What I Learned From Mr. Denise

I talked with Mr. Denise at length today regarding my ideas for working with H. He was very supportive and agreed that something needed to be done and that I was probably on the right track.

However, we talked about differentiated instruction. I was surprised to know that you can't. Well, you sort of can, but when the rubber hits the road, all kids are equal. Some subjects, such as English and History, have regular classes and "Pre-AP" classes in the same classroom. These are seen as two different classes and in such cases, it is quite alright to have differentiated instruction and expectations for the two groups.

If you don't have such an official division though, things become much more difficult. You can differentiate your instructions and you can encourage kids to achieve more or produce more advanced work if they are more advanced students. However, when it comes to graded work, you can't expect the advanced kids in your class do anything more than any other kid. This opens the teacher and the school to great difficulties if the "advanced kid" doesn't do well and parents come back wanting to know why he had to do harder work for the same grade as other kids. Makes it sort of hard to "push" kids to achieve more than they think they can do.

You may have noticed that in an earlier post today, I seem to have set up exactly this situation with H., my current challenge. I talked it over with Mr. Denise first. He steered me in the right direction. I need to talk with the counsellor and have H's grade in my class changed to Pass/Fail, so that he will merely pass the course and get credit for it, not have any chance at getting an A for his differentiated assignments.