At the end of each week students should be able to account for their use of time. This may be a list of activities that a student can do to at any time when they have completed present assignments or it can be assigned for a short period at the beginning of each class as students organize themselves and prepare for work. These activities may relate to specific needs or enrichment opportunities, including problems to solve or journals to write. They could also be part of a long-term project that a student is working on. These activities may provide the teacher with time to provide specific help and small group instruction to students requiring additional help to get started.
Students can work at different paces but always have productive work they can do.
These activities must be worthy of a student s time and appropriate to their learning needs. Tomlinson also recommends tiered activities, adjusting questions , learning centres, flexible grouping, independent study and curriculum compacting as defined above. The teacher becomes a facilitator, assessor of students and planner of activities rather than an instructor. This is what Roger Taylor called the Guide on the Side rather than the Sage on the Stage approach in the early 80s. It is less structured, more busy and often less quiet than older teaching methods.