Last week our campus hosted a Differentiated Instruction / Cornerstone Showcase for certain school leaders in our district. Going through this process, along with a full day of reflection and planning with my instructional specialist counterparts guided by our Principal and Director of Instruction, has helped me realize how important our Cornerstone model is to my action research plan on differentiation.
I’ve realized how imperative it is that I position our differentiation initiative within the Cornerstone framework that our school is focusing on for the next school year. I need to show teachers that neither of these initiatives is going away. One actually fits within the other. Cornerstone is a framework that organizes everything that goes on in a school. It will help lead us to make systematic decisions with the correct data, and it will help stakeholders understand how everything fits together on our campus. Differentiated Instruction is a piece of that, and I’ve realized that focusing on differentiation independently of our Cornerstone model would be a mistake. Using Cornerstone will help me show teachers where differentiation fits in our school. It will help show them the type of data they should use to differentiate. It will help them see where differentiation should play a role during their lesson planning process. Teachers will see where differentiation can address specific skill deficiencies that some students will have. This will lead teachers to value differentiation as a critical tool in their toolkit instead of “the next thing”.
Based on this realization, I have change action item 6 from my Action Research Plan that I posted last week. The new action item is below.
| 6. Review how differentiated instruction strategies, electronic learning opportunities, and data (such as individual, group, and comparability data) fit into the Cornerstone framework. | H. Patel M. Welch (resource person) | May 23 – Aug 10, 2011 | · Cornerstone training manual · Cornerstone notes | · Which of the four quadrants of the Cornerstone framework does differentiated instruction fall into? · How does it impact the other quadrants? · What kind of data can we gather in this process to base grouping decisions? |
I have not heard of Cornerstone Showcase as a program for differentiated instruction. It sounds like something I need to look into for a professional development class for this summer. I like to keep up with what is new in Bilingual or ESL instruction. That is the reason your action research and Darla's action research are interesting to me. I did take an ESL LA class last summer that actually gave us a Reading/LA book that showed us the TEKS and the differentiated instruction that we could use for that TEK. I can't remember the name of the book, of hand, I have it at school. I will try to find it tomorrow and let you know what the name of the book is. I know that they were having these same types of classes for Math, Science, and Social Studies as well and were giving the books out for each of those core classes, to those core teachers. I think my professional development workshop was called New ELA TEKS K-2 or ELA ELPS K-5, where they gave us that book. I'll get back to you with the name of the book.
ReplyDeleteI have not heard of the Cornerstone framework, but itsounds interesting. I think you are on the right track by showing teachers that your differentiation strategies will fit into what they are already doing. I believe this will help you overcome the hurdle of them thinking it is just more work for them. In addition, it will make it more relevant for them and hopefully cause them to be more willing to be active participants in your action research project.
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