What is differentiated instruction?

Differentiated instruction is a teaching approach that aims to personalize instruction, by tailoring instruction (both teaching content and approach) to students’ needs and interests.

When you differentiate instruction, you’re not just being flexible and open to change, but your flexibility is more structured and aligned with your teaching objectives.

For instance, if you’re providing choices, you know why these choices matter to your students and how each will contribute to their learning.

Besides, differentiation is not just about varying the content and mode of instruction, but also varying the pace, time, and performance and offering students a considerable amount of choice about their learning experience.

But, how should teachers differentiate their instruction?

I’m suggesting here two main ways to differentiate your instruction along with some tips.

I. Create flexible content and tools

To differentiate instruction, teachers need to be more flexible to meet their students’ needs and concerns.

But, how can teachers create content that aligns those needs with the course objectives?

This is the most commonly addressed question among teachers.

We have to meet the requirements of the curriculum, but meanwhile, we should not ignore how our students are learning and what they need to progress further.

So, to bring such alignment, it’s important to develop an approach to content that is informed by students’ needs and interests and guided by the overall goals and objectives of the course.

How?

1. Know about your students

Knowing about your students is an ongoing target, a continual engagement with students to understand how they’re learning and adjust the learning environment accordingly.

Besides learning about our students’ interests (what they like to learn and how), we should learn about:

Students’ strengths: What they know and can do about a given subject area/concept/skill.
Students’ needs: The existing learning gaps. These include:

1) needs at the prior-knowledge level or what the student is supposed to know and do before learning new content.

2) current learning needs that concern the actual lessons or what you’re teaching. These can be basic needs related directly to the knowledge and skills related to your instructional materials or indirectly to those transferable skills (communication, teamwork, creativity, etc.) required to achieve certain learning tasks.

2. Critically examine your materials

Whatever materials you’ve been provided with and you’re using for instructional practice (textbooks, digital/printable tasks, and resources, etc.),” get inside them”. Study their contents, and speculate the topics/concepts and structures to understand how these are structured and why.

This will help you distinguish between those materials you need to keep unchanged because they seem relevant and interesting to your students and those you need to adapt to maximize their appropriacy.

3. Adapt your materials

Having in mind clear objectives of your lesson along with knowing your students’ needs and interests, you can bring the necessary changes to those materials you find boring, and irrelevant to them.

So, when adapting your material, you’re going either to modify or replace it with another ready-made or devised one.

You can use the principle of adaptation provided by McGrath (2002):
Localization: adapting the material to confine within your country.
Personalization: changing the material to satisfy your students’ needs and interests.
Individualization: adapting the material in a way that addresses your students’ learning styles.
Modernization: bringing the material up to date.
Simplification: making the material/task easier or less challenging to do or understand.

Such a process of adaptation will help you match your students’ needs and interests and, at the same time, achieve your intended learning outcomes as indicated in the curriculum.

II. Plan for a differentiated lesson

Once you design your flexible content, try to differentiate it. That is making it highly customizable, matching your students’ needs and interests.

Here are some tips to achieve this.

1. Vary your delivery of instruction

You can vary the way you deliver your content and help students interact with materials in different ways. This is through using a variety of delivery mechanisms, such as teacher presentation, textbooks, online, media such as films and recordings, computer-assisted instruction, and so forth.

This can help vary the learning process, offering activities in a range of modes (writing, discussing, creating, collaborating), at a varied degree of complexity, in varying time spans, and with varied teacher and peer support.

Differentiating the way you go about your teaching is not only a motivating source for students, but also a stimulus that triggers their thinking and productivity in multiple ways.

2. Offer a variety of tasks and variety within the same task

Based on what you know about your students offer a variety of tasks or variety within the same task.

What does this mean?

A variety of tasks: You can arrange a variety of tasks for students to work on or ask them to choose the tasks they want to do.

So, students work at the same time on different tasks that relate to the same input/content you taught and so target the same outcome.

For instance, an English language teacher can help all her students learn the past simple tense, offering them a variety of tasks to practise. These range from putting the verbs into the correct forms, spotting the mistakes to completing story extracts and describing muted video scenes using this tense.

Variety within the same task: You can have one task and assign roles based on students’ interests and needs.

For instance, in a reading lesson, students are expected to read and demonstrate their understanding of a text about the impact of the Covid-19 lockdown on teens’ mental health.

Students who performed well on a previous drama activity can turn this text into a role-play between two teenagers talking about their lives and issues during the COVID-19 lockdown. Students who require more thinking time and prefer to work individually could prepare their answers to comprehension questions.

Those who like searching on the net can browse further information about this topic and explain it in light of the ideas presented in the text.

Offering a variety of tasks and variety within the task not only help meet students’ interests but also their different learning needs and abilities. Yet, don’t overwhelm yourself and your students by integrating a lot of tasks. Focus on what is more relevant to their learning.

3. Provide choice

To differentiate instruction, there is a need to enable students’ voice and choice in what, how, when and where they learn.

How?

Students may set their own learning goals or work on those selected by their teacher and decide on their preferred method to reach them. They can work at their own pace, at home or at school to meet them.

You can also provide activities where they’re given a choice to make. Yet, their choice should meet their needs, besides your teaching objectives.

Therefore, such activities should be carefully planned and should systematically build on their knowledge and skills.

It’s also necessary to help students understand the knowledge and skills they need to work on.

For this purpose, it would be helpful to provide your students with an instructional model that describes clearly the learning goals, how these relate to the standards, the targeted skills and knowledge and the necessary strategies students need to achieve them.

Coach your students while they’re making those choices and encourage them to reflect on them to improve further.

Further, you can provide choices in terms of how students want to exhibit their learning or perform. They can use presentations, videos, audio recordings, web pages, portfolios (hard copy and electronic), wikis, web blogs, analysis and reflection, etc.

4. Use mixed ability pairings

We have advanced students at one end of the spectrum, struggling students at the other, and some students spanning in the middle. Mixed ability pairing is a good idea, but advanced students may not learn from such experience.

Therefore, we need to differentiate the tasks while focusing on the same objective. This is through assigning different roles to students and providing different support based on their needs.

So, here is an example:

In a lesson whose communicative aim is to interview a partner on their shopping habits, a struggling student might be given complete questions to ask their partner, while the advanced student gets partial question prompts.

The struggling student benefits from listening to the advanced student’s responses while the advanced one can get the complete version of the question that he has constructed from those prompts.

5. Encourage cooperation

Working together, students can have multiple learning opportunities from the task itself and from cooperating with their peers.

Yet, cooperative tasks can also help teachers differentiate instruction and so maximize those learning gains. This is so since students can work on different tasks at the same time, have choices and hold themselves accountable for their roles.

So, encourage students’ cooperation, involving them in a whole range of activities: discussion, decision-making, research writing, shooting a video, enrichment projects, etc.

6. Use extension activities

Extension activities are not just a way to extend the learning of the lesson or deal with early finishers in the classroom, but they can also provide students with opportunities to personalize their learning.

If students have been learning a particular topic, an extension activity would be to ask them about their opinions: what do you think about……?/Do you agree with……..?/What would you do if…… ? etc.

In addition, extension activities are levelled to fit the students. For, gifted students those activities can be challenging while for struggling ones, these can be reinforcing skill activities.

7. Differentiate classroom space

You can also differentiate space by organising a physical classroom in ways that help students to work on various tasks (individual, pair-work, group work, whole class work). So, your differentiation of the classroom space depends on the task’s objective.

Also, offer online delivery systems to extend students’ learning beyond the classroom and help them work in a variety of contexts (home, library, etc.).

8. Differentiate support

When interacting with our students, we need to bear in mind that some require more attention than others.

So, it’s necessary to differentiate the way you’re clarifying your instruction and supporting others to learn. Use more visual aids, call upon students to explain and assess each other, address thought-provoking questions to help them think about that content, etc. Using multiple instructional modes can help you reach out to most, if not all students.

Similarly, when monitoring students’ progress, devote more time and attention to struggling students, and those who need your support to overcome their setbacks.

Still, support does not only include your constructive feedback on how they need to improve, but also assigning further tasks for practice and scaffolding their learning.

This is how to differentiate your instruction. The process may seem overwhelming because it requires much time and effort.

Yet, you’re not supposed to use all those suggested tips above. Once you create your flexible content you can opt for just one way to differentiate it and then switch alternatively to others in other lessons.

Planning regularly for differentiated lessons can also help you get more familiar with the process and refine it further. So, differentiate your instruction, it’s worthy!