Building Human Capital--Institute Day Happenings


Building Human Capital--Institute Day Happenings

 Building Human Capital is one of the three goals of District 107's Strategic Blueprint.  One of the ways schools and districts grow their employees is through targeted training on Institute Days during the school year. As you know, we had one of these days this past Tuesday and in this week’s blog, I wanted to share a little bit about what we learned that will impact how we teach the students in our classes. 

The bulk of the middle school staff had a full-day of learning with an outside consultant named Jessica Hockett (http://www.jessicahockett.com/) about differentiation. Differentiation is not a new concept in education, but with the infusion of technology and the shifts in what we want students to know and be able to do, it was a great day to refine the knowledge and practices for some staff members while laying a foundation for others. Differentiation has many definitions, but I think the following is a good one: An intentional approach to teaching that plans for student differences in classrooms. 

 Through differentiation, each student is met where they are at, and they are challenged to learn, develop and grow.  The overarching goals of the lesson are tied to the standards that have been adopted by the state of Illinois and integrated into the local curriculum.  In many cases, the standards are the minimum that the students need to learn and differentiation allows most students to go well beyond these standards.   This is a great benefit of differentiation.

 Some of you reading this may say to yourself, “But wait, that’s not how it was when I went to school” or “I thought that all students were supposed to learn the exact same thing in the exact same way in public education.”  These are common thoughts that many of you have based upon your interactions in school, but these aren’t really true anymore.  As I've written about previously, the Internet has caused learning in school to be less about memorizing information and more about how to use that information to create something new or solve problems.

 We learned many different ways about how to group students.  A very important take away was that depending upon what the goal of the lesson or the unit, the teacher will then determine how they're going to group students to best accomplish the goal.  Groupings need to be intentional, even if the teacher is choosing random, heterogeneous groups.







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