Re: [Phys-l] Phys-l Digest, Vol 56, Issue 21

[Paul Martenis <pmartenis@martenis.com>]

On Tuesday, September 29, 2009, at 12:00 PM, 
phys-l-request@carnot.physics.buffalo.edu wrote:
> From: Philip Keller <PKeller@holmdelschools.org>
> Subject: Re: [Phys-l] differentiated instruction
> To: 'Forum for Physics Educators' <phys-l@carnot.physics.buffalo.edu>
> ...
> 2.  No one has claimed to be (or to know of) a high school physics 
> teacher who is using differentiated instruction in their classes.  I 
> am not counting it if you say "I do it all the time" in an informal 
> way.  After all, teachers have always answered questions from 
> individual students with individual responses, thus differentiating 
> based on student need as identified by the questions they ask.  But I 
> am looking for someone who follows Tomlinson's suggestion and 
> differentiates by content, process and product in a planned program.
> ...

OK, I'm not sure if this is what you're looking for, but here goes.

We've been doing something that I think of as a kind of 
differentiation. At our school, most ninth graders take Intro Physics 
in heterogeneous sections. Math skills are quite varied among the 
students. For several topics, I've written different levels of 
worksheets to be used to practice and apply whatever math we're doing. 
Typically there are three levels. One reviews and provides a gentle, 
scaffolded introduction, another is targeted at the level of our tests 
and quizzes, and a third makes things complicated in various ways. This 
is not an everyday thing. Most of the course is not differentiated in 
this way: everybody does the labs in mixed-ability groups, takes the 
same tests, listens to the same explanations, etc.

Here is an example. Recently we had the kids "rediscover" Hooke's Law. 
We followed up by calculating the slopes of their graphs, what the 
units mean, etc. All that was done together, or in groups of mixed 
apparent math ability. But when it came time to practice and review, 
there were differentiated class assignments. Kids who've shown signs of 
difficulty with math got a page that started with qualitative 
descriptions of slope, worked examples to verify, guided questions 
about parts of the task, gradually working up to a full calculation of 
slope (with units) from a graph. The others got a page that was a 
fairly traditional problem set, comparable to what would be on the 
quiz. I didn't fuss much over who got which, as the process is 
self-correcting: a student who races through an easy page advances to 
the next; when I see somebody stuck on the standard page, I give them 
the review/intro. For those who finish the standard page, I've got more 
challenging/interesting questions about comparing pairs of springs 
side-by-side or linked end-to-end (plus a few springs on hand for them 
to verify their reasoning in a qualitative way).

Assembling the leveled worksheets is extra work, but not much. Over the 
years, I've accumulated more question sets than I can possibly use, so 
it's a matter of selecting, editing and formatting, and it only needs 
to be done once. Even so, I've only done it for some topics.

I've been pleased with the results. I do not claim a miracle cure: I've 
seen only a modest improvement in test scores, and these are hardly 
controlled conditions. Yet I've found it worthwhile. Conversations 
during that class time seem more productive: less about the work being 
too hard/easy, more about how they're handling the problem in front of 
them.

- Paul Martenis