"Our job as teachers is not to teach the Standard Course of Study. Our job is to ensure that the Standard Course of Study is mastered. If we define our role as teaching the Standard Course of Study, we ignore the needs of all students who do not understand or master it when we teach it, as well as all students who had already mastered it before we taught it. That eliminates the needs of fifty to seventy percent of any given classroom. There is nothing fair or equitable about focusing our energies simply on teaching the Standard Course of Study. However, if our job is to ensure that all students master the Standard Course of Study, our classroom will look dramatically different. Instead of everyone doing the same thing, students are doing different things at the same time. If we base our rationale on even one truth with which everyone agrees, it is that children learn at different rates. The reality is that there are many reasons for differentiating, but this one truth should be enough to help us recognize that we need to do something different for different learners at any given time."
Tiering to avoid tears: Developing assignments that address all learners' needs By Linda Pigott Robinson
