Tiered Learning

 "If you are following the hallmarks and making lesson equally engaging and respectful for all of your learners you are tiering."

                                                 --Nancy Peterson

A great teacher learns to differentiate their lessons by tiering the activities within the lessons, always with the students in your class in mind. It is not enough just to have a good lesson that covers great content; you need to design your lesson in a way that every student in your class will get meaning from it. Not every student is going to be the same; they are all going to be on different reading levels, they will all have different interests and different ways that they learn the best. When tailoring a lesson you MUST take these factors into account so that the objectives you are trying to reach with the lesson are met by ALL students, not just a select few. I know it sounds overwhelming, but I promise, it can be done. When developing your lessons, first look at what you want the students to know, understand and be able to do; from this starting point you can draft up the activities within the lesson.  Once you have done that, stop and look back at the activities, decide which students in your class will understand the context you have put them in and then clone the activity with the other students in mind. What do I mean when I say, “clone”?  Basically, just look at the activity, think about your students and make some adjustments so that your other learners can understand it in a context they know. This is what we call “tiering.” Sometimes you may only have two tiers, other times you may need to clone your activity 3 times to encompass the broad spectrum of your students, it just depends on your class. This is definitely something you shouldn’t take lightly though, especially as a first year teacher. Differentiating can be hard and it takes practice, but as the saying goes, “Practice makes perfect.” I am going to adjust that a little, “Practice makes ALMOST perfect.” I include almost because as a teacher you are always going to be learning and finding better ways to do things, you will never be perfect, but you can strive for perfection. Differentiating is something that will get easier with time.