Reconcilable Differences: Standards-based Teaching and Differentiation.

Recent demands for more standards-based teaching can feel like a huge impediment to encouraging differentiated instruction, especially for teachers and principals who recognize student variance and want to address it appropriately. A relatively new phenomenon (at least in its current form), standards-based instruction dominates the educational terrain in a time of great academic diversity in contemporary classrooms. In fact, standardsbased instruction and the high-stakes testing that drives it can often feel like a locomotive rolling over everything in its path, including individualized learning.