FIAE+B2+Chapter+5

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 * Lauren Scheidegger**



A great deal of the class found tiering to be a great tool to use in the classroom and thought it would be beneficial to most students. A sparse few disagreed. Those who did supported their reasoning very well however. “Personally I am not a big fan of tiering, I feel that students that are perhaps a little behind could be brought up to speed by adapting to their learning style” -T.J Herbert. Those who agreed with tiering went on to say some of their preferred activities. Many enjoyed ones like the menu and tic-tac-toe board. Activities such as those not only allowed students to have some choice and freedom in their learning but it also made it so every child was given the same assignment sheet. Giving different students different sheets and making it obvious that certain students are getting different assignments might single them out which can lead to negative consequences. A lot of people brought up the importance of privacy and found that a few of the activities in the book made maintaining privacy very easy. While many of us found tiering to be useful, it was also mentioned that it does not need to be used all the time. There will be many activities that all students can do in the same manner. Also many wanted to keep in mind that it is nice to be able to cater to students’ interest and learning profile as well as readiness level, which seemed to be focused on slightly more in the chapter. It was mentioned that tiering does not have to be an always thing. Once students reach similar levels it may not be needed as often. While many of us held different opinions on tearing, we all seemed to learn something from the many examples of lessons provided in this chapter, and we all seemed to encounter growth from exposure to more options in the classroom. toc

Lauren Breton
In the fifth chapter of this text, Wormeli describes the process and effect of tiering assignments in the classroom. He is able to explain multiple different ways to go about tiering assignments for individual students within the classroom and is able to expose the positive and negative aspects of each. One example of tiering that I had never heard of before but was discussed in this chapter was the idea of creating learning menus. The idea of letting students make a choice of which assignments/projects they want to do gives students more input into their own learning experience. I also think that it is an ingenious way to tier material for students in confidentiality. Students who might feel self-conscious because they are doing work that is different than their classmates would not have to deal with that concern at all because all members of the class would be mixing and matching their projects, just as those students who are tiered at lower levels would be. For the same reasons that I hope to incorporate learning menus into my curriculum, I also hope to incorporate the RAFT(S) model. This model offers creative options for students while simultaneously addressing a common essential understanding. I also appreciate how easily it can be tiered, simply by adding extra categories (such as a time period category or a list of strong verbs to help determine the tone of the project). For the more advanced students, extra categories could be added whereas students who aren’t as prepared would just be able to focus on the four basic categories; role, audience, format, and topic. I hope to be able to incorporate both learning menus and the RAFT(S) model into my classroom in order to offer my students assessments that are tiered to their learning needs and that also allow them to be creative and have fun with their projects.

Lauren Scheidegger
Chapter five of “Fair Isn’t Always Equal” by Rick Wormeli is all about tiering assessments. Tiering is when teachers adjust their assignments to better fit a students’ readiness level or interests. Lessons that are tiered are typically developed in three ways, at readiness level, for early readiness students and for advanced readiness students. It is good to keep in mind that not all aspects of every unit plan needs to be tiered in order to have a differentiated class. In some cases extending a deadline or making small adjustments such as that is enough and the material itself can remain the same for all students. To help instructors get a grasp on how to tier assignments the chapter provided a plethora of examples. Some of the ideas were learning contracts, learning menus, tic-tac-toe boards, cubing, the summarization pyramid, RAFT(s) [Role, Audience, Format, and Topic or Time], and one-word summaries. I found these lesson ideas to be a wonderful resource. All of the ideas were fully explained and the chapter was full of examples. One of the ideas I found the most interesting was the tic-tac-toe board. Assignments are put in boxes that’s are three long and three wide (like a tic-tac-toe board) and students pick three diagonally, horizontally or vertically to make their assignment chart look like a winning tic-tac-toe game. I thought this idea would be very effective in a classroom because it allows students to have choice in what they do and also encourage them to try multiple new things. Also each box can represent different learning styles so it can cater to each individual student. I plan to remember and use many, if not all, of the tiering ideas from this chapter.

Rachel Joiner
This chapter has provided me with a better understanding of what tiering is. I have learned many new ways in order to tier assessments for my students. One thing that really resonated with me was the idea of RAFT. As a teacher, I thought this was a wonderful idea and system to get my students engaged. RAFT stands for Role, Audience, Format, and Topic. The instructor will give students a list of choices for each one of the sections, and then the students are allowed to choose one from each in order to create their own assessment. I thought this was great because it allows students to choose what they want to do, and they can create their project in a way that works best for them. In order to make it less overwhelming for some students, the choices can be limited. This design can also be tiered to fit any skill level of students. One thing the chapter discusses is to remember not to tier everything in a lesson. I think this is something that I will need to remember. It would be acceptable to extend deadlines for some students who need more time, but for the most people they can all be doing the same thing. I think this is important information I can use, I will need to focus on this and make sure I am focusing on one concept or task. I thought the section on changing the verbs in this chapter was extremely helpful. As a teacher, it is important that all my students be engaged and that they understand. This chapter discusses how sometimes the prompts are not always the most interesting. In order to “revamp” the prompt we can change some of the verbs to make it more exciting. I think that by also doing this it can help some students understand better.

Kevin Lind
The main idea of this chapter is differentiating assessments. One idea that stuck out in my mind about differentiating assessments is the Carol Ann Tomlinson’s equalizer idea. This idea essentially makes students work on an assignment with a particular way of thinking, and then change it slightly so it targets a different way of thinking. This could prove to be a good tool in a politics class because there are some ideas that can be viewed as facts, while there are others that are more opinion based.

The idea of changing the verb in the prompt of an assignment seems like a rather effective way to keep students engaged in the learning process. There are definitely some words that can be seen as over used in teaching, like “describe” and “explain.” By using this method, teachers can keep students interested by giving them some direction rather than giving a vague assignment. Also, if students keep seeing the same word over and over again, there is no way they will have any interest in the question.

There is one suggestion in this chapter associated with tiering assessments that seems effective. The idea of creating three assignments (one at grade level, one below, and one above) seems like it could work well to identify exactly where students fall in the classroom. This idea mirrors Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development, since it allows students to work within their own level. The theory of tiering and Vygotaky’s Zone of Proximal Development revolve around the idea that students need to be pushed.

**Samy Tracy**
Chapter Five of this book focuses on tiering assessments. Wormeli describes tiering as “‘racheting’ up or down the challenge level” (as described by Dr. Carol Ann Tomlinson, pg 56). Differentiating students’ assessments is another way of thinking about tiering assignments also. Even though it is recommended to tier assignments, only do so if you have students who need it because if they do not it is more harmful to their learning. This is where getting to know your students comes in handy also, without knowing your students and their needs, you cannot find out how to tier their work to suit them best. An example that seemed really eye-catching to me was to create learning menus. I personally like to think outside of the box and come up with creative and fun things. Making a restaurant menu to give students selection of assignments helps those who like to have those choices and makes them think in more creative ways. The learning menu also ties in with the RAFT(S) idea because this also helps choose what assignment students can do. It is fairly easy to differentiate this for specific students that need it. Since RAFT(S) stands for Role, Audience, Format, Topic (sometimes Time) and Strong Verb or Strong Adverb combining all of these together can help students who feel like they are not as intelligent as some other classmates feel like they are taking on as much work as the rest of the class.

Alyssa Amari
Chapter five introduces the concept of tiering assessments for students in your classroom. Tiering is defined as “how teachers adjust assignments and assessments according to students’ readiness levels, interests, and learner profiles.” Tiering is a way of differentiating to fit the needs of your students, and although it is helpful, it is not necessary to tier every assignment; it is okay for some students to do what everyone else is doing. Tiering can be done to increase the complexity and challenge of an assignment, this can be done through adding components to a task or even asking for further explanation and relations to real life context. Tiering can also be done to reduce the complexity of an assignment by giving students an assignment that still meets the requirements, but allows them to do it with less challenging aspects or one step processes. Tiering can be done with learning contracts increase students dedication to in class and unit long tasks. Learning menus are a way of giving students a choice of what and when they will complete an assignment by listing everything needed to be done in a unit, and having students choose as they wish to complete each one. Tic Tac Toe boards, and RAFTS are a way for students to determine how they will complete and produce an assignment. This chapter gave me a lot of ideas to differentiate by tiering assessments. I want to be able to give ample opportunity to all students in my class, no matter what their readiness levels are. I think that my classroom will benefit from tiering greatly; they will each have the opportunity to meet and excel any standard. This will help to reduce pressure on any students who feel like they are not ready for a certain assignment, as well as allow others to move ahead instead of standing still.

Morgan Ware
This chapter talks about tiering assessments. Tiering is how teachers adjust assignments and assessments according to their students’ levels, interests, and profiles. One example of tiering assessments is a learning contract. Learning contracts allow students to work at their own pace and the skills that they are interested in. Most learning contracts have a combination of teacher/student design tasks that fulfill the expectations of the unit. Some contracts indicate what exactly a student is required of a student, for example, how to work without bothering others, use an indoor voice, avoid interrupting the teacher when he or she is teaching, bring two sharpened pencils and ample paper supply to class everyday, and to refer to posted classroom options list when a students stuck. Contracts also include checkpoints on when parts of a project is due. The chapter talks about two things that checkpoints do. One is that they help the teacher assess student progress and two is that they keep students focused on the task. Learning contracts are an alternative assessment and should not be taken for granted. I want to use tools like learning contracts in my classrooms to help my students feel in control. I hope to really include tiering assessments in my curriculum. In my experience they have really helped keep me on task and thinking about the project or assignment.

T.J. Hebert
Tiering is adjusting assignments and assessments up or down the challenge level and is based on students’ readiness level. Before tiering begins, a higher level of standards and expectations should be set then what is expected of the student’s particular grade level. This makes the curriculum more challenging and will start separating the early readiness students from the rest. This will make tiering much easier. The chapter describes three tiers: grade level, advanced level and early readiness level. Some examples of tiering assignments include having grade level identify cloud types and explain how they are different, advanced level would be doing the same with the exception of identifying clouds made of more then one type and explain and early readiness would be matching cloud types with names and explaining in writing. Personally I am not a big fan of tiering, I feel that students that are perhaps a little behind could be brought up to speed by adapting to their learning styles. Maybe those students are not behind; perhaps they have not received proper instruction to their learning capabilities. I hope to identify those things early in my classes so that I may avoid having to tier. I hope for everyone to leave my classroom with relatively similar levels of understanding. Maybe I am of base with these thoughts but I feel that if a student is understood and is taught in a manner based on how they learn best they can learn nearly anything. It is not tiering that I find challenging, it is avoiding the tiering and differentiating that I feel will be challenging and once that is overcome, tiering will be unnecessary.

Megan Millette
Before reading this chapter I no idea what tiering was. However, after reading the chapter I find it to be a good tool. As a teacher, it could be beneficial to my teaching because I am able to adjust assignments and assessments based on where my students are and how ready they are. Another part of the chapter I found to be good for future teaching would be Tomlinson’s idea of an equalizer because it is a great way for teachers to organize by considering which areas an assignment fits such as in the English class having my students participate in a group discussion where it is mostly independent but I am giving them talking points to make it a little bit less independent. The idea Wormeli describes, as cubing is a great tool that would work well with the six facets of understanding. It is a good way to have students working to answer essential questions. While reading when I came across the summarization pyramid I thought this could be a good resource for the unit I am planning to do and one of the activities within it. I want to teach students good ways of writing and this would be a helpful tool in showing them how structure is important to the writing process. It is a great starter idea for a prompt in the classroom as well because it is a way to organize thoughts while also helping the students brainstorm good ideas. Another great tiering technique that I found helpful was the changing of verbs; as an English teacher I can see this as a successful way t start prompts and other writing pieces by giving my students verbs they can use and go off of. The ideas brought forward on this chapter of tiering seemed especially beneficial for education and my concentration.

Patrick Hurley
Give students different examples to account for your students varying skill levels. Be sure to use tiering, which is adjusting assignments and assessments to your student’s different skill levels, interests, and learning profiles. Be sure to stay focused when tiering, if the subject is too broad it will be difficult to set up the tiers. You can start with dramatic tiering and slowly ease off of it until all the students are on the same page. Using learning contracts is a good way to let the students learn at their own pace. You work with the student to make sure they are doing everything they need to for the class and make sure they will complete it by the end of the course. Use checkpoints in these contracts to make sure the student is keeping on track. Learning menus give the students a choice of what tasks they want to do. You can use a cube and have them write what they want to answer on each side and then do those activities. Use Williams taxonomy of creativity, the different steps are on page 68. Tiering is an important thing to do in the classroom. You can’t just expect everyone in your class to learn at the same pace, some take a little longer than others to grasp the concepts. So you need to accommodate for that. You can give different assessments for the different levels, you can use different examples, etc. Giving the students options of what they can do for the projects is another way to tier assessments, this way they can choose the level that they can handle.

Matt Roy
Chapter 5 of Fair Isn’t Always Equal focuses on the idea of tiering in our assessments. Tiering describes the process where teachers adjust the difficulty level in response to the readiness of their students. One of the more interesting examples that the author provides is the idea of “Learning Menus”. Learning Menus present multiple options for projects and assessments and gives students the choice of what they want to do or feel most comfortable with. This allows students from different “tiers” to choose an assessment medium that they feel the most comfortable with and feel challenges their level of understanding the most accurately. I also really enjoyed the “Cubing” idea, where a cube has the following written on its faces: describe it, compare it, associate it, analyze it, apply it and argue for or against it. The topic/content is chosen and the die is cast giving the student a random prompt. Granted this may not be appropriate until the students have had extensive time to work with the material but I feel that it will teach students to react quickly and intelligently to unexpected questions. Obviously, tiering will naturally occur on its own in our classrooms as students will grasp the material at different rates. The challenge is how to embrace the inevitable while still designing lessons and assessments that are fair for all students and challenges the entire group appropriately. The only thing I’m worried about is how to keep this all confidential, I don’t want students to feel singled out because they aren’t getting the material quite as quickly as the rest of the class. ===

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Simone Thiry
Tiering is an integral part of differentiation. In order to ensure that students are working at a level that is appropriate for their level of experience with the material and the skills that they came into the course with, teachers must find a way to tier assignments so that each student is both challenged and able to succeed. I was interested to learn the different ways the text approached tiering, because I did not fully understand how the process could be executed while preserving the basic understandings of a unit. The chapter emphasizes designing the grade-level tasks earlier, and then differentiating for early readiness and advanced level tasks that address the same standards. Two variations of tiered assessments that I found appealing were “Learning Menus” and Tic-Tac-Toe boards. I think these methods would be most suited to my classroom and teaching style. In “Learning Menus” there may be an ‘entrée’ portion that students are required to do (one big assignment), but they can choose from several options. Then they must choose a certain number of ‘side dishes’, and maybe an ‘appetizer’. The ‘dessert options are the most requiring, and so those would be left optional for the class, except certain students who are at a more advanced level. Tic-Tac-Toe boards provide a similar element of choice, organizing assignments into a 3-by-3 square. Students should pick one from every row, or one from every column depending on their ability level. I liked these methods because they allow students to make the choice of what tier they should be on; often they know better than we are what their abilities are. In these situations, it would be easy to discuss with a student if they picked activities that were too hard/too easy for them, but avoids the stigma of having slower and faster groups.

Emily McGee
Wormeli encourages the use of lateral adjustments to certain student’s assessments in the differentiated classroom. These adjustments should be made based on the student’s readiness level and should affect a assignments complexity not content. In order to do this, Wormeli explicates, a teacher must be able to recognize that there are subsets and skills within their content material, which may be temporarily extracted for some readiness levels or added for advanced learner prepared for exploration at length. Tiers should begin at the standard level and gradually move upwards. Equalizers may be used that take advantage of challenge level degrees on a continuum, allowing teachers to examine and adjust difficulty in challenge as needed. Wormeli also mentions RAFTs and the Taxonomy of Creativity to be used to motivate students.

In my future differentiated classroom I hope to make tiering a natural part of class assignments. I understand that it should not be used on every assignment or in instructional pieces, but it should be offered to students who need it. I believe that it is so important that students work to their ability level, with a certain degree of challenge, but should not be pushed too far or too little because both lead to lack of motivation. In __Integrating Differential Instruction and Understanding by Design__, by Tomlinson and McTighe, a wonderful idea was brought to my attention. They proposed that for certain assignments there be tiering offered up front by labeling different complexity levels, “straight ahead,” “uphill,” or “mountainous.” I think it is always a good idea to allow students choice and ownership in their education whenever possible, and allowing them to chose their own level of difficulty may truly stimulate personal growth in students.

Mike Kahler
Chapter 5 of the book explains the concept of tiering assignments for your students so that those who are a step behind can be brought up to the level of the other students, and students who are a step ahead will stay engaged. Tiering starts at the minimum standard so that every student is expected to have proficiency with the standard. From here you ratchet up the challenge level of the assignments so that students are never falling behind but always getting ahead. If you start below or above the expected challenge level you can easily lose focus on what it is that you are actually trying to teach your students. When ratcheting up the challenge level for stronger students it is wise to do so by making them take the information that the already know and apply it somewhere else. They should not be expected to memorize and echo back more information than the other students. They should be challenged to apply it to a wide range of scenarios. Lessons should not all be tiered though. By tiering every lesson you are just creating a gap between the students. Only specific tasks should be tiered, and if one student starts to show more proficiency in the subject after time they can be moved up to a higher tier. I personally view tiering as a good tool when applied correctly, but a horrible one when utilized improperly. If you simply lower the expectations of some students you are treating the whole class unfairly, and they will be able to see that. What should be done is a simple tweak to the work of upper level students so that they stay engaged while the other students in the class get up to their level.