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10 of the familiar 'yes, but ...' refrains and how you can address teachers' hesitancy to moving forward
A typical classroom today is a jigsaw puzzle of learners. It is not unusual for a teacher to have in one class students from multiple cultures, bringing with them varied degrees of proficiency with English and an impressive array of learning exceptionalities (both identified and not identified), as well as a broad array of economic backgrounds.
That set of descriptors doesn't account for students' varied learning strengths, entry points into any given segment of the curriculum, dreams and interests or approaches to learning.
There are three approaches schools and teachers can take to deal with this common span of academic diversity. One is to place students in heterogeneous settings and do little to attend to student differences. The second is to track or group the students homogeneously by ability, what we perceive to be their potential as learners. The third is to create heterogeneous classrooms designed to attend to learner variance. The third option advocates differentiating instruction in heterogeneous classrooms.
Option one - heterogeneity without attention to its reality - has been tried and found wanting over generations, even when student populations were far less varied than those in contemporary schools and those likely to be in schools of the future. Some educators suggest that as long as teachers "teach well," a one-sizefits-all approach can succeed. That is likely not the case for the students who do not understand the language of the teacher and text, students who already know the content before the teacher "teaches it well," students who have significant gaps in prerequisite knowledge, and so on.
Option two - ability grouping and tracking - not only has a poor record in terms of student achievement, but also too often creates classes stratified by race and economic status in an era where there are evident benefits to bringing diverse individuals together. In addition, this approach frequently results in educators misjudging student capacity and teaching down to those students perceived to be less able. Again, this approach is counterproductive when the nation's clear mandate is to raise the level of challenge and proficiency for all students.
Approach number three, which we now refer to as...