Different Ability Levels

Every Thursday both English teachers are in the computer lab, and generally the students spend this time working on an essay. This week, the students' assignment was slightly different. Instead of a formal essay, they had to create a How To poster of anything they wanted (How to Dribble a Basketball, How to Eat a Sandwich, How to Survive a Zombie Invasion, etc.). Normally, when it is time to write a formal essay, the students who are labeled as lower-ability struggle and almost never finish before the end of the class period. But this assignment they dove right into. Even if they did not pay attention to all the instructions of the assignment, they were, for the most part, much ahead of the rest of the class by the end of the period. The "high-achievers," on the other hand, first had difficulty coming up with a topic and then were concerning themselves with formatting, etc., and most were not close to finished by the end of class. It was really remarkable to see this flip. That, my friends, was a very interesting (and effective) use of differentiation and a clear reason why appealing to different learning styles is important.