FIAE: Tierring Assignments (Chapter 5)

    The fifth chapter of Fair Isn’t Always Equal, by Rick Wormeli, talked a lot about the use of “tiering” in the classroom. Simply put, tiering is the altering of expectations based on the readiness, interest, and learning profiles of the students. When creating tiered assessments it is important to start with the middle level, the level that meets the standard, from there you can create the higher or lower levels. The reason for this is that if you start too high or too low then the expectations for the other groups may be influenced; for example, if you create the higher level assessment first than you may be blinded to what the actual standard expects, thus creating an unfair exam; likewise, if you start too low than the others levels may not be challenged enough.

     Tiering does intrigue me, especially for the more diverse classroom. Providing students the chance to exercise their creativity with my assignments will be more than welcome, assuming academically it does not interfere. The book introduces many ways to tier assignments, of them the RAFTS concept is particularly interesting. As a beach ball, I am a big fan of choices and providing options. However, a lot of students when given too many choices say they don't know where to begin, so this may be a structured way with which variety can be introduced. With that said, I think tiering can be really effective, but it is also something that teachers should implement cautiously. I have had teachers tier work before in a not-so-subtle manner and it led to the higher level kids feeling frustrated, and the lower level kids feeling belittled.