Equal vs. Fair
Several of you reflected on your P&P about our equal vs. fair discussion from class this week. Below I included a quote from what Richard Allington has to say on this matter...The quote below begins after Allington discussed studies in first-grade classrooms, where successful teachers provided more small group instruction to students who needed more literacy support, while the remaining students completed student-directed reading.
"Some teachers, the less effective ones, thought that fair meant distributing instruction equally to all students regardless of their needs. The exemplary teachers we studied, however, thought fair meant working in ways that evened out differences between students...providing struggling readers with greater amounts of teacher direction, at least early on, produces improved reading outcomes for these students..." (pp. 10-11)