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An Essential Trilogy for the Bookshelf
by Elizabeth Helfant


I’ve been in San Antonio, Texas at the ASCD conference since last Tuesday- that’s six nights away from my family and six days and nights totally immersed in learning about curriculum design, differentiation, and research on how we learn. (It was also some time on the Riverwalk and at the Reenactment of the fall of the Alamo.) The conference is still in progress so there is more learning to be done, but already, I have a few key take-aways to share.

From Tuesday to Thursday, I attended an institute given by Carol Tomlinson on differentiation. Relative to all the conferences I generally attend as the school’s Coordinator of Instructional Technology, this session was low tech. For three days I listened to information on differentiation with no internet access and was not bored even once. Those of you who don’t know me might find it interesting to know that one of my teachers said it was worth the price of admission to watch me try to focus for 90 minutes during one of the other sessions- so keeping me engaged for three days is really quite remarkable. The session itself was differentiated and that has much to do with maintaining my interest. The session looked at differentiation throughout the school from professional development to curriculum, how Dweck’s Mindset theory impacts ability to differentiate, differentiating assessment, specific strategies for differentiation, and incorporating differentiation into Understanding by Design. It was intense and fascinating. I couldn’t help but think about the tools that are available in our digital world that would so naturally support differentiation. That’s the reason I attended. I don’t want to use tech for tech’s sake, I want to be good at curriculum design and assessment and I want to make technology a great facilitator of that. I couldn’t help but think about how easily Diigo could be used to scaffold different assignments for reading to support various reading levels and could also provide formative assessment information for the teacher. I also see ways to use the grouping function in DyKnow to deliver tiered assignments to various ability levels. Google forms would be a logical tool to use for preassessment work. Student blogs could be used with formative assessment writing prompts build around Sternberg’s three intelligences. I’ll have more on this in an upcoming blog post. For now, I’d like to recommend the first of three books. Tomlinson and McTighe’s Integrating  Differentiated Instruction and Understanding by Design, provides a solid overview of both models and how to design curriculum. It’s an excellent starting point. I fully believe we need to understand educational pedagogy and research first, and then layer on the tech to support it.

On Saturday afternoon, I was fortunate to be able to attend a session on Mind, Brain, and Education Science given by Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa. The session was excellent as we worked through what we know about the brain with the information divided into four categories: what we definitely know, what is probably true, what is intelligent speculation, and what is considered nueromyths. If I wasn’t sold on differentiation before this session, I certainly am now. Clearly the research says that each of us have unique brains and the way each brain learns and responds is individual. Maximizing each student’s capacity to learn, requires differentiating. Here is the second book recommendation, Tokuhama-Espinosa’s The New Science of Teaching and Learning: Using the Best of Mind, Brain, and Education Science in the Classroom. The book covers all the things we know and think we know about the brain. Tokuhama-Espinosa makes a terrific argument that as educators, we need to know more about the physiology and psychology of the brain so that it can help inform us. If we understand it better, we can make good decisions about curriculum design and differentiation. This book is an excellent source for starting down that path. (Another good selection would be Washburn’s The Architecture of Learning.)

Sunday, I attended a session on Curriculum 21 delivered by Heidi Hayes Jacobs. Her session was, on one level, about upgrading our curriculum and our assessments to better meet the needs of our students. On another level, her session became an overview of cool tech tools. It’s tough to face an audience of several hundred and meet everyone’s needs. Some of us need to see tools and very concrete examples. All of us need to be reminded that the driver for technology integration is good curriculum and good pedagogy. The session delivered some of both. The session also shares its title with Heidi Hayes Jacobs’ most recent book. The book is really a compilation of essays by a number of educators with some expertise in technology integration or innovative curricular design.  It is also worth reading as we need good curriculum to differentiate and we need a curriculum that takes contemporary skills into account. Tomlinson made the point in her session that you can differentiate grits but it won’t really get students excited and it might not have all the nutrients they need. We need to find appealing things to differentiate. And we need to decide exactly what diet students really need in this rapidly-changing, global world that is so full of digital information.

There were/are so many interesting things to learn. I have so much to think about and process (and there is still another day to go.) I have come away more convinced than ever that each of us in education has a responsibility to model lifelong learning and, in so doing, to make sure that we understand all the tools, the theory, and the research at our disposal. The bottom line is this: Mind, Brain, and Education research supports differentiation and the development of an engaging curriculum that uses multiple sensory inputs. Differentiation must be planned for and the best planning strategy, in my mind, is UbD. Differentiation requires knowing where each student is and where each student needs to be and that necessitates a robust assessment strategy that includes far more than the traditional summative assessment we so often rely on. It most likely requires a shift in grading that is more consistent with what Tomlinson called 3P grading, assigning a grade for process (habits of mind), product/performance, and progress but not averaging those components (and this can be an argument for portfolios and narrative grading.)  

The way we’ve always done it, isn’t good enough anymore. Mind, Brain, and Education Research should trump teacher comfort zones. If the technology makes you uncomfortable, don’t start there. But start learning. Do a little reading. Much of the reading has little to do with technology integration and everything to do with excellence in teaching and learning. When you are done, consider that technology might be necessary, and even the easiest pathway, to do all the things you need to do to ensure you maximize your students’ learning and provide them with the essential skills and understandings they will need to navigate their futures.

 

I believe that Tomlinson and Tokuhama-Espinoso would agree that if the content is boring and delivered in a teacher-centric manner that uses low level thinking skills, is more about coverage than learning, and does not include activities to let the learner interact with the content, then we are doing our students a disservice. Heidi Hayes Jacobs Century 21 does a nice job of suggesting ways to go about updating the curriculum in ways to support students learning. Understanding by design gives me the tool to design curriculum in a way that will be high impact for students.

 

About Elizabeth

Elizabeth Helfant is the Upper School Coordinator of Instructional Technology at Mary Institute Country Day School, a JK-12 institution embarking on a 1:1 adventure. using Tablet PCs and DyKnow.

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