Schmoker's blind spot?

As I predicted, Mike Schmoker's visit to WKU last week ruffled a few feathers and raised a few eyebrows.  I had warned my own education administration students that usually before Schmoker has completed a talk he offends everyone in the room at least once.  This visit was no exception.

Schmoker, author of the book-I-recommend-more-than-any-0ther Focus, made comments during both of his presentations disparaging differentiated learning as having no "research base."

Last year, just after the publication of Focus, Schmoker got into a public debate with differentiation guru Carol Ann Tomlinson for making the same assertion.  Read Schmoker's Education Week commentary calling differentiation "a fad," and Tomlinson's response (subscribers only, but email me if you want the full text version).

It appears that Schmoker defines (and still defines) differentiation by the bad examples that pass for it in schools around the country.  "Grouping," acting out skits, coloring, doing dioramas and other "fun" strategies based on some vague notion of "learning styles" abound in many schools, watering down an otherwise rigorous curriculum in the name of differentation.  Schmoker rejects all this as unproven junk that does more harm than good.

And in this, he's right.  But Schmoker seems to miss the point that none of these low-rigor, disconnected activities actually meets the definition of differentiation laid out by Tomlinson and others.  Anyone who has read one of Tomlinson's many books on differentation knows that the practices she describes require extensive planning and reflection on the part of teachers, must be rooted in a guaranteed, rigrous curriculum, and are fundamental to the kinds of effective lesson planning that lie at the heart of Schmoker's own "focus."

So what to make of this apparent divergence of thinking between two educational reform giants?

My own sense is that Schmoker and Tomlinson are closer together than Schmoker thinks.  To Schmoker's credit, it makes sense that if schools are trying to prioritize their time among many competing instructional improvement initiatives, focusing on differentiation should not be the highest priority.  Until schools have narrowed and guaranteed their curriculum through power standards, embedded authentic literacy throughout the curriculum, and implemented the fundamentals of good lesson design, differentiated instruction will not make a lot of difference.

But within the context of this kind of focus, differentiation has an important place.  As one example: Schmoker stresses that good lesson design involves regular formative assessments of student learning (he prefers the plain language "checks for understanding") which lead to immediate instructional adjustments.  One important adjustment that emerges from formative assessment is how a teacher will differentiate for students who have mastered a learning target and for those who have not.  Differentiation is as simple - and important - as this.

And as Tom Stewart and I have argued in nearly every professional development session we deliver on this topic, almost no one knows how to do differentiation effectively.  The literature is out there pointing the way, but few of us have explored it, and this remains a great frontier of professional learning for teachers and school administrators. 

We can't really wait much longer to begin this process.  If a school has invested heavily in aligning its curriculum and promoting formative assessment (as many schools in the region have), then differentiation is the logical and necessary next step.  As a wise local school leader recently told us, "We're telling teachers all the time to differentiate, but no one knows how to do it, including administrators.  We've got to give teachers the tools to actually differentiate, or else we're going to have to shut up about it."

In this sense, differentiation might be fundamental to Schmoker's "focus."