The center of all teaching is, or should be, learner development, the movement of learners along a developmental continuum. Teachers need to recognize how learners grow and develop, aware that students’ different developmental arcs will call for different challenges and learning experiences.
In order to teach students effectively, teachers need to identify students’ prior knowledge and readiness for new material. To accomplish this in my classroom, I use pre-instructional assessment data to evaluate prior knowledge and readiness for new material, evaluating the results to design instruction respectful of students’ existing abilities that will move all learners further up the developmental continuum. Here is a link to the pre-instructional assessment I created for my most recent teaching experience in a 10th grade English classroom: Link to Pre-Instruction Assessment.
Another strategy that honors and drives learner development is the importance of relevance and motivation. In every lesson that I teach, I strive to make the learning relevant and important to students explicitly and implicitly. In my most recent unit introducing the text Lord of the Flies, for example, I set up essential questions that we were going to investigate as a class through our reading. This concept, based on the ideas of Wiggins and McTighe, calls on teacher to identify important questions that go beyond the content, that speak to students lives in and beyond school. Here is a link to the Essential Questions I incorporated into my planning for the unit and shared with the class: Essential Questions for Lord of the Flies.
Another way I acknowledge learner developmental differences and provide appropriate challenge in my classroom will be through the use of independent reading choice texts. I will provide a well-stocked classroom library, give students guidance in selecting developmentally appropriate and interest driven texts, and we will chart their progress on their “My 10” chart. The idea for the My 10 chart comes from Kelly Gallagher, and I will draw on his work and the work of Donalynn Miller (The Book Whisperer) in supporting students’ choice driven development as readers.
