(upbeat music) - So tiered assignments are a really, I like to use the word kind of a handy tool to add into your collection of differentiation strategies, or universally designed lessons, because it really allows you to meet the needs of individual students without worrying too much about, you know, equal groupings or worrying too much about, you know, necessarily fitting a particular kind of student learner to a task. You have a lot of flexibility with a tiered assignment. So essentially what tiering allows you to do is create different kinds of tasks or activities for different groups, right?
And your groups can vary by all kinds of, you know, different factors. You can tier by interest, you can tear by readiness, you can tier by product. Almost an endless list here. But a lot of folks will look at, you know, things like readiness or things like kids creating a different product, things like that.
So imagine that you are working with young children on a math problem, and some students are, you know, working with manipulatives like cotton balls or counting bears, and they are illustrating a story problem. And then you've got students in another area who are maybe using other tools, potentially drawing their own problems, maybe slightly more sophisticated problems. And then you might even have a third group of students who are working on double digits, and they are creating their own problems, and then maybe even solving their partner's problems. So that's an example where students have different kinds of work, but they're working on very similar kinds of skills, if not the very same kinds of objectives.
And what I like about it is, again, you don't have to worry about, you know, eight kids in this group, eight kids in this group, eight kids in this group. Sometimes with stations or other kinds of models, that's more of a concern. With tiering, certainly you wouldn't want students by themselves, but you could have for a particular lesson, you know, three students in tier one, you could have a couple of different groups in tier two, you could have, you know, a handful of kids in tier three. The caution for tiering I always say is that you wanna make sure that you do have flexible grouping kind of at the center of this brainstorming.
So every now and then you're gonna have students, you know, engaged in that work around that readiness example that I gave. But you don't pervasively want to have students in those same kinds of groupings, especially if those are the same students repeatedly in a group that is, you know, solving a problem on a more basic level, and then kids getting into these more sophisticated constellations in, you know, subsequent tiers. So you wanna think about using this one like with most structures widely and for different purposes, and being really careful about, you know, what those groupings look like, so that if you are pervasively making some of those kinds of decisions, students don't see these, and that they don't become, you know, static ability groups.
That can be one caution. These can work really well across grade levels though as a strategy that you mix into, you know, the rest of your menu, so to speak. I like this for middle school and high school as well. Think about a group of students who are studying Shakespeare.
And you have one group of students who is going to be maybe watching a clip of a scene in a play. And then you have another group of students who might be reading that same scene, and potentially maybe an adapted or an annotated version because it's quite complex. But you may have another group of students who's really ready to tackle this and is doing a close reading, and creating their own scaffolds and supports, and potentially, you know, alone or collaboratively. So again, you can see how those tasks could otherwise be done in small groups with different kids taking roles, right?
But tiering gives you just one other approach that you can bring in when you do have either certain skills that you really want groups of kids to practice, or when you wanna add in some novelty to the mix of lessons that you are offering.
