Through our teaching, we aim for students to become more and more expert in particular knowledge domains. Ultimately, we want them to become as expert as their teacher – if not more. It is at this point that they can be truly thought of as independent. In theory, the principle that teachers should take steps to cater for natural differences between students is a sensible and equitable one. However, this does notmean that different students in a class should be taught:

The Teaching Delusion

The first is that such approaches to differentiation consume teacher timeto such an extent that it not only becomes unreasonable, but unmanageable. The perceived benefits could never balance with the very real costs. No teacher should be expected to differentiate like this. Ever. Sadly, this is often misunderstood. In a misguided attempt to ‘personalise’ the curriculum according to interest and preference, some schools advocate approaches designed to do exactly this. They are making a big mistake. Principally, there are two reasons why. Consuming time and learning gapsNewspaper articles, PowerPoint presentations and all related activities are the medium to deliver a message. The medium usually has little value in itself. It is the messagethat is most important. Just as building muscle allows us to lift heavier weights, developing long- term memory allows students to think about more complex things. We teach students knowledge so that they can ‘do things’ with it. The catch-all term for ‘do things’ is ‘skill’. ‘Describe’, ‘explain’, ‘predict’, ‘evaluate’ – these are all skills because they are all things that students do with the knowledge they are taught. In that sense, knowledge and skills are really two sides of the same coin. While for the purposes of discussion it can be helpful to draw a distinction between them, we should keep in mind that this distinction is actually artificial. I had never thought about this before but, after reading your post and revisiting some original research by Vygotsky, I suspect there is no benefit to a younger child in separating the learning objective from the success criteria; indeed there may well be a strong advantage to our scaffolding function as teachers to combine them. Thank you, it made me think. Thinking - "Thinking is the interaction of knowledge, from our environment and our long term memory"

The Teaching Delusion 2: Teaching Strikes Back by Bruce

Ironically, gaps are the very thing that differentiation should be fighting to prevent. ‘Equity of opportunity’ through access to a core curriculum, and ‘differentiation’ as different content and activities, are diametrically opposed to one another. The problems with a personalised approach Careful instructional design is the key to minimising extraneous load and freeing up as much working memory as possible for thinking. If we expect our working memory to think about too muchat one time, or about content that is too complicated, we will overload it. As a result, we will stop being able to think, we will make mistakes, and learning will stop. At any point within any learning sequence, any student may require support. This can come from the teacher, from peers or from resources created for this very purpose. Getting the support matters more than the form it takes. Challenge Another key part of improving teaching is to make use of lesson observations. There are two broad types of lesson observations:The reason that students will always need teachers is because, by definition, students are novicesand teachers are experts(certainly, we assume that they are). The best way for novices to learn is through ‘Specific Teaching’ approaches with experts. If we leave them to learn independently as novices, they won’t learn as well as they would have with an expert. As with almost everything, we will always find the odd exception to this rule. There area small minority of students who, in particular subjects, are able to learn well on their own, with little need for a teacher. However, this is very rare. The vast majority of students learn best according to the novice–expert principle. I am a maths teacher looking to share good ideas for use in the classroom, with a current interest in integrating educational research into my practice. Categories Success criteria relate to the evidence you are looking for to determine if students have learned what you intended. A useful acronym is WILF: ‘WhatIamLookingFor’. Not everyone understands this. There are some who believe that independent learning means minimising the role of the teacher at every stage in the learning process. For them, teacher-talk is bad; student-talk is good. Direct-interactive instruction is oppressive; discovery learning is liberating. Textbooks are old-fashioned; online research is the future. The irony is that all of this will actually make it less likelythat students will ever become independent.