Differentiating Instruction

I feel like I talk about math a lot, but I suppose that is because this is where we spend most of our planning time and where I seem to be getting the most experience teaching.  It also seems to be the subject that is easiest to plot the students' progress.  Either way, I feel like I am learning a lot about teaching math at my placement.

We assess the students just about every day in math.  Sometimes it takes the form of door passes, other times its really informal based on what we see the students do and questions we ask them.  Based on these formative assessments, we differentiate instruction for the students.  Since there are 4 teachers with this group of 50 students (2 cooperating teachers and 2 student teachers), we are easily able to break the students into 4 groups for small group instruction.  These groups are never the same and they are designed to give the students exactly what they need to help them understand the concepts of the unit.

One question that I had with this type of differentiation was whether the students who needed reteaching would get a chance to learn the more advanced skills (like solving word problems).  My cooperating teacher told me that they probably won't, but its ok because it is not what they need at this time.  Unfortunately, we only have so much time for each unit, so we have to focus on making sure that the students understand what they are doing, even if that means they don't all learn the same thing.