At the beginning of the year I make sure to set a classroom culture which values personal progress. I talk about students tracking their own progress, students working on their own schedules, and strongly encourage revision, especially of formative work, especially in the moment. (Almost) every time a student hands a formative task to me, I glance at it for common errors and point them out for immediate revision.
After students are asked to revise their work once or twice they start to “get” that the point of my course is not to do work, be evaluated, and move on; the point of Latin II with Magistra Birch is to learn and fully understand. They start to hand me “drafts” of their work and ask for quick feedback in order to clear up misunderstandings right away. When I ask "finisne? (are you done?)", instead of saying yes or no, they respond by asking for help: "Almost. But I didn't understand this part." Together we make sure that each student works as close to perfection as he or she is willing and able to, within whatever time frame he or she needs to do that.
Standards-Based Learning fits in with differentiation perfectly: when students are oriented toward a goal and have enough time to make it to that goal they will succeed. In my classroom I make sure to incorporate “independent work time” at least once every week so that students may work at their own pace either on today's or old work while I circulate and address each of their needs. In addition, I take advantage of the Learning Center and one-on-one time during student free blocks.
Differentiation in the standards-based classroom does more than just individualize learning. When we collate data (scores) from standards-based formative assessments, it's easy to see trends in what skills need work and what skills are already mostly achieved by a whole class of students. I like to use jumprope's assessment averaging for finding trends in scores; for finding trends in student misunderstandings I look at actual student work.
Student work examples: verbis discendis, reading formative 1, reading formative 2
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