Blog 3

Questions You Posed With Responses

From September 23, 2008 to September 28, 2008 I was discussing with one teacher how she differentiates her instruction and how she breaks her class up into groups.

A. Included descriptions of discussions you have participated in and any consequence of your teaching

As the blog was talking about differentiating instruction this woman had told me that she uses reading inventories and pretest to group the students in a certain way. To me that seemed logical, however, I was not sure what she meant by either of them. I figured with pretests that she was referring to tests that she gives and groups the students according to their marks. She said that she groups kids of the same ability together so that the work is on the same level for the different groups. Another woman was also inspired by her comments and replied to her by saying that she admires her ability to manage a class in small groups

B. What Questions Did You Pose

“What are pretests and what is a learning inventory?”

I chose to ask that question because I liked how that sounded. It sounded reasonable, and it seemed like she was comparing data in making her decisions. I wanted to know more about how she went about doing it and what tools you needed to do this. I need to learn more about how to group kids and how to differentiate instruction.

C. What Did You Learn From Her Responses

She explained to me that a learning inventory is a series of questions that you ask each student. They choose how they would prefer to do whatever the activity is. As for the pretests, she said she creates a simple pretest for the unit or standard that she is teaching. She gives it to the kids to assess what they know before she starts teaching. This helps her know who needs what the most and who needs to be challenged the most. It helps her know how to plan her groups and what skills to target with each group. This, I felt, was a wonderful way to find out where the students are at the beginning of a lesson. This way, the teacher knows where each of her students are in the lesson before she even begins teaching. She is tapping into prior knowledge which will give her an idea of maybe how she could even group students together with different ability levels. She could encourage peer tutoring.

Responses to Other’s Questions

A. In response to what she wrote, I am asking her if she ever puts students in groups so to encourage peer tutoring. I think that peer tutoring is important because I do feel that kids learn from each other. I want to see what her reaction is to peer tutoring and how and when she implements it.