Product


 * ~ PRODUCT: how students demonstrate what they learned. ~ **

The product of a differentiated classroom is the assessment. Your assessments should be prepared after you have decided what the essential understandings are, and __BEFORE__, you design how you will teach the material.

 The assessments should match 1:1to:  a) what you are teaching, and  b) how you want your students to understand it, apply it, and remember it. //This is a great place to incorporate Bloom's Taxomony. //

For example, if you want your students to know vocabulary words, then the assessment would be matching or fill-in-the-blank. If you want your students to be able to apply their understanding of two topics in order to write an essay comparing and contrasting, then your assessment would be written as such, and your lesson plan would focus on how to enable your students to write an essay comparing and contracting the two topics. This is an excellent source for some ideas on how to differentiate assessments.

This next source is long, but again contains how excellent examples of assessments for a variety of subject areas. After assessing your students, it is also helpful to record and compare their results. Below is a link for an Excel program that allows you to record the results, add a color code for the variation in scores (in this case, the stop light colors: red, yellow and green) and finally a graph is also produced to help in a quick visual evaluation. The Stop light colors allows you to quickly find those students who are struggling with the material. This enables you to make the necessary adjustments to your teaching, to help the "red" students and provide a different course of work for the green and yellow students. 