Chapter nine of Fair Isn't Always Equal is a list of ten ways to avoid common mistakes teachers make in grading. These mistakes include incorporating nonacademic factors into the final grade, not allowing students to redo work for full credit, grading homework (Because homework is practice), withholding assistance, assessing students in ways that don't reflect mastery, allowing extra credit, using group grades, grading on a curve, recording zeros for incomplete work, and using norm-referenced terms to describe criterion-referenced attributes. As you can tell, these mistakes represent a wide range of different elements of teaching, but they all build toward a common theme that seems to go against the established expectations in the field of education, and they all represent an increased trust of students.
The most common aspect of grading connected with in this chapter seemed to be the part about not grading homework. Almost everybody, in their reflection paragraphs, talked about the part of the chapter. There was a lot of support for the idea that homework is practice, that it shouldn't be used to address new learning, and that it sometimes shouldn't be used at all. This Powerpoint presentation (Converted by Google to HTML for ease of viewing) addresses many of these concerns and questions, and gives additional perspective to the issue. It should be noted that the information at the link clashes sometimes with the information from Fair Isn't Always Equal; this suggests that the treatment of homework is something that teachers should decide for themselves, based on their subject and what they want their classroom culture to be like.
This is the first part of an article that provides more general tips on how to implement differentiation in the classroom. It should provide some illumination on the basic implementation of DI, and addresses some of the tips in FIAE. (Part 2, Part 3)
Finally, this brief article discusses differentiation of instruction as it relates to assessment.
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