While our aim is never to make someone uncomfortable, if teachers from the 60's, 70's or 80's could time travel, we'd hope they'd feel pretty lost when it comes to how we teach today. The book suggests this because the idea of differentiated curriculum has so evolved within the past 20 or so years, that these past teachers would have little idea why or how the end results of todays lessons were achieved. They would probably think it took a significant amount of more work than they were used to putting in for their curriculums, but as it is stated on page 3, "Sometimes, [when using differentiated instruction], we don't spend energy identifying tasks for high-medium-, and/or low-functioning groups so much as we consider whether we've taught in a way the brain best processes."
Some people claim that supplying one student with a differentiated curriculum of their own would cause them to become dependent on that one way of learning forever, and if they had a teacher in the future who did not teach that way, that they would fall flat. Others believe that it would make them competant, independent thinkers with a better understanding that all of his or her peers are very different as well, and that they should respect this. The latter is the truth. It has been shown that even when students have been quizzed in a more traditional way, after having learned the material of the quiz in a differentiated setting, they will still do well because they learned in a way which helped them absorb the most. Some say this kind of teaching is allowing a "crutch", but in actuality, it levels the playing field so that everyone is learning the same amount, just differently.
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