While surfing for information on differentiated instruction, I came upon a site help4teachers.com. There I found information about an approach to providing instruction using a differentiated method that Layered Curriculum into 3 layers with the basic layer being core content/knowledge, the next being application, and the third being analysis and synthesis. Choices for students to pick for assignments are given on each level and reflect a variety of learning styles/preferences. I bought the book and it reads wonderfully. I am looking for anyone who has implimented it or knows of someone who has. I do a lot of work in the regular classroom but I only differentiate for my special ed students and only in a limited way. While it helps them survive in the regular ed classroom it doesn’t help them thrive. I could use some convincing evidence to approach my regular ed teachers with. The concept is rather radical—all kids can and want to learn if they are provided with an opportunity to do so. Hmmm.
Don’t know the particular book, but here’s a general caution for you: lots and lots of things *read* well. “Whole-language” has lots of very literate very good writers who sold it,. and that doesn’t make it any more successful. You can read one book supporting fascism and another supporting communism and both can apparently make a lot of sense. You have to be a skeptic and a nit-picker. You have to look not at the wonderful success stories the authors half report and half invent, rather you absolutely must look at worst-case scenarios. If you give the kids and teachers the choice of all these activiites, is there an “easy-out” set of choices that the school-wise will take to get out of doing any high-level thinking? Are the activities all really at appropriate levels, or are some of them really dumbed-down? Is the program really implementable as written, or is it another of those 30-hour-day and Martha-Stewart-staff-of-forty systems (a lot of programs have many good ideas and things that could work, if you had the 30-hour-day and Martha-Stewart-staff-of-forty to be able to do all the things necessary; in real life they fail badly due to lack of backup.) Are you going to get in big trouble with parents and school board over grading? Look at *all* the worst-case scenarios, plan and prepare for them, and then enter into your new system gradually.