Chapter 5: Teaching to the Individual, Working with the Group

In this chapter of Fires, it talks mostly about how to be fair to each student, and treat each student as an individual, while also teaching to the entire class and make sure the entire class is succeeding. This chapter also talks about small group work, and how small group work thrives on diversity, having kids who are at different levels of learning, can be some of the most successful groups. Also discussed in this chapter is how as a teacher, you work with having many different levels of students in a classroom, and teach to all of them, without dumbing down, or raising the difficulty of any of the content.

My personal favorite part of this chapter, was the first quote a the very beginning, "One job of a teacher is to be fair to all. Don't expect the work of one student from another." One of my biggest pet peeves is when teachers expect all students to be at the same level, just because they are all in the same class, some kids learn differently than others, and that's an important thing to foster in a classroom. Finding out how each student works individually and holding each kid to the standard that they have expressed, is something that I think will allow a classroom to really succeed.