I remember my early assumptions about differentiated instruction. I remember thinking, like many do, that differentiation would require the careful design of three separate approaches for each day’s learning. I remember worrying about how I would ever accomplish such a thing. I worried that my kids would fall through the cracks. I remember not wanting to try. I’m sure my former building principal remembers this well, too. One of the greatest discoveries that I made…
When I first began teaching, I was passionate about performance-based assessment, and the first groups of students that I taught found themselves engaged in upwards of ten different performance-based assessments each year. My seniors wrote I-Search reports ala Ken Macrorie, and when I taught eighth grade, my students were performing everything from the meaning of their vocabulary words to the scripts that they wrote as a part of their Cast of Characters projects. These were…