At the end of last school year, I had a heated exchange with a colleague about the concept of “differentiation.” I have evolved the mindset that it is my responsibility as teacher to attempt different strategies to enable students to access and demonstrate learning. My colleague’s perspective was that this was setting students up for failure. Her claim was that the world doesn’t do for people, so in her classroom, it was the student’s responsibility to do what was asked, how it was asked. In the real world, when an employee is given a task, that employee must execute the task. That’s the way it is.
Besides, she concluded, she didn’t have time to make 25 different lesson plans for each of her learners.
The problem with her argument, though, stems in part from the fact that I have known this educator for a very long time. I have observed in her classroom. She differentiates without even realizing it. With ease, she re-phrases a prompt so a student better understands. By reading a student’s quizzical look, she knows to draw a picture on the board to re-state the concept she just lectured about. When a kid struggles to complete that 1500-word essay, she is more than willing to narrow the scope to a solid intro, body and conclusion, regardless of the word count.
I attempted to point these out to her, but I think it might have been the end-of-the-year exhaustion and fatigue at a revolving door of district initiatives that set her on edge as we discussed “differentiation.”
This talk of differentiation was part of a broader conversation we were having about TPEP and our instructional framework (Marzano). To enter into that “Distinguished” realm in our framework, a teacher has to draw upon a deep repertoire of strategies to serve all learners…particularly by “adapt[ing] or creat[ing] new strategies to meet the specific needs of students for whom the typical application of strategies does not produce the desired effect.” (That’s a fancy way of saying “differentiating for the needs of all students.”)
Contrary to her concluding statement that she “didn’t have time to create 25 different lessons each day” to differentiate, this isn’t what good differentiation needs to look like in practice.
When I am mentoring early career teachers, I frame differentiation like navigating city traffic.
Let’s say you want to get from your house in Vancouver to the south side of Portland to see a friend. You plug that address into your phone and thanks-be-to-Google you get a color coded map to show traffic speeds, where cars are crawling along and where the coast is clear. If the conditions happen to be just right (it is early Saturday morning in summer) the route with the shortest mileage might just be all green. Try again on Friday afternoon at about 3:30pm, and that same route will have plenty of new obstacles. It may just happen that the clearest route to your friends house means looping all the way around the east side and back tracking a little. More miles, different route, same destination.
That’s how I try to get my new colleagues to think about differentiation: what might be some other ways to get to that same destination? Much depends on your priorities…does it matter more to get there quickly or is it okay if it takes a little longer? Is the shortest number of miles the priority, or are you like me who would be willing to drive 15 extra miles if it meant that I kept moving rather than sitting idle? What doesn’t change is that you want to get there, to that particular destination. There are countless variables that might be adjusted or considered.
Now, it is very easy to then take the leap to “25 different lesson plans for 25 different students.”
To me, differentiation isn’t about planning 25 different lessons; it is about planning learning with a clear goal. As I plan, I consider the tools I might have at my disposal to help kids get to that goal no matter what traffic they encounter. With the PDX traffic analogy, it isn’t about planning every possible route and contingency plan before I hit the road, it is about developing a mental toolkit of alternative routes I could try if I found obstacles along the way.
Earlier this year in my 4th period class, my students were tasked with writing an essay identifying key concepts of sociology and social institutions as they were evident in the first four chapters of the memoir Hillbilly Elegy. When I had one student in particular produce nothing for their first draft, I checked in with them. They stated that they struggled with writing…getting the ideas on the page never seemed to go well. They said, “If I could just sit down with you and talk out my ideas, I think you’d see I understand.” They were a bit shocked when I replied that was a fine idea, let’s schedule an appointment.
I explained that for this particular task, I was not actually assessing students’ ability to write. Rather, I was assessing comprehension of the core concepts and the ability to identify these concepts in the text. While an essay is a perfectly fine way for me to assess most students on this, perhaps it wasn’t the best way for me to assess this one student.
I did further explain, though, that this wouldn’t be an option for every writing assignment. While for this task I was assessing knowledge, there were going to be plenty of times when my learning goal specifically relates to the skill of writing. In those cases, students would have to write…but as this was something this student didn’t feel confident about, I’d be working with them on some strategies to accomplish even that goal. (And to be clear, just because a student “has to write” doesn’t mean that, too, cannot be differentiated…more on that in a future post.)
In terms of Portland traffic, we still ended up at our destination, but we took the light-rail instead of our car. The vehicle looked different, the destination was the same…and to be fair it did take a little longer, but we got there nonetheless. That is what matters to me, in the end.
It is true that differentiation is hard, as this EdWeek commentary titled “Differentiation Doesn’t Work” claims (though it’s central thesis seems to be that it isn’t so much that differentiation doesn’t work, but that it is hard to do well, so we shouldn’t do it). I guess that’s why it is key to the “Distinguished” level of the Marzano framework.
In the comments below, share some of your perspectives and go-to strategies for differentiation. In my next post, I look forward to sharing a “framework for differentiation” I stumbled across… one that has transformed the what that potentially intimidating “d-word” really means.
I really like the speech to text features of our Chromebooks and find them very helpful for my students struggling with dysgraphia. I have thought about if this mode of communication will ultimately result in students who can’t write at all and have realized this process results in at least some form work for students to edit and revise, whereas in the past my students may have struggled to get even a few sentences down to work with. It is kind of hard to assess “organizational skills” and “voice” with less than a paragraph. Overtime, I have seen the quality of writing improve. Who knows-maybe someday we will all simply dictate our writing…
Many phones now have pretty accurate voice-to-type features as well… I’ve had some students dictate into their phones, and the phone produces a passable dictation. It requires, follow-up editing, for sure. We also have one-to-one chrome books, and I have had some success with kids using the speech to text feature in google docs.
I often have students who have difficulty getting their ideas on the page for writing assignments. I suggest that they tell their story or essay (or whatever the assignment is) into a recording device–years ago it used to be a cassette tape but now kids can do it on their phone or on their parent’s phone.
Once they are finished, they can play back what they said a little bit at a time and take dictation. It means they don’t lose the thread of their ideas while they do the physical task of writing, which for some kids can be laborious.