Week 7 Reading Response

What do you, individually, still need to know and understand in order to tier (differentiate) a lesson of your own choosing?

I really enjoyed class of Thursday. I thought it was a lot of fun and good to see an example of Tiering a lesson. However, I still do not feel completely comfortable with knowing exactly what it is and how to go about teaching it. From what I was seeing a big part of tiering a lesson is the before part. It is not only preparing your lesson and making sure that it is clear about what you want your students to KNOW, UNDERSTAND, and DO. It is important to group your students by their interests, ability to learn, or whatever the lesson may be focusing on. From what I saw from my group, it seems like you grouped us with who had musical talent and could play the piano. Not everyone maybe was able to sing very well, but for our group it was pretty important to be able to read the music. We had all types of students in our groups. It was not just all one type of people in the group. If I’m correct I think that when you are tiering and putting into groups that the students need to have a sort of range of different types of learners. That way they can help each other out when others in the group are struggling.

I also think that tiering is a part of differentiating. It is not something you would use every time you are teaching a lesson though, correct? With that my question would be when do you know the best times would be to teach using tiering?

However, I might be completely wrong on what I am thinking tiering a lesson is. So please let me know if I’m completely wrong on my thinking. I would feel a little more comfortable with teaching a lesson like this is I knew what all your up front steps were on how you decided to group us and also when the best times are to use this approach. And also I would need to know if I’m on the right track of knowing what this is? ;)