Literature Review

We've been working on compiling a literature review over the past few weeks. We've each identified a source focusing on differentiated learning and its effects. Through this process the team has found that there is not one sure answer about differentiation - it largely relies on the students in the classroom, and how the teacher chooses to meet their many needs. While frustrating, we believe that this complexity will serve us well as we come from different content areas and different schools. The broadness will allow us to create a plan based off our actual students, and our results will be specific to our classrooms. It is important to note that what I end up implementing in my classroom will look very different than what Dana will implement in her classroom. Though Kevin and I have the same students now differentiation would still appear differently in a social studies classroom than an ELA classroom because our students aren't the same in every single class - or even in every unit. As a team, we will conduct surveys to gauge the self-efficacy of our students in our content areas, and build from there. We will compare the beginning results with the end results to see how differentiation affects a student's image of himself/herself in a given content area.