Day 6:

Today was the start of my third week in Al-Ezzah School with grade four students and my focus was observing how my monitor school teacher is applying differentiation with the new system where students are divided into separated sections based on their learning levels.

The science lesson today was about healthy and unhealthy foods and the most significant differentiation between the low and high sections was on the instructions while the activities remained the same. When I first started this teaching practice, I asked my MST how she implements differentiation with the new system. The explanation was not clear until today where I tried to understand what she meant by saying: “You have to change the instructions, not the whole activities”.

For instance, when the teacher introduced new vocabulary for high-level students she selected some students to read the words and the meaning, then she asked the rest of students to explain what that means. In general, all students were involved and able to comprehend the new vocabulary very well regardless of the complexity of the concept which impressed me. In contracts, with the low section students, the teacher presented visuals to demonstrate the meaning of new vocabulary and she did not ask them to read by themselves, instead, she provided them with the explanations by using simple language. The result was satisfied because the majority of students were able to get the new concepts easily.

Another important difference between the low and high sections was modifying some of the test questions. It was the same questions for both sections, but the instructions were different, for instance, the teacher read the test question by question for the low students while the high section student did the test by themselves. Furthermore, the requirements in some questions were different, for instance, the high-level students were asked to identify the places of several organs in the human body in a picture that has no labels while the low-level students only asked to write names of organs next to specific numbers. In general, students who belong to the high level of learning have an active role in the learning process and usually, they learn by a self-direction compared to low section students who experienced the gradual release of responsibility model.

The only thing in this process that I believe it has a dangerous impact on students psychology is the official names for each level which are low, middle, high and unfortunately, students know they called low, middle, high students. I think these names decreased the motivation of learning among all students because limiting them in one level throughout the academic year will not encourage them to make any improvements. In my opinion, if the MOE prefer homogeneous classes, at least the names of each level must return to the previous classification emerging, developing, and mastered levels.