It’s a beautiful fall day today…crisp, cool, yet warmed by the sun. I spent most of a quiet morning looking over teachers’ self assessment around differentiation. I tried to give each teacher constructive and encouraging feedback on their responses and I also gained a lot of knowledge about where we are as a school, what we’re feeling confident about, and where we can go next to build our collective capacity to differentiate in our classrooms.

Differentiation is hard. If it wasn’t, we’d be doing it already! The concept of differentiation has been around for years AND it’s challenging to wrap your head (and your practice) around it. We’ve been working with Dr. Doubet, author of the book we are reading together, Differentiation in Middle and High School, and using our professional development grade level meetings to build our understanding and keep our eye on our North Star: Deeper Learning for Equity through Differentiation and Developmental Designs. Developmental Designs is our social/emotional learning framework that we’ve been promoting for going on three years, and differentiation is the curriculum, assessment, and instructional complement to it.