| E2C2 Testimonials Thank you so much for the wonderful ideas you presented on differentiation! You provided such a great balance between the philosophy and the practical application. Thanks for showing us how easy it is to jump into differentiation. Before another school year starts I want you to know that your information helped me and I am positive my 80 students last year. I will be using your information again as I start the 2006-7 year. Thanks to our wonderful weekend conference in Stevens Point, I finally feel like I can get into this differentiated curriculum discussion with a degree of background knowledge and experience. I really enjoyed Nanci Smith and am so glad she enlightened me as to what differentiated curriculum can be and how it can progress from small steps into a classroom using many integrated activities. At Rice Lake we are starting a new term next week - and though I know I will be too busy to do as much as I would like, I am determined to design a few activities for each class based upon some of the differentiation models Nanci shared. I am still in the process of giving the [learning profile and interest] inventories, but I wanted to give you some feedback. I am surprised by the students’ interest! They think it’s neat to find out and compare with their friends….it also is a great way for the students to understand why they don’t get the lessons…it helps me to see the variety of the talents and try to address as many as I can in a lesson. Thanks for the great tips. The year’s getting off on a positive foot!! I am a fifth grade teacher in Franklin, Tennessee who attended your DI Training sessions. I am so excited to start the new school year off using the best tools I can find to understand my students and plan according to their strengths. Thank you for helping me serve my kids : ) Thanks so much for taking time to work with us. It was refreshing to be surrounded with positive, thinking, creative educators. You ladies all brought differentiation to life and were a welcoming breath of fresh air in a time of testing and some negative squawking. I attended the workshop on differentiation last week. I first wanted to say thank you so much. It was so refreshing to be at a conference and leave with the feeling of "Wow! I can do this!" Thanks for all of your hard work in making that feeling possible. I contracted Nanci Smith as a consultant in the United States, and have continued to contract her for work internationally. I have worked for low, medium, and high socio-economic schools (i.e., public, private, international), and Nanci has always been a perfect fit for my schools. She is an expert in the fields of mathematics and differentiated instruction, she customizes her programs to meet the needs of each school, she has practical experience as a classroom teacher and designs her programs to meet the practical needs of teachers, and she is fully committed to making a difference in the understanding and practices of each and every teacher. Nanci presented twice to our Educational Consortium as we are experiencing gaps in our data between regular and special education math scores on state testing. She is knowledgable on current math curriculum for K-12 teachers of math and special education. In a presenatation, Nanci can differentiate math examples that her audience gives her. Nanci collaborated with our consortium by doing an onsite class and following-up with the online postings. The participants loved the fact that Nanci looked at their postings. She is awesome!! Nanci’s work with differentiation is important for several reasons. She understands the concept deeply, but also brings to it long and strong classroom experience. That combination enables her to integrate key philosophical concepts with practical classroom applications—a necessity if we expect differentiation to result in achievement gains. In my book, Nanci is the go-to person with differentiation in math and at the high school level. |