Applying Standards Based Constructivism:
A Two-Step Guide for Motivating Students
Differentiated Instruction

There is no advice at all as to how to get students moving to the point where a challenging task has been internalized and that students are aroused, have shared ideas, and are ready to embrace their challenges. In other words, there is no EXPLORATORY phase at all.

At the time of this writing, Differentiated Instruction seems to be everybody’s favorite new “approach” to talking about teaching As originally designed by Tomlinson (l999) and as adapted for classroom instruction by Heacox (2002), this systematic approach to instruction holds out the hope that full-inclusion & heterogeneous classrooms can see teachers modify and adapt practices that allow learners (and groups of learners) to complete meaningful task that are tiered (differentiated by difficulty, complexity and interest) and yet stand as valid and standards-based.

Heacox’s very practical book is the text that we will use to examine this approach. As she sees it, there are two very powerful and well known ways to create DIFFERENT, yet valid, cognitive tasks: Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences and Blooms’ famous taxonomy. Simply put, once the teacher philosophically accepts a “one size doesn’t fit all” approach, his/her job is to design units of instruction that provide limited choice for students of various diversities, and, MOST IMPORTANTLY, “ability levels”. Thus, there is no fixed model to follow, but she does promote the idea of a planning matrix: one that structures the task and projects across the mix of intelligences and Bloom level. In essence then she says that teachers should get to know their kids, master Bloom & Gardner, analyze a piece of curriculum to tease out “essential questions” and guide students to do projects to demonstrate their understandings. Here is the core of the matrix:

This is another promising approach to instruction in that it allows for teachers to utilize creative challenges to their learners, adapt to individual differences and justify the whole package with well accepted theory. She does provide teachers with guiding questions, ones that spark dialogue and which do provoke thinking (as we saw in Dimensions).

COMPARISON

Most of the advice suggested by Differentiated Instruction is very sound instructional practice and certainly consistent with the two-step model. However, there are several important differences worth noting:

(l) There is no advice at all as to how to get students moving to the point where a challenging task has been internalized and that students are aroused, have shared ideas, and are ready to embrace their challenges. In other words, there is no EXPLORATORY phase at all. (Like Marzano’s Dimensions, this “getting ready” is recognized but not assisted: the two-step’s Exploratory is a dynamic addition to both of these models by its very existence.)


(2) A second difference revolves around this lack of an exploratory-type phase to get the projects started. Aside from affective factors that have been established earlier as critically important, the exploratory conjures up, modifies, and shares student prior knowledge. Thus the student and teacher can more easily work from an established and recognized knowledge base. This approach understands the importance of prior knowledge, but does not systematically bring it into bearing as students take on project responsibilities. (By the way, this FAILURE to DEVELOP PRIOR KNOWLEDGE is very common in practicing teacher use of projects at all grade levels. Except for work with very young children who are directly engaged in designing their own projects (Harper, 2002), students in grade 3-12 rarely if ever exert any power over their choice of topics, their forms of investigation or even the time frame for when they can be completed. Interestingly, Vermette (1998) has noted that in 7-12 classes, cooperative group projects are rarely even worked on during school time, so opportunities for productive spontaneous interventions seldom are of benefit)! In the two-step model, spontaneous interventions occur when based on observations of students working on their tasks, the teacher seizes the opportunity to act as a guide or coach.

There are two other similarities to the two-step model that should be noted as well.

First, Heacox (following Tomlinson) advises the use of flexible groupings and suggests that teachers arrange the student groups according to learning abilities, by interest AND by project... Unlike formal cooperative learning theorists who often advocate long-term and stable group membership, the DI people like the frequent re-working of intra-class groups depending on the task at hand. Implicitly, the two step is in agreement.

The second similarity is fascinating to us: we promote the two-step model as most likely resulting in a problem-solving and product creation task for students during the Discovery phase, making their [literal] construction of knowledge the ultimate “authentic task”. This suggests that the synthesis [Bloom] level is the most useful direction for best learning. Heacox explicitly states this: she places synthesis “above” evaluation in Bloom, arguing that the creation of knowledge during an authentic task is the proper vision of effective learning from teaching. We agree!