Customer Reviews

Differentiation in Practice, Grades K-5: A Resource Guide for Differentiating Curriculum

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The staff at my school in Dallas was given copies of Differentiation in Practice as sort of a book study for discussion groups. I read it, and while I feel I would be very hard pressed to put a lot of the specific examples into practice, the overall sense of differentiation that is expressed through the lessons definitely made me change a few things in my own classroom teaching style.
I teach at a departmentalized school. This means that I only teach math and science, while my partner teaches reading and social studies. This, coupled with the high-pressure nature of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills(TAKS) does not really give me enough time to have lengthy units on any particular topics. However, looking through the examples of lesson plans that are provided in Tomlinson's book, I was able to pick out a few ideas, cafeteria-style, and attempt to implement them slowly into my own classroom.
Now that I have read Differentiation in Practice, I feel that I will probably not reference it as a guide very often, but that the importance of differentiation itself will stay with me.

This book was introduced to me in a workshop. It is full of solutions to our ever changing classroom. I now have ideas to teach my SPED students with my gifted students. Differentiation is the wave of the future. After reading the book, I realize the differentiation is not leveled reading groups as we all think!

Another practical differentiation guide from Carol Ann Tomlinson.

More than an introduction, this book contains lesson plans for a variety of elementary school subjects. For each subject, you can look at a complete instructional unit. Teachers looking for a step-by-step guide to creating differentiated lessons, look no further.

I have to say, the first unit I designed this way took FOREVER. Don't get discouraged on the first lesson and don't think you have to differentiate everything right out of the box (the mistake I made the first time).

This is an excellent source for those people creating differentiated units. It has units for you to uses as models for creating your own. You could also use the units as is and take thenm straight to your differentiated classroom. I used this book as the model when I created my unit while working with Carol Ann Tomlinson in Virginia it was great!