Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Micro v. Macro (I guess)



The readings this week vacillated between being very interesting and just appearing to be a jumble of strung together words, with key quotes I liked.  The Parson’s article discussed macro vs. micro differentiation in a somewhat veiled way. A question I came away from this article with is what is the difference between micro differentiation and “reactive teaching”? Isn’t micro differentiation small changes you make while teaching? Not necessarily planned as your macro differentiated lesson is. I thought this quote really summed up differentiated instruction, but also makes you realize how massive of a task it is:

“Therefore, teachers who effectively differentiate their instruction not only carefully plan instruction to differentiate for the variety of learners in their classrooms but also provide moment- by-moment adaptations to meet specific needs that become clear during instruction — needs that were not or could not be anticipated”(Parsons, 2013).

I find it interesting that the Duffy & Hoffman article is from 14 years ago but we are still having the same whole language vs. phonics debate even if it is just on a minor level. I found this quote to be interesting:

“Most U.S. elementary students are learning to read better than they ever have in the past (Berliner & Biddle, 1996), are competitive with students in other developed nations of the world (Bracey, 1997)”(Duffy & Hoffman, 1999).

Is that still true? We did an exercise in one of my undergraduate classes ranking different countries in different subject areas. The U.S. normally faired in the mid-to lower half of the bunch when the statistics came out. Though when I discussed this assignment with my brother, who has a master’s degree in Political Science and is just a fountain of random knowledge otherwise, he questioned the validity of the information since often the countries that came out on top were much smaller than the U.S, (Finland, Norway, etc.), so of course it would be easier to have a higher literacy rate in a country with a population one-fifth the size of Texas.




Another quote I took away from this article was one of my favorite from the readings this week:
“Such excellent teachers do not rely on a single program or method because they know that good teaching requires "doing the right thing in the right way and at the right time in response to problems posed by particular people in particular places on particular occasions”(Duffy & Hoffman, 1999).

I did not relate to the Tomlinson article very much. While it has good general ideas, middle school is just not my game.

Finally the big article. The Shulman. I immediately identified with a point he made, “Teachers themselves have difficulty in articulating what they know and how they know it.” This reminded me of my student teaching observations and the conversations I had with my supervisor afterwards. He would ask me how it went and they ask me how I knew. This was extremely hard for me to answer at first. The first observations always warranted answers like the students were engaged, they asked questions etc. Which his response to was always “and what else?” I think it would still be hard for me to articulate an answer to that question now, but the practice of it made me better.

Shulman (1987) articulated all of the plates teachers have in the air at any given time, “the subject matter being taught, the classroom context, the physical and psychological characteristics of the students, or the accomplishment of purposes not readily assessed on standardized tests, are typically ignored in the quest for general principles of effective teaching.”

Another point he made that stood out to me is that teaching is a learned profession. A teacher should never stop learning or believe they have all the answers. I think that is often a sign of a teacher who has given up or is bored with teaching or the school system. There are too many teachers who get far into their career and then never change their methods or point of view and it’s their students that suffer. I can only hope when I am at that point in my career I will still be open to new ideas. That’s part of the reason I think having student teachers is so important because it often shakes up what tenured teachers have concretely set up in their classroom.

On a final note I would like to discuss tailoring in class. I don’t think there was enough in the articles about it besides:


“Adaptation and Tailoring to Student Characteristics: consideration of conceptions, preconceptions, misconceptions, and difficulties, language, culture, and motivations, social class, gender, age, ability, aptitude, interests, self-concepts, and attention”(Shulman, 1987).

The term tailoring reminds me of this video from one of my favorite Disney movies.


4 comments:

  1. I think that the reason that we are still having these debates is that it is much easier to pick a side (a method, a strategy, whatever) and stick with it, then it is to build a tool box of methods which can be used to "micro-differentiate". To answer your question, I assumed micro-differentiation was a synonym of adaptation. I agree with you. Professional stagnation or the inability or lack of desire to grow is the biggest reason that teachers fail. I too hope to always be in a place where I want to grow as a teacher!

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  2. There doesn't seem to be any choice but to learn and grow as a teacher. Wouldn't it be very frustrating, especially if you actually care about your students, to see them not learning? Students change from year to year with new technologies and bring new knowledge to school, teachers have to change just to know how to communicate with their students.

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  3. Hi There!!
    I too hope we talk about tailoring tonight. I think the combination of the information from the Tomlinson article and the Shulman article helped me understand tailoring to be what teachers do to adjust instruction to the specific student. So, I might ask a more concrete/direct question to one of my language delayed students during an interactive read aloud, and then transition to a more interpretive figurative question or comment to a student that is not struggling with language during the read aloud. Am I understanding this right? I hope we talk about it tonight.

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  4. Hi All--

    I like the way you all are thinking about micro- and macro-differentiation. I was kind of thinking about it a little differently (see my post), but I like the idea that macro is how teachers plan for different levels of learners in a whole group, while micro is more focused on individual changes for different students. In the end, I think good teachers do both.

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