Differentiation strategies: a teacher's guide
What does differentiation in the classroom look like and how can we use this concept to make learning accessible and challenging for everyone?
What is Differentiation in the classroom?
Differentiation is a way to modify instruction to meet students' individual needs. Teachers may differentiate process, content, resources, or the learning environment. A flexible grouping and ongoing assessment can make differentiation one of the most successful instructional strategies.
Differentiation is a teaching approach that modifies instruction to meet the individual needs of students. Teachers can differentiate in various ways, such as through the process of instruction, the content being taught, the resources used, or the learning environment.
By providing flexible grouping and ongoing assessment, teachers can make differentiation one of the most successful instructional strategies.
The goal of differentiation is to ensure that all students are challenged and engaged in their learning, regardless of their skill level or learning style*. With differentiation, teachers can tailor their instruction to meet the diverse needs of their students and help them achieve academic success.
Differentiation is all about creating a personalized learning experience for each student. By adapting instruction to meet individual needs, teachers can create a more engaging and effective learning experience for their students.
This can include activities that cater to different learning styles (*this theory has been heavily criticised as it has been taken out of context in many classrooms), such as visual aids for visual learners or hands-on activities for kinesthetic learners. Differentiation can also involve adjusting the level of difficulty of assignments or providing extra support for struggling students. Ultimately, the goal of differentiation is to create a positive and inclusive learning experience that helps each student reach their full potential.
One may consider differentiation, as a way to teach or even a philosophy that's designed to meet the needs of the whole class. It is not a package or collection of worksheets. It motivates teachers to understand their pupils so they can help each student to enhance learning.
As Carol Ann Tomlinson (1999) explains, differentiation means providing students with many options for gaining knowledge. Carol Ann Tomlinson believes that Differentiation is an instructional strategy to help educators teach while keeping students as well as content in mind. Differentiation ensures that learning and teaching work for every student, which really should be a teacher's main purpose of teaching. Differentiating teaching means that the teacher would observe and identify the similarities and differences among students and use this knowledge to teach students.
How can we differentiate instruction?
According to Carol Ann Tomlinson, there are four ways in which teachers may differentiate their instruction.
1. Content: There are six levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy (a classification of degrees of intellectual behaviour ranging from lower-order thinking skills to higher-order thinking skills of advanced learners) i.e. remembering, conceptual understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating. Therefore, according to Carol Ann Tomlinson, the teachers must differentiate the content by creating activities for each group of students covering different levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy.
2. Process: Every student has a preferred style of learning, and successful differentiation allows the delivery of instruction to different mediums of learning (we are not advocating for learning styles!): auditory learners, visual, verbal and kinesthetic learners. This process-related strategy also considers the fact that each student demands a different amount of support from the instructor, and they may choose to work individually, in groups or pairs. Carol Ann Tomlinson believes that teachers may improve learning by providing support based on the individual needs of each student. The universal thinking framework enables teachers to design different learning journeys that achieve the same goal. Instead of using generic strategies for everyone, teachers can move pupils from an introductory level to a more advanced understanding of the content using the learning actions. Advanced learners can be stretched and challenged using the red icons that indicate higher-order thinking.
3. Product: After completing a lesson, the students create a product to show content mastery. It may be in the form of reports, projects, tests or any other activity. For example, according to Carol Ann Tomlinson, the teachers may ask students to complete activities to show mastery of maths lessons as preferred by the students, depending upon their preferred learning style.
4. learning environment: The optimal learning conditions include both psychological and physical elements. A differentiated classroom layout is crucial, including a wide range of arrangements and classroom furniture to support both personal and group work. Carol Ann Tomlinson states that to support students' psychological wellbeing, teachers must use that classroom management and teaching strategies that promote a supportive and safe learning environment.
What are the most popular Differentiation Strategies used in a classroom?
There are several broad differentiation strategies that can be used across different subject areas. Differentiation begins from the students' essential understandings, prior knowledge assessment and skills and through individual learning objectives.
It is suggested that the success criteria and the respective learning objectives must be shared with the students. This fosters self-regulation, metacognition and empowers learners to control their learning progress. Following are some of the most effective differentiation strategies used in a differentiated classroom:
- Ongoing, formative assessment: Teachers need to continually assess and identify students’ areas of need and strengths so they can modify their teaching style and help students to move forward.
- Response to Intervention: This is a very effective focused differentiation strategy, which is normally implemented as a whole school implementation technique. This multi-layered approach to classroom learning allows teachers to identify individual learner abilities and help to provide additional instruction to the students who may take advantage of teaching in more targeted settings.
- Recognition of diverse students: Each student has a diverse level of expertise and experience with reading, writing, speaking, thinking and problem-solving. Ongoing assessments are the most common strategies that allow teachers to adjusting content and plan differentiated instruction strategies to fulfil every students’ needs.
- Explicit Teaching: In explicit teaching, the differentiation focus remains on offering students a strong conceptual understanding of new ideas and knowledge and opportunities for individual and group practice. The phases of this strategy, frequently simplified to "I do, we do, you do", offer numerous opportunities to differentiation. In the phase of "we do," teachers model the new knowledge application, they can evaluate the conceptual understanding level, give feedback to the students, design targeted interventions and offer further support to the entire class. In the phase of "you do," teachers may walk in the classroom and offer individual feedback, invite individual auditory learners for conferencing, and create small groups for differentiated instruction.
- Group Work: This is a student focused differentiation strategy in which learners collaborate in small groups and pairs and the members of the group may change as needed. Learning in groups is a focused strategy that allows learners to learn and observe from each other and to engage in meaningful conversations.
- Feedback: Feedback has a major role in differentiation. Actionable and timely feedback allows learners to identify the next stages needed to enhance their basic learning. Individualised feedback, alongside the clear success criteria and learning intentions may promote self-regulation. Here the differentiation focus remains on the advanced learners' feedback, which may also help regular students to show a deep understanding of the success criteria and what advanced learners may do to improve their essential understandings, level of competency and learning process.
- Problem Solving: The main focus of the lesson plan with differentiated instruction remains on the concepts and issues, rather than the chapter or “the book.” This motivates learners to explore big ideas and improve their knowledge of key concepts.
- Flipped Classroom: Within the flipped classroom, the learning phase of direct instruction occurs online or at students' homes. For example, students may access their content (mostly in the form of videos composed by their maths teachers) anywhere and at any time. A flipped classroom experience offers great opportunities for differentiation as it allows teachers to spend more of their free time in the classroom with their students. Teachers may spend their free classroom time addressing a group or individual needs or providing feedback to the students. Students may also forge ahead, learn to self-regulate or spend time to improve their level of competency and revise the level of complexity of content that needs revision.
- Choice: Teachers may use 'Choice' as a focus strategy and leave it to students to decide what do they wish to read or write in the projects and tasks they complete. While engaging students in this student focused differentiation strategy, teachers may change different aspects of content leading to continuous improvement in students and create motivating assignments according to students' varied interests, level of competency and diverse needs.
Tips on Differentiating in the Classroom
Teachers spend hours every week preparing lessons and teaching students. This means they often don't have much time left for themselves.
So, here are our top tips for teachers to differentiate class instruction.
1. Use Technology to Help Students Learn
Technology has changed education forever. Teachers no longer have to rely solely on textbooks and lectures to teach students. Instead, technology allows teachers to deliver content in an engaging manner. For example, instead of using a textbook to teach reading comprehension, teachers can use interactive books such as iBooks 2. They can also use apps such as Duolingo to provide language learning opportunities. This helps students learn faster and retain information better. And these tools allow teachers to focus on delivering quality content rather than spending time on lesson preparation.
2. Create Lesson Plans That Work For Everyone
It's common for teachers to prepare one set of lesson plans for each subject. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that everyone learns the same way. Some students may benefit from visual aids, whereas others may learn better from listening to a lecture. Therefore, it makes sense to tailor lesson plans to individual student needs. To do this, teachers can ask students questions about their interests and preferences. Then, they can plan lessons accordingly. For example, if a student enjoys playing sports, he or she may learn better from watching videos of sporting events. If a student prefers to read, teachers can assign articles from online news sources.
By tailoring lesson plans to individual students' needs, teachers can ensure that all students receive the most effective form of learning.
3. Provide Feedback Throughout Class
Feedback is essential for improving performance. Therefore, providing feedback to students should be part of any teacher's daily routine. However, it takes time to give feedback. Therefore, teachers should schedule regular meetings with students to discuss progress and answer questions. These meetings can be scheduled once per week, once per month, or whenever needed. By scheduling regular meetings, teachers can address issues quickly and efficiently.
4. Encourage Student Collaboration
Collaborative learning is becoming increasingly popular among educators. Students working together to solve problems can improve their understanding of concepts. In addition, collaborative learning encourages students to share knowledge and resources. As a result, students become more confident in their abilities and develop stronger relationships with peers.
To encourage collaboration, teachers can hold group discussions, host guest speakers, and organize field trips. These activities can help students understand complex topics and foster friendships between classmates.
5. Make Learning Fun
Learning isn't supposed to be boring. Therefore, teachers should strive to make learning fun. They can do this by incorporating games into lessons, encouraging students to participate in debates, and offering rewards for academic achievement. Students enjoy learning when they feel engaged and excited about what they're doing. By creating a positive environment, teachers can motivate students to achieve higher grades.
As you can see, there are plenty of ways to differentiate classroom instruction. With these five tips, you can help students learn effectively and enjoy school.
Differentiation in your classroom
The most effective teachers may use evidence of differentiation focus, knowledge about individual student learning profiles, students' ability levels, basic learning progress and their learning readiness, to make changes in different aspects of content such as level of complexity and lesson planning to ensure that each student must experience success, challenge and improved learning.
A student focused differentiation strategy allows teachers to tailor instruction to fulfil individual needs. In conjunction with focus strategies of process, content, learning environment or product, the teachers may use other approaches such as flexible grouping and ongoing assessment to make differentiation a successful instructional strategy.
If you are using an inquiry-based learning or project-based learning pedagogy, you might want to look at the block building methodology. This learning strategy helps students develop deep conceptual understanding within a playful environment. This innovative method is also a good example of a differentiated instruction strategy.
Advanced learners can take their knowledge in different directions whilst pupils working at introductory levels can move through the task at their own pace. This strategy is not just for kinaesthetic learners (we now understand so much more about learning styles), the colour-coded nature of the strategy helps children to organise their thinking which produces rich dialogue.
Teachers need to be able to differentiate effectively because students learn differently. Differentiating instruction means tailoring lessons to each student's needs. This requires knowing your students' strengths and weaknesses, understanding their learning styles, and being aware of their interests and passions.
To help teachers differentiate effectively, I recommend creating lesson plans based on the following three principles:
1) Focus on skills rather than content. Students should master specific skills instead of memorizing facts and figures.
2) Use multiple strategies to teach the same skill. One strategy may work better for some students, while another works better for others.
3) Create a variety of activities to engage different types of learners.
These principles apply equally well to online courses. To create effective online courses, instructors must understand their students' learning preferences and design course materials accordingly.
When designing online courses, instructors should use these three principles to ensure that students receive the most efficient form of instruction possible.
Further Reading on Differentiation
These studies collectively highlight the importance of differentiated instruction in addressing the diverse needs of students, the challenges of implementing DI effectively, and the need for further research and development in DI strategies to enhance learning outcomes:
- Teachers and their implementation of differentiated instruction in the classroom by M. Suprayogi, M. Valcke, and Raymond Godwin (2017): This study explores the actual implementation of differentiated instruction (DI) by teachers and how it's linked to variables like DI self-efficacy, teaching beliefs, and classroom size. It finds that while DI implementation seems high, it still falls below a critical benchmark, with implementation significantly linked to DI self-efficacy beliefs, higher constructivist beliefs, and larger classroom sizes.
- Myth 7: Differentiation in the Regular Classroom Is Equivalent to Gifted Programs and Is Sufficient by Holly L. Hertberg-Davis (2009): This paper challenges the assumption that differentiated instruction within regular classrooms can substitute for specialized gifted programs. It highlights the need for differentiation to address the unique talents and needs of gifted students, beyond a one-size-fits-all curriculum, and discusses the limitations of relying solely on differentiation to meet the needs of gifted students.
- Differentiated instruction in small schools by Robbert Smit and Winfried Humpert (2012): The study investigates the practices of differentiated instruction in rural small schools and examines the school conditions that support the implementation of DI. It shows that team collaboration including pedagogical topics enhances teachers' use of DI, highlighting the difference in practices between teachers with more- and less-developed DI cultures.
- This Issue: Differentiated Instruction by C. Tomlinson (2005): This editorial introduces the topic of differentiated instruction, emphasizing the need to modify teaching in response to learner needs. It discusses the importance of differentiation in meeting the diverse needs of students and calls for more research and guidance on making classrooms more effective and efficient for all learners.
- Meeting the Needs of All Students through Differentiated Instruction: Helping Every Child Reach and Exceed Standards by Holli M. Levy (2008): This article discusses the practical examples of how to differentiate content, process, and product for students. It addresses grouping techniques, assessment strategies, and tiered lessons as means to meet the needs of all students and help them to meet and exceed established standards.