Common Sense Differentiation, Part 2: Strategies (You're Already Using Some of These!)

Now that you have a definition you and your team can work from, let’s start with what you are already doing to differentiate in your classroom. Identifying strategies and naming them will increase your ability to build on your current successful practices. Let’s look at a few.

Student Interests

You know your students and what interests them most. You use this knowledge to hook them so they’re better able to make meaning from what they are learning. You might use this information to ask probing questions, assign students group work, or adapt homework assignments.

Sentence Stems and Starters

You provide sentence stems to help students frame their responses. Include the academic vocabulary you want them to use. This frees up their brain power to think about the content so they’re not stuck on how to put their ideas into words.
              The setting of the story is . . .
              I know I need to multiply because . . .
              There are different reasons for migration. One is . . . Another reason is . . .
You may use sentence stems and starters in whole group discussions, small group discussions, writing prompts, and exit tickets.

Resources for Sentence Stems and Starters:

• Starting Out With Sentence Stems
• Non Fiction Sentence Frames
• Math Journal Sentence Starters

Anchor Charts

Because you know that some students need visual cues, you create anchor charts to help students organize and remember their learning. You also use anchor charts to connect concepts across units or content areas.
Resources for Anchor Charts:

• Context Clues Anchor Chart
• Author’s Purpose Anchor Chart

Varying Levels of Questions

Knowing that your students are at different stages in their understanding of a concept, you regularly create and ask questions at different readiness levels. This helps you ensure student success while increasing their engagement and excitement because they’re being challenged at their level of readiness.

Question Resources:

• Question tool for getting kids to MATH TALK
• DOK Question Stems
• Levels of Thinking
• Ready to dive deep? Read Gerald Aungst’s article “Using Webb’s Depth of Knowledge to Increase Rigor” (originally published in edutopia.)

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Open-Ended Questions

In addition to varying the level of questions, you often ask students open-ended questions. This technique encourages students to express different ideas and thinking creatively. Why? Because there is no “right” answer. When students are responding, you avoid responses or praise that indicates a right or wrong answer. Now you have a wide variety of responses!  
Here are some examples of probing questions, and a video about thin versus thick questions.

Flexible Groups

You regularly regroup your students so they have opportunities to learn with and from a variety of other students. As you plan a lesson or activity, you use the learning objective to decide whether to group students who have similar ability levels, similar interests, or mixed ability levels or interests. You occasionally create these groups on the fly as you notice needs, but more often you pre-plan these groups. Click here for information about how to manage flexible groups.

Individual Feedback

Whether verbally or in writing, you give clear and explicit feedback. You know that students learn best when they reflect on their current work and are challenged to move to the next level of understanding. Based on this belief you provide students with individualized feedback.

• When you used academic vocabulary it really helped me understand your diagram.
• I got a little lost here. Can you tell me more about what you’re thinking and trying to say?

What's Next?

We’ve briefly looked at just a few of the strategies you may already by using. In the first part of this learning series we suggested that you create a personal definition of differentiation as well as a team definition. Let’s add to that. Download the Differentiation Design form and consider differentiation strategies you’re already using successfully as well as strategies you want to explore. Share your thoughts and plans with your team, your administrator, and parents.

differentiation_design.pdf
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Coming soon: quick assessments you can use to plan for differentiation.

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