Differentiating my Differentiation.

I have run a small gamut in the world of education so far. It's not overly impressive, but as far as my certification goes, it stretches. I started by teaching 7th grade language arts five years ago, which covered reading, writing, and grammar in one curriculum and it was c-r-a-m-m-e-d but I loved every second of it. Now I'm teaching college prep seniors in a semester-long four-essay base module writing course in which students can earn college credit.  When I saw that this and next week's readings would encompass the thoughts of differentiation as it pertains to assessment, I started to think back to my teacher cert program and how much we learned about this. I thought back to my student teaching experience, where my wonderful cooperating teacher modeled many examples of this, from the simple to the quite complex. I thought about my lovely co-teacher from my years in 7th grade who would do anything for her learning support students in my inclusion class. I thought back to when I taught 8th grade gifted language arts (a class of 12) and how I had to come up with frequent ways to differentiate in order to make it more challenging. And I thought about how now I don't noticeably differentiate. 

But then I read.

And I let myself breathe; I let myself take it all in and I finally felt my footing for this new year of teaching. (If you're doing the math, yes, I have taught something new four of the five years I've been a teacher. I'm assuming many new teachers go through this, yes? Please? Anyone?) 

I felt at ease reading about the definition(s) presented to us by both Wormeli and Moon-- they made sense; I had seen this and done this many times. But seeing some new tactics and thoughts behind these things was comforting. I hadn't, pardon me, crapped out at doing Think-Pair-Shares and the like. The nicest thing I came to understand from Moon's text is that now that I'm more comfortable in my teaching and have relaxed  a little (well, as much as we can relax in this profession...), I'm able to really utilize the data that I create with the assessments that I give, either formative or summative (or pre-). I noticed that I'm just starting to really dig in and change things up for the better. 

I learned from Wormeli that it's okay to question and discuss our methods of differentiation. I really pondered over his theories and thoughts on mastery. I think this is such a hot-button issue in education right now. Well, at least for ELA. Perhaps other content areas have it easier, but in all honesty, how do we judge mastery in English class?! I know we've talked about this in previous discussions, but I liked seeing it alongside the idea of differentiation. Whew---mind blown, I'm totally scattered now. Is mastery different for each student out there? And where do standardized tests fit in? 

Annnnnnnnd now I'm having English teacher anxiety. It's a good time to pause and grade some essays, right?