUALLY read Skinner yet! I've only read what people say about him, so I've ordered a copy of Verbal Behavior for summer reading.

I will note that this is still an open issue, I think it's possible that there is some truth in both Behaviorsim and Universal Grammar when both are understood in their proper spheres. See http://www.behavior.org/vb/index.cfm?page=http%3A//www.behavior.org/vb/verbal_behavior_catania.cfm by A. Charles Catania

"When we talk about what we do with words, we're likely to say that we try to communicate things with words: information or feelings or ideas or emotions or thoughts. But we do something even more fundamental with words. Words give us a very efficient way to influence the behavior of others."

"The distinction is important to the topic of verbal behavior because the science of verbal behavior, as part of behavior analysis, owes much to a 1957 book by B. F. Skinner called Verbal Behavior [now available from the B. F. Skinner Foundation.] A review of that book by the linguist Noam Chomsky appeared in 1959. The review was highly critical, and for many years it was assumed that Chomsky had demolished Skinner's position. One reason was that many behavior analysts who had read Chomsky's review concluded that Chomsky had missed the point of Skinner's book. It therefore took a while before some began to respond to Chomsky's arguments. Linguists usually still fail to appreciate the functional content of Skinner's preliminary account of verbal behavior and have typically ignored the growing body of experimental research that has expanded Skinner's early taxonomy and has broadly extended the account to novel aspects of verbal behavior. Linguists still concentrate much more on whether what is said is grammatical, and what it means for something to be grammatical, than on what effects the verbal behavior has (even when, as is often the case, it is not grammatical)."

It's easy to be objective about sex but not about love.

Twice now I've taken a class from G that starts with the pummeling of poor hapless BF Skinner and behaviorism vs Chomsky and Universal Grammar. It's not so much that I'm a fan of behaviorism as it is that I can't accept that all-in-all his work was nullified by The Event (Chomsky published semantics and syntax in response to BF's verbal behavior). One might say that BF's work was put in a new light, limits of application set, new context for interpreting what was observed etc. etc., but not nullified. So I find myself wanting to defend the poor fellow. I love G's classes, they make me think.

Much of the viewpoint of this Master's program, especially the more theoretical parts, seems to come from Bateson, the inspiration for Dr. Clarke’s books on Systems theory in education. So when I'm looking to gain perspective I try and go back to this source. I'm halfway plowing through Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Bateson) and I found a jewel that speaks to yesterday’s topic on SR vs UG. In 1969 Bateson published an imagined dialogue between Father and Daughter titled "Metalogue: What Is an Instinct?" I'll post some outtakes that speak to our subject: (SR is Stimulus-Response, shorthand for behaviorism)

D: Daddy, what is an instinct?
F: An instinct, my dear, is an explanatory principle.
D: But what does it explain?
F: Anything-almost anything at all. Anything you want it to explain.
D: Don't be silly. It doesn't explain gravity.
F: No. But that is because nobody wants "instinct" to explain gravity. If they did, it would explain it. We could simply say that the moon has an instinct whose strength varies inversely as the square of the distance...
D: But that's nonsense, Daddy.
F: Yes, surely. But is was you who mentioned "instinct", not I.
D: All right - but then what does explain gravity?
F: Nothing, my dear, because gravity is an explanatory principle.
D: Oh.

So there we are, Universal Grammar which humans have innately, one might say instinctively, is an explanatory principle.

S-R psychology is also addressed in this dialogue:

D: Could we do without the idea of "instinct"?
F: How would you explain things then?
D: Well, I'd just look at the little things. When something goes "pop", the dog jumps. When the ground is not under his feet, he wiggles. And so on.
F: You mean - all the imps but no god?

(imps and gods were introduced earlier as bottom up/top down)

D: Yes, something like that.
F: Well, there are scientists who try and talk that way, and it's becoming quite fashionable. They say it is more objective.
D: And is it?
F: Oh, yes.
D: What does "objective" mean?
F: Well, it means that you look very hard at those things which you choose to look at it.
D: So, inevitably, when the objective creature looks at animals, it splits things up and makes animals look like humans after their intellects have invaded their souls.
F: Exactly. It's a sort of inhuman anthropomorphism.
D: And that is why the objective people study all the little imps instead of the larger things?
F: Yes. It's called S-R psychology. It's easy to be objective about sex but not about love.
D: Daddy, we've talked about two ways of studying animals - the big instinct way and the S-R way, and neither seems very sound. What do we do now?
F: I DON"T KNOW. (Emphasis mine)
D: Didn't you say that the royal road to objectivity and consciousness is language and tools? What's the royal road to the other half?
F: Freud said dreams.
D: Oh.

Language and Literacy Acquisition I

I miss having a blog or thread for this class. The worst thing about having threaded discussions for classes is when you don't have anything to say, but you have to go through the motions so that the thread count is updated and you get credit.

The best thing about having threaded discussions is that one gets a chance to 'talk back' to the teacher and class without bogging down the whole class in a tangent that may not be generally useful.

This blog doesn't exactly make a threaded discussion but I still offer it up to folks who care to make use of the facility for discussions on the class topics.

Linguistics and Math

I'm taking a course in the linguistic analysis of english. It includes gammar. I haven't thought about grammar since 7th grade. I've found however a connection between math and linguistics.

I'm reading God Created the Integers by Stephen Hawking.

In the section on George Boole, his thesis that introduces what will become boolean logic and the foundation of digital computing is titled "An Investigation of the Laws of Thought" and we find:

"It should be within the province of a general method in Logic to express the final relation among the elements of the conclusion by any admissible kind of proposistion, or in any selected order of terms. ... To a choice or selection in the order of the terms, we may refer whatsoever is dependent upon the appearance of particular elements in the subject or in the predicate, in the antecedent or in the consequent, of that proposition which forms the "conclusion".


Reading this after having refreshed myself on the meansing of subject, predicate, antecedent and consequent allows me to get more out of reading Boole. Math is not a universal language, there is a lot of linguistics that go with it and the studies of Math and linguistics are related.