Tiering Assignments

1. Tiering Assignments

2. Tiered assignments are teacher-prescribed learning activities that are specifically designed to respond to differences in readiness, interest, or learning preferences. They are the most prescriptive, learner-responsive, and sophisticated strategy for differentiation. Heacox, Diane. Making Differentiation a Habit. Minneapolis: Free Spirit Publishing. 2009

3. First Steps • Diagnose student needs • Pre-assessment • Formative assessment • Observation and reflection of student learning • Find or design an activity, task, or project that responds to those needs. • Prescribe specific tasks to particular students, creating a match between the learner and the learning experience.

4. Use a tiered assignment when: • Students represent different developmental stages • Readiness for learning differs among your students • Learning preferences differ among your students • Some students need more support or structure for their learning, while others are able to work with greater independence and openness • Some students are best suited to work with more basic applications and others need greater complexity to be challenged and engaged.

5. True or False • You do not need to use tiered assignments every day; you use them as necessary and appropriate. True False

6. Correct! • There are days when everyone in your class needs an introduction to content, or everyone needs to learn a skill or process because it’s new for all students. Click here to return to the previous slide

7. Wrong! • According to Diane Heacox: “There are days when everyone in your class needs an introduction to content, or everyone needs to learn a skill or process because it’s new for all students.” Click here to return to the previous slide

8. Characteristics of a Well Designed Tiered Assignment • addresses the learning differences in a classroom • focuses on learning goals. • reflects work on critical content, processes, or skills. • designed to respond to the immediate and specific learning needs of different groups of students. • equally active, engaging, and interesting • reflects differences in purpose and are not simply more or less or redundant work • requires similar time commitments • assigned individually, to partners or collaboratively in a small group of like learners. • offers an opportunity for students to learn from each other. Students share work. • used as practice or daily work, not as an assessment task to be graded.

9. Tier Assignments to Address Learning Needs

10. Readiness: Tier by learning readiness to offer an opportunity to reinforce or reteach a lesson to one group of learners, and to extend or enrich learning for other learners.

11. Level of Challenge & Complexity • Tier by level of challenge and complexity to provide basic applications of content, skills, or processes for some students, as well as more complex applications to benefit those students who need greater challenges in learning.

12. Structure Tier by structure to provide some students with more support or direction for their work while other students engage in a more open-ended task.

13. Abstraction Tier by degree of abstraction to allow some students to engage in more concrete applications of skills, processes, content, and others in more abstract applications.

14. Learning Preference Tier by learning preference to enable students to demonstrate what they know or understand by being “matched” with tasks by learning preference.

15. Finding Tiered Assignments • Find an activity that is just right for certain students but not right for all students. • Reconsider activities that you used in the past that may have been too hard or too easy for some students. • Find activities that represent different Multiple Intelligences. • Find activities or questions that represent various levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. • Find an activity noted as “reteach” or “reinforce” or “extension” or “challenge”. • Find two activities or versions of activities that could be paired representing different levels of complexity, difficulty, abstractness, or structure.

16. Designing Tiered Assignments • Determine whether a tiered assignment is necessary. • Determine the most appropriate way to tier the assignment based on the needs of the students. • Shop for ideas in your teacher’s guide or resource materials then design, modify, or redesign tasks that will provide “just right, right now” learning experiences. • Do a “fairness check”. • Do the tasks reflect different work, not just more or less work? • Are the tasks equally active, engaging, and interesting? • Do the tasks reflect equal demands on time? • Is each task clearly focused on a significant and critical learning goal? • Determine which students need to be assigned to each tier. • Determine whether students will complete the task alone, with a partner or small group. • Create work cards to present directions for each task.

17. Create a Tiered Assignment • List the content objectives that you are going to teach. • Based on your students learning needs, determine the way in which the tiers will be created. • Create the task that will be appropriate for most of your students. • Create a more complex, open-ended, or abstract task that will require less direct support and more independence. • Modify or adapt the original task to make it more appropriate for students with 504’s, IEP’s, or other specific learning differences. • Examine the sample plan shown on the next slide.

19. Week One Task • Write a note on Edmodo discussing the benefits and challenges involved with using tiered instruction. • Write one or more responses to a colleague on this topic (or if you are the lone tiered assignment warrior, another topic of your choice).

20. Week Two Task • Create a tiered assignment filling in the planning form linked below. • Planning Form