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RTDI Core Beliefs

Beliefs Behind Responsive Teaching/Differentiated Instruction

  • Human beings share common feelings and needs, and schools should help us understand and respect those commonalities.
  • Individuals also differ significantly as learners; these differences matter in the classroom, and schools should help us to understand and respect the differences.
  • Intelligence is dynamic rather than static, plural rather than singular.
  • Human capacity is malleable, and the art of teaching is the art of maximizing human capacity; a central goal of schools ought to be maximizing the capacity of each learner.
  • We probably underestimate the capacity of every child as a learner.
  • Students should be at the center of the learning process; actively involved in making sense of the world around them through the lenses we call "the disciplines."
  • All learners require respectful, powerful, and engaging schoolwork to develop their individual capacities so that they become fulfilled and productive members of society.
  • A major emphasis in learner development is self-competition for growth and progress.
  • Teachers and other adults need to help learners accept responsibility for their own growth and progress.
  • Individuals and society benefit when schools and classrooms are genuine communities of respect and learning.
  • Effective heterogeneous classrooms are essential to building community in our schools.
  • Effective heterogeneous classrooms are powerful venues because most students spend most of their school time in such classrooms.
  • All effective heterogeneous classrooms recognize the similarities and differences in learners and robustly attend to them.
  • Excellent differentiated classrooms are excellent first and differentiated second.

Promoting Effective Differentiation is Difficult if Educators' Beliefs Include the Following:

  • Teachers are tellers and students are absorbers.
  • Time in the classroom is fixed.
  • Curriculum is largely fact based and skill based.
  • Pleasurable learning is a luxury.
  • "Fair" means treating all kids alike.
  • Students don't learn what the teacher doesn't directly oversee.
  • Life is difficult, and teachers must help students prepare for its rigors by giving them a taste of "reality" in the classroom.
  • Sorting of students through grading and scheduling is appropriate and effective.
  • If we'd just homogeneously group students, we wouldn't need differentiation.
  • Intelligence is fixed.
  • Ability and compliance are intertwined.
  • Most students cannot handle responsibility in the classroom.
  • Most students should be able to learn in the same way.
  • Students who differ broadly from grade-level expectations are problematic.
  • Students who achieve above grade level are already fine and we don't need to worry about them.
  • Student deficits are generally at fault when students don't learn.

Source: Tomlinson, C. A. & Allan, S. (2000). Leadership for differentiating schools and

classrooms. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.