Differentiation

In the following blog post, the names of individuals have been changed.

If you have read some of my posts, you would know that I still keep in touch with colleagues from my previous school. The students that I taught are now in Year 4 and luckily, the Teaching Assistant (TA) also went to Year 4 with them. Every now and then, she would message me to ask for advice or vent about how her week went.

Before I go into a full story telling mode, let me give you a background of the class. It has 20 students age 8 to 9 years old. 80% of the population is EAL (English as Additional Language) speakers with a couple of students with a learning support. To meet the standard of practices set by the Ministry of Education, the class is split into 2 groups where the homeroom teacher (Ms Anne) takes half and the TA (Ms Tina) takes the other half.

This week, Ms Tina sent me messages about one of the lessons. The class had to read a very long article about food. She said it is about 45 pages long and she gave each student about 2 to 3 pages to read. Her group struggled to understand the text and spent most of the class time asking how to read the unfamiliar words and their meaning. At the end of the lesson, Ms Tina gave some feedback about how the lesson went. Ms Anne replied, “Why? It was easy. I gave them an easy reading to do.”

When Ms Tina showed me some of the pages of the article they had to read, I immediately went into a teacher mode. After reading the pages she sent me, I did a Google search and found that this article came from BBC, titled The hidden significance of what we eat.

I don’t often work with native English speaking student so I don’t know what their English language ability is like, but I don’t think this article is suitable for the class I described. Here are my reasons:
1. The text is inappropriate in content and lexile level (difficulty).
2. Talking about meal-kit delivery service and different diet is pointless.
3. The higher level of vocabulary is of such a level that it is useless even if the students can work out the meaning.
4. There is no attempt from the homeroom teacher to make it age/level appropriate. Or known as differentiation.
5. The group found it difficult to understand, even if the homeroom teacher had tried to explain it, they would never have a sound understanding of the content.

I know that Ms Anne has never taught lower primary students and that she is not used to the practice of teaching without a textbook. In my opinion, regardless of your teaching experience, it is her responsibility to find out what level her students are at linguistically and create a lesson that would be suitable for them without it being too easy or too challenging.

Yes, the article is easy enough for me to understand and offer my own opinion, but that is because I can relate to the content. I grew up eating flatbread, I have experienced eating culture from different countries and been exposed to different diet as well as food from different continents. You can say that children who have lived in different countries are more culturally aware than those who haven’t. But it all depends on how much exposure they get from the local environment. You could have an Australian kid who grew up in China but never had any Chinese food because he or she always had home cooked meals. Anything is possible these days.

Anyway, going back to the article Ms Anne asked the class to read. I always wonder … why do children dislike Maths, reading or writing. I believe what she is doing could potentially make this class dislike reading. If they spent most of their class time figuring out how to read unfamiliar words and trying to understand the meaning of the words, the brain would get tired and will never be able to comprehend the actual message within the text. And the next time they are presented with a similar text, they may not respond to it positively.

Ms Anne can still get her students to read the text, but perhaps rewriting it to meet her students’ reading level would be the way to go. This way, her and Ms Tina won’t have to spend most of their teaching time teaching the class how to read the words they don’t know and explain the meaning. They could invite the class to share what they think about the article.

I had a friend how said, “teaching is easy. You just stand in front of the class and entertain the students.” If she were still my friend, I would share this with her and ask what she thinks of this. Would she have changed her opinion on teaching?