Blog #37 – TEACHING A CLASSROOM WITH DIFFERENT ABILITIES
During my teaching and coaching career, I was constantly working with a group of students that possessed different abilities in mathematics. This is common for most teachers and coaches. Initially, when working with students of different abilities, I sought to make sure that all students mastered the fundamentals of any concept that I taught. In other words, I made sure that each lesson focused on strengthening the skills of the weakest students while at the same time providing reinforcement for students that did not need as much help. As the lessons progressed, I gradually introduced more complex and challenging problems. With every step I made an effort to give ALL students an opportunity for success. I always made sure that during every lesson I provided problems that ranged from simple to more complex. This was important because I did not want to stress the weaker students or lose the attention of the stronger students.
Independent study materials that I developed began with basic problems and progressed to more advanced problems. In general, if I assigned 20 problems, the first 15 were the ones that I expected all students to be able to solve. The last 5 problems targeted the stronger students. In general, the last 5 problems could be viewed as being extra credit although I never labeled them as being such. From my experience, most students saw extra credit problems as being optional, thus most students did not attempt them. When I stopped calling them extra credit, all students saw them as being required problems to solve. I did make an adjustment to how I scored the assignments to insure that students were not being penalized a lot for the last 5 problems. All assessments that I wrote were written in the same format as the independent study assignments. My lessons, my independent study assignments, and the assessments gave every student an opportunity for success. They also made each student feel that everything I produced was tailor made for them.