3.5.12 Providing Multiple Pathways to Creating a Poetry Portfolio through Process Differentiation

Providing Multiple Pathways to Creating a Poetry Portfolio through Process Differentiation

The creative writing process is highly individualised and much learner variance exists in a creative writing class. This study, which was conducted in a Singapore school for high-ability learners, examined how two classes of Grade Eight students responded to the use of a differentiated instruction (DI) approach in a Poetry Writing Portfolio Task, where a “menu” of writing prompts that presented multiple pathways to poetry writing was provided. It sought to answer the question: What pedagogical role did the use of a DI approach play in facilitating students’ creative writing process?

Pre-assessment results indicated learner variance in terms of readiness, interest and confidence levels within each class and between the two classes. Given such variance at the start of the task, it was crucial for the teacher to play the role of “a mediator of activities and substantial experiences” (Blanton, 1998; Rueda et al., 1992), and a purposeful designer of multiple pathways for learners to attain their zone of proximal development, defined by Vygotsky as “the distance between actual development level and the level of potential development” (Vygotsky, 1978).

Tomlinson’s DI Model (Tomlinson, 2001) was adopted in the design of these multiple pathways to creative poetry writing. The Portfolio Task required students to write three original poems by responding to 3 out of 27 writing prompts provided. These 27 poetry writing prompts were varied in their subject matter to cater to student interest and were categorised according to learning modes: Group A (9 visual prompts), Group B (9 auditory prompts) and Group C (9 kinesthetic/tactile prompts). Within each group, the 9 prompts were further banded according to levels of task open-endedness to cater to varying levels of readiness.

The prompts that the subjects chose were coded and counted to determine their distribution by interest, learning mode and readiness. The distribution patterns were further compared between the two classes to assess if their differences in profile resulted in corresponding differences in their selection of prompts. Qualitative data were collected from the Reflection Task students submitted together with their portfolio and focus group discussions with randomly sampled subjects to understand their creative writing process and whether the DI approach catered to their learning needs. The data collected were organised and classified into categories, which were then labelled according to common themes for interpretation.

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