How Self-Assessment Can Play a Role in a Differentiated Classroom

     This school year has really been the year of differentiated instruction for me. This is not to say I never thought about DI before this year. In fact, while in my former district, I was one of the champions of DI, trying out a lot of the strategies I was reading about, discussing these strategies with colleagues, etc. But this year, as an instructional coach in a new district, I find myself working with numerous educators who really want to succeed with DI, but don't always know where to start, and have a lot of understandable concerns about how it all works. Coaching colleagues on implementing DI in their classrooms has opened my eyes to a lot of new possibilities concerning differentiation. In this post, I'll share one of my more recent thoughts and discoveries...

     It all started when I realized that the vast majority of teachers I was discussing DI with were asking the same questions: How do I group students? How can it be flexible? Shouldn't I be worried about how my students are going to react to being given different work to do than their classmates?

     I went digging around in all my books on differentiated instruction, and I found a lot of great ideas and suggestions to help answer these questions. But there was one suggestion that really hit home for me, that really aligned with how I believe DI can function in building student self-awareness and self-assessment, in turning some ownership over to the students. It's from chapter 6 of Learning Targets: Helping Students Aim for Understanding in Today's Lesson by Connie M. Moss and Susan M. Brookhart, and it goes a little something like this:

     It doesn't always have to be the teacher who determines what differentiated work students do during a lesson. We can turn assessment over to the students, who, after all, are the experts on what they know and on what they don't know as of yet. Moss and Brookhart recommend using a student self-assessment sheet to do this. Here's a sample of what this might look like in a math class (2012, p. 111):

My Self Assessment

Try these problems, and then check what type of problem it was for you.

1.       Find the mean, the median, and the mode for this set of numbers: 2, 10, 4, 2, 7.

Mean _____     Median _____     Mode _____

 How is this problem for you?
__ I can already do it easily
__ I can do it, and want more practice with this kind of problem
__ I can learn it, and want to practice this kind of problem with help.
__ I am not ready for this kind of problem yet.

2.Jack sold newspapers at a newsstand. On Monday he sold 41 papers, on Tuesday he sold 58 papers, on Wednesday he sold 52 papers, on Thursday he sold 48 papers, on Friday he sold 57 papers, and on Saturday he sold 58 papers. On average, how many papers did he sell? _____ Is this number the mean, the median, or the mode? _____

 How is this problem for you?
__ I can already do it easily
__ I can do it, and want more practice with this kind of problem
__ I can learn it, and want to practice this kind of problem with help.
__ I am not ready for this kind of problem yet.

 3. Ms. Smith sold handmade jewelry at a shop. For the month of January, her sales totaled $163 the first week, $274 the second week, $873 the third week, and $842 the fourth week.

a. Which statistic makes her sales look better, the mean or the median? _____ Explain how you figured this out.

b. How many more dollars' worth of sales would Ms. Smith have to have made in January for her mean sales to equal $600? _____ Explain how you figured this out.

How is this problem for you?
__ I can already do it easily
__ I can do it, and want more practice with this kind of problem
__ I can learn it, and want to practice this kind of problem with help.
__ I am not ready for this kind of problem yet.

     I love so many things about this! It's a great example of a fairly simple pre-assessment that puts the ownership on the student to self-assess. I particularly love how this example requires the student to not only state where he or she is "at" in answering "How is this problem for you?" but also requires the student to actually do each problem before self-assessing. Sometimes, things can go wrong when we ask our students to self-assess in a differentiated classroom. They may not fully know their own current level of understanding. In having to do the problem first, they will be much more likely to self-assess accurately. There is also the worry of some teachers that, in a differentiated classroom, some students will be too easy on themselves on a self-assessment in the hopes that they'll be given an "easier" assignment as a result. I believe the above example helps to reduce this occurrence in asking the students to actually do the problems instead of simply making blanket statements about their current readiness. Of course, there may be some students who still try to "underrate" themselves on purpose. But I have to ask: does it make sense to not use these types of valuable self-assessments because a handful of students may abuse them? Besides, we teachers are not taken completely out of the equation just because there is self-assessment going on. We can always step in if we think a student has been too easy (or too hard) on himself or herself. 

     Something else I love about the above example is that it's so easy for the teacher to know what the next step is! Based on these self-assessments, the teacher can now form differentiated groups of students based on their readiness, and will know what types of problems to give each group, as well as which group he should probably work with first, second, and so on. 

     I hope this gives you some food for thought about ways you can involve your students in the differentiated learning process. Why not make them our partners in discovering what they currently know and are able to do?