Assessment and Instructional Design, or, Why Every Student Needs an IEP

This weeks readings and lecture discussed instructional design and assessment.  As much as many teachers dislike these topics, they are among my favorites.  I don't think that there is ever a 'best' way to provide or design instruction -- there are certainly ways that work better than others in many situations, but there is never only one way of doing things.  I believe that the 'best' way to design instruction is whatever way your students will truly learn and understand the material you are covering.

But that brings up an interesting conundrum -- how can you best instruct your class of diverse learners, with each student in their appropriate place on the learning spectrum? Maybe I'm being a bit naive, or maybe I'm showing my inexperience, but it's always seemed silly to me to expect a class of 20 or so younglings to move at the same pace and make the same progress on ANY subject, let alone something so uniquely experiential as music.  For instrumentalists and vocalists, the spread of ability and skill is even wider, plus you add in the added challenge for instrumentalists of every student needing to be taught their own part and instrument.  One of my biggest frustrations in my four years of teaching as well as my teacher training programs has been the nearly ubiquitous approach to lesson design of teaching to the 'middle' and differentiating for the extreme outliers.  College instructors, principals, and other teachers have come up with all kinds of justifications for this approach, but... I question why.  We know that students don't neatly sort into boxes but fall somewhere along a flexible continuum of understanding and ability.  We know that students all learn differently, uniquely, and on their own time frame. So why are we still planning and assessing and designing lessons as if it was drill for the continental army?

I know it takes extra time to plan and execute, but I really think that every student needs to have their own plan through the curriculum that will be covered.  It could be student-directed for those kids that have the maturity level and knowledge to understand how they learn best (for example, providing students a list of possible assessment tasks and allowing them to choose the assessment they will be measured with, same with instructional materials or experiences), or it can be teacher-directed (such as breaking students into groups of roughly the same ability level with roughly the same needs for mini-lesson time and group support).  With the number of demands that are placed on teachers, this isn't going to be de rigeur anytime soon (or possibly ever), but I really think that it's a discussion that needs to be had.  Especially for instrumental music teachers at the beginning and intermediate level, where we are teaching not just ensemble pieces to the whole class but also technique and musicianship to each individual, I don't see how we can't approach planning in this manner!