Fair Isn't Always Equal Ch. 5

Abstract
The main idea of Chapter 5 was the concept of tiering or adjusting the level of complexity and challenge in a given assignment. The main idea of tiering is to maximizes the learning for all of your students. You are doing your students an injustice if you are aware that a specific student has only a basic knowledge of a subject and you hold them to a standard of a higher knowledge. Your are just setting your student up to fail which is not doing anybody any good. You are also doing a student an injustice if they have an advanced knowledge of a subject and you only hold them to a standard of a basic knowledge. In this case you are not setting the student up for failure but instead you are allowing the student to stop learning because they know that you only are going to hold them up to the level of basic knowledge. Chapter 5 also discussed the ideas of learning contracts as well as menus while re-emphasizing the usefulness of tic-tac-toe and the pyramid method. Chapter 5 also emphasized that there are certain keys to tiering such as Tomlinson's Equalizer and the Taxonomy of Creativity. Chapter 5 concluded expressing the need to think about tiering every time you sit down to design a lesson.

Personal Reflection
We particularly enjoyed the learning menu because it related the necessity of tiering to the theory of MI which we have been studying in our other text. We liked how it resembled the tic-tac-toe template by allowing the students to choose from a variety of different responses to best fit their learning style and mental intelligence. We also really liked that it incorporated UbD by exemplifying the fact that if the student demonstrates mastery of the essential questions and understandings it doesn't really matter what the mode of response is. As students we often were not big fans of tiering because it seemed like it was holding students to different standards which didn't seem fair to the students who were held to the high standard. Why should more be expected out of us than is expected out of the group across the room. That just isn't fair! Which actually is a perfect segue into the title of the book. As pre-service teachers we now all understand the necessity of tiering and it's importance in our future lesson plans.