.3 HORIZONTAL DIFFERENTIATION SKILLS:

PRESENTATION, COUNSELING, CONTENT AND INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN

In addition to the vertical differentiation, we have horizontal differentiation. Horizontal differentiations are different tasks that teachers do that aren't necessarily hierarchical. In other words, one of the skills of a teacher is presenter. I happen to be a pretty good presenter; that's not an ego statement, I've just had a lot of success as a presenter. Put me in a class as a facilitator, and I'm really not very good at that. Why? Because I talk too much. If I'm put in a group of ten or twelve people, I can't resist talking. The facilitator has great listening abilities. In one-on-one situations I like to listen. I would argue that the presenters' skill is no more important than the facilitator. These are parallel professional skills which different people have in different combinations. The skill of a counselor, the one-on-one skill, the person who's able to help others, is another set of skills. Typically in the schools today, the counselors are above teachers. I don't agree. I think counseling is another skill, a parallel skill.

Then you have the content specialist. It's really neat to have someone in the school who knows "all there is to know" about US history so they're at your disposal. This is the person who can develop new curriculum units or the interdisciplinary units, figuring out how things fit together. This person always has a store of really neat anecdotes to kind of liven things up. Like, for example, do any of you know who used daylight savings time first? Adolph Hitler used it was during WWII. So anytime you have nice things to think about daylight savings time, you've now found something you can be grateful to Hitler for. It's that kind of anecdote that kind of livens up the situation. These are all content skills.

The other side of the content skill is the instructional design skill. These are people who know how to put courses together. Unfortunately, the way the world works is that teachers tend not to be very good at instructional design. Every teacher has his/her own particular instructional design. Each teacher designs their class a different way. Rarely do you get someone who mixes it up. Because it is hard to always be doing something different and new, try new things because it's easy to get into a routine and it feels comfortable. To always try new things is hard, so have a specialist at instructional design around to say: "Hey, did you ever think about doing it this way? Or perhaps you want to try this?" For example, a tele-technet class has a lot of elements of instructional design to it. Everything from "do you have a course pack or not?" to "what is the balance between quizzes and papers, the balance between group work and individual work, and how much emphasis should there be on deadlines?" All of these things are issues of instructional design, and they're all very important things. Some we do okay in and on some of them we don't do as well. But instructional design really makes a difference in terms of the class. Like, for example, I have an embarrassing example of that from the day before yesterday. We have really been trying to encourage people to take their quizzes early. We have been practically standing on our heads to get people to take their quizzes early. I have news for you. There were nineteen people who took their quizzes on Tuesday. And I was delighted, but they weren't rewarded very well because we forgot to put up group quiz four on the web. So after you happily take your individual quiz on Tuesday and you click "send me the group quiz", you get group quiz three. It took us a day to find that out and fix it. So anyone who took the quiz before noon on Wednesday was rewarded by not being able to get the group if you were ready for it. That's not a very good reward. We've been working really hard to get people to do the group quizzes early and what's your reward? You get hassled. You do it late, and you get hassled, you do it early, and you get hassled. After a while you think "anything I do I'm going to get hassled". That's a bad example of instructional design. Don't think instructional design is simple or that I've just learned how to do it and I can do it well. Wrong! The instructional design is something that is an issue that will be with you for your entire career as a teacher. And the more you are aware of this as an element, the more you're going to have to work on it to become the teacher who doesn't do everything from a set pattern. And I know some teachers in the classroom who never change their ways.

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Why is it important to recognize the existence of different skills while valuing them all equally?

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