I'm Larry Ferlazzo. Differentiating instruction. To some educators it conjures visions of having to create a different lesson for every student in the room and long nights of planning and grading.
That insanity is not what differentiation is. is all about. Differentiating instruction is really a way of thinking, not a pre-planned list of strategies. Oftentimes, it is making decisions in the moment based on this mindset.
It's recognizing that, to paraphrase Rick Wormley, fair doesn't always mean treating everyone equally. It's recognizing that all of our students bring different gifts and challenges, and that as educators, we need to recognize those differences and use our professional judgment to flexibly respond to them in our teaching. Carol Tomlinson talks about the ability to differentiate in three areas, content, process, and product. For content, student choice is one way we might differentiate, like allowing students to choose their research topics or essay prompts.
As teachers, we need to keep our eyes on the prize. In other words, we have to keep asking ourselves, what are the main learning objectives? One day, my students were writing an argument essay about what would be the worst natural disaster to experience.
John's head was down on the desk. He was not doing anything. I knew that he was interested in football, so I told him that he could write an essay on why his favorite team was the best.
He would still have to make an argument just about football instead of hurricanes or earthquakes. His eyes lit up. He got to work and wrote what his mother later told me was the first essay he had ever written in school. He had followed all the guidelines of a good argument essay. The prize in this case was learning to write an argument essay, not learning to write about natural disasters.
To differentiate by process, teachers can change up how they group students. Sometimes a mixed ability group might work best, while sometimes it might be appropriate to have same ability groups. We might have an English proficient buddy work with an English language learner to help them out.
During independent reading time in my early morning class several years ago, one student tended to fall asleep. I told him that if he wanted, he'd go to the back and sit on a desk and read. Soon, several others joined him. A few days later, I saw another student dozing off. Before I could say anything, one of his classmates whispered to him, just go sit on a desk.
Again, it's a matter of keeping our eyes on the prize. What are the learning objectives and what are the best roads to get there for different students? Teachers can also differentiate by the type of product students create.
The major demonstration of learning doesn't always have to be an essay or a multiple choice test. One year I had a student who liked to doodle when other students or I were talking. I told her it was okay as long as she was doodling about the information we were discussing.
She built on those doodles to create a final project that brilliantly and visually represented all the key points we had covered. When I give tests, I often give students an extra blank page where they can write anything else they remember by the topic being tested that they think is important. I often find the quality of thinking and writing better there than in response to my test questions.
None of the differentiating strategies I've mentioned have created any extra work for me. They did require that I had relationships with my students to know their strengths, challenges, and interests, and I needed to demonstrate flexibility in my thinking. Making these strategies successful also required building a strong class culture so that some of the students were being treated differently and they understood why and they understood that that was the only way to be truly fair. The ideas mentioned here are just a drop in the bucket.
There are a zillion other ways we can support our students' gifts and challenges. We just need to keep our minds and ears open.