Once upon a time, I used to be a high school science teacher, however, I no longer work as one. However, I married a high school science teacher who has been using differentiating instruction in his junior and senior science classes. He didn't start out that way. In his initial years of teaching, he would teach all the students in a class with the same approach and expectations. For example, if he posted notes on the overhead projector, it was expected that all students would copy down the material exactly as they appeared on the screen. If he gave out a worksheet, it was expected that every student in that class would complete it. If he gave a project that required a model to be built to explain conceptual knowledge, every student was required to submit his/her own little work of art.
However, there were always some students who weren't motivated to complete the work assigned to them, and they were not always necessarily the same students, depending on the instructional method that had been used. In other words, there were students, who thrived with a lecture/note taking/worksheet approach, who bombed when they were presented with building models of cells. There were also students who mentally checked out when they were supposed to be copying the notes from the overhead screen, but who submitted beautifully detailed models of an atom or a plant cell, created with materials that many wouldn't have considered using.
After getting to a point in his teaching where he felt comfortable enough to do so, he started using differentiating instruction in order to capture the interest of as many students as he could. In a lay person's words, he started offering choices to his students with respect to how they could learn and show what they knew. For example, in the note taking situation, students had a choice of copying directly from the screen, or they had to follow along using worksheets that had most of the notes typed on them, but with key words/ideas missing that needed to be filled in. Sometimes, for assessment, students had a choice to either submit in paperwork, or if they had an aversion to that, they would be required to answer the questions orally in an interview. These choices may seem too simple, or even ridiculous to some people, but there were enough takers for every choice provided to consider them as legitimate options.
So, when the Goodreads Giveaway Program listed Differentiating Instruction With Menus - Science, by Laurie Westphal, I signed up for a chance to win the book, and I did. The book has a focus for teachers of grades 3 - 5 science, but I figure that if I ever return to teaching high school science, the principles behind using the methods described in this book would be useful to know. Apparently, this book is part of a series which also covers differentiating instruction with menus for math, language arts, and social studies for the elementary school level. There also appears to be a couple books in the series that also tackles differentiating instruction with menus for grades 9-12 in the areas of algebra and biology.
The book is divided into two major sections: the first part takes up about a third of the book and covers a general discussion and explanation about what menus are. The author discusses at least five of them. For example, one is a list menu which has predetermined choices, each with its own point value. Students can choose any number of options which have different weights and different expectations for completion time. The point total should equal to 100% and students can choose how they wish to achieve that total. The book also provides suggestions on how to use menus (for example, in mini-lessons). Also provided in this section are guidelines for using the menus and rubrics for assessment.
The second part, which makes up the remaining two-thirds of the book, contains actual menus for specific lessons under the categories of Physical Science, Biological Science, Earth Science, and Scientists and the Tools They Use. For each of these menus, there are introduction pages for the teacher, the content menu, and supporting activities for the section. There 8 sample lessons for the Physical Science section, 6 for the Biological section, 12 for the Earth Science section, and 3 for the Scientists and the Tools They Use section.
Because I have previously taught material that is presented in some of the menus provided for in the Physical Sciences section, I took a closer look at those particular lessons. For a couple of those lessons, I could have directly lifted them straight out of this book and used them in my classroom without making any alterations or modifications, even at a junior science level. However, there were lessons that I would have had to make changes for because they weren't a suitable fit content-wise or activity-wise.
In my opinion, the most valuable part of the book was the first third of the book, which provided the descriptions and explanations on how to use the menus, and especially the list of the products (Table 3.1 which lists activities that could be used in conjunction with the menus, such as an poster, model, making a commercial, etc.), and the guidelines detailing the requirements for the product. For example, product guidelines for a model may include the following requirements:
-the physical dimensions
-all parts labeled
-in a suitable scale
-title, information card
-name (because, yes, students have been known to not write their names down on work that they spent hours on!)
Again, because I taught at the high school level, the list of guidelines would need to be adapted and expanded for my class. However, it is nice to have a jumping point to start off from, and the author has provided project guidelines for at least 56 activities/products that could be selected for differentiating instruction.
I remember receiving a 3-4 page handout at teacher college listing Bloom's taxonomy and a list of about activities that could help promote learning. This book has a list of activities, possible guidelines/requirements for those activities, a couple of rubrics, and an example of a $1 contract form (to equalize that amount spent on these activities). Even if not all 29 sample lessons are directly usable, they could be adapted or used as models to construct lessons for use in the classroom.
Disclaimer: I received a copy of "Differentiating Instruction With Menus - Science" by Laurie Westphal for free from the Goodreads Giveaway program. All opinions stated in this review are mine.
