This is Jennifer Gonzalez welcoming you to episode 192 of the Cult of Pedagogy

Podcast. In this episode we will be talking about a differentiation strategy

called backward chaining.

If we want our students to learn as much as they can, ideally they should be

presented with learning tasks that are right at their level or slightly above

so they have to reach a little bit but they can get there. Making this happen as

a teacher, what we refer to as differentiating instruction, is really

challenging because within any group of students you'll find a huge range of

abilities, background knowledge and interests. To do differentiation well you need

lots and lots of tools. A few that we've offered on this podcast are playlists

in episode 50, self-paced learning in episode 158 and universal design for

learning in episode 166. Today I have one more and it's one I never heard of

until very recently called backward chaining. It's an approach that allows a

student who struggles with a task to skip some of the early steps in order to

experience the later ones. My guest today is Melanie Mean, a Connecticut-based

elementary writing and social studies coordinator who has written three books

about teaching writing and contributes to the phenomenal collaborative

blog to writing teachers. Although Mean uses backward chaining to help students

with writing, it's a strategy that can be used in many many subject areas so if

you are not someone who teaches writing keep listening because you will likely

finish this episode with some ideas for how you can use it in your own classroom.

Before we get started I would like to thank Spindle for sponsoring this

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