Chapter 5

Abstract:
This chapter talked about the use of tiering in the classroom. When you test your students knowledge you are inevitably going to find that some students are at different levels then others. It is important to make sure your plans for assessments are flexible enough to take care of these differences because making sure that all students are learning the main ideas and expanding their knowledge is the most important thing. We need to take our assessments and break them down into different levels in order to accommodate for the needs of everyone. To help with tiering this chapter offered suggestions such as Tic Tac Toe boards, using the RAFT format, the summarization pyramid,learning contracts, cubing, and William's Taxonomy. These provide ways to adjust to students' different levels by allowing them choices of assessments. This is one way to help get the students interested. Another helper provided in this chapter for getting a students attention is a list of verbs that can make assignments seem more interesting and attention grabbing.

Reflection
I think that overall our group decided we would really like to have more information about tiering before we make a final decision on how we feel about it. Some of us really like the idea of giving students options on how to be assessed because we feel like that would definitely help to get the students more involved and interested. We all think that tiering is important but we are also all slightly confused about how it would work. We know that students are at different levels and so they may require different assignments and none of us think it is fair to allow a student to fall behind and fail simply because we didn't give them the type of work they needed. However, when we were discussing this chapter in class, the main point we talked about was how to you balance it. Personally I would be very afraid of making students feel singled out or stupid, and through our discussions in class I found that many other people thought this could be an issue as well. We spent a long time talking about how the students who were considered more advanced would realize that their work was harder than others and that they would be all to willing to point out this information. Once this happened the less advanced students would start wondering why they were getting easier work and may come to the conclusion that the teacher thinks they are stupid. If a student thinks the teacher thinks they are stupid then they will be much more inclined to think that themselves. So, when using tiering how do you make sure that this doesn't happen? We all agreed that this could be an issue and the chapter never got into any explanation of how to avoid this issue. For this reason, while we all see the definite advantages and importance of tiering, we are skeptical about using it ourselves. Another point was brought up in class discussions, and that was about what classes can use tiering. Some people think that subjects such as history would be hard to tier because they are completely based on facts and if you don't know the facts then you just don't know them. I mean if you don't know what year Columbus sailed to America how can you use tiering to solve the problem? However, I think that while the factual part may be hard to tier, there would probably be other assignments where it would be possible. For example, if you were having them write an essay on a historical event then you could use a method such as the Tic Tac Toe method in order to provide multiple options for the essay. Then again, if you were to do that, we started to wonder: Well, what is to stop the advanced students from picking the easy way out? If you tell them they can't pick certain topics then we get back into the questions about singling students out. Overall I would have to say, and after reading this you would probably agree, that this chapter brought forth a lot of question within the class. Personally, I think this was excellent because it really got us thinking and asking important questions. Hopefully those questions will be answered throughout this course.

*Posted by Chelsae