Give them what they need: Differentiation in the classroom

This month at Edtech Deep we are talking about Differentiation! If you've been following along then you know differentiation is one of my personal passions. My perspective as an educator was forever shifted my first year of teaching when I stumbled upon this recording of a lecture by Carol Ann Tomlinson.

In talking about differentiation she broke it down into: knowing your students, meeting them where they’re at and purposely planning to give them what they need.

When you say it like that, it seems like the most common of common sense, but it blew my mind as a baby teacher.

That year I also discovered Donalyn Miller and Nancie Atwell who put this concept into action in the Language Arts classroom. I had no idea what I was doing, there was only about a quarter left in the school year, and I knew I wouldn’t do it particularly well, but I looked at my students and decided I had to try.

I started slowly by giving my students more choices. We did reading workshop where students chose whatever books they wanted and we talked and wrote about them. We did literature circles with our required texts where students could choose from the books I still felt obligated to teach.

I started giving more open-ended project options. My students could do a poster or a video or an interview. I was taking small steps to bring in a little more student choice and voice.

For me, this was the easiest way to start differentiating. I basically let students self-select into differentiation. I put the choice in their hands to at least offer the possibility that they could find the right fit for them. And that has its own power.

But the real power in differentiation, in my opinion, is what Tomlinson calls differentiating by readiness. It's about more than letting students choose how to work or what type of project to do. It's about really knowing what students need to learn, understanding how to know if they've learned it, and then being able to assess where each student is on that continuum.

When we have that information we can plan our units and lessons to make sure everyone gets what they need, whether that is a challenge or scaffolding. We can make informed decisions based on the reality in the classroom and get each student to the finish line.

That’s what we are going to talk about this month on Edtech Deep. This post kicks off our series on Differentiating by Readiness. We'll look at how technology tools like Google Forms can help you gather data about your student’s readiness. But more importantly, we'll talk about what to do with it!

I'm so excited to dig into this with you!

If this sounds like the classroom transformation you've been looking for and you want to learn more, I offer a self-paced online course all about it!