Differentiating Content, Delivery, and Assessment

As I begin the new school year I am always changing and reevaluating units and lessons to figure out how to make them better than the year before. This is a process that I believe will continue throughout my whole career as a teacher. The unit I am currently focusing on is the Constitution of the United States (Standard 8.2). Up until this point we have looked at the American Revolution and the causes and reasons behind it. Now as we turn to look at how the Constitution will be formed it is important that we look back to the Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights, and the Mayflower Compact. These three documents had a major influence on the writers of the Constitution and we can see their ideas echoed in our Constitution. I begin this unit by introducing each of these documents and giving a brief overview. I then want my students to look over these primary sources to find the main ideas presented in each, and to ask themselves which of the ideas presented are something that they value and would want to see in their Constitution. Now these writings are complex and challenging when left in their original language, some students can dissect and understand these, while others can not. That is where the differentiation comes in, I have to level the reading and questions according to my students. For the higher level students I leave the documents as is and allow them to work together to dissect the language and discuss ideas while answering the more complex questions about the text. For my mid-range students I have taken the documents and transformed them into more modern day language, this way they still have to look through and investigate the whole document, but it is in a language they can more easily understand. For this group the questions are a mix of mid-level and higher level thinking questions. The students again can work together to discuss the ideas and answer the questions. And for my lower level students I have taken isolated sections of the documents that correlate to the questions that are to be asked and translate them into simple modern language, this way these students are not searching an entire document, but are still getting the important aspects of the primary source. For them their questions have been simplified, but there are a couple mid-level questions in there to challenge them. They may work together as a group to discuss and come up with answers. By the end of this assignment all groups of students will have an understanding of the documents and how these ideas contributed to the thinking of the men at the Constitutional Convention. As the students go on to dissect the Constitution they will receive vary levels of questions and wording to accompany that document. At the end of this unit the students will have a formal test on the content covered. Because of the leveling of each document and the wording used, this is not a one size fits all test. The wording of the tests will need to match the wording that was used in their study of the document. The test will remain the same, but the wording will be differentiated depending on the wording level of how they learned the information, if this were not done there might be a lot of confusion and unnecessary mistakes.