General Introduction

This blog is part of my Differentiation and Adaptive Teaching Knowledge Base.

I use the terms differentiation and adaptive teaching synonymously. To me, they are the same, as genuine differentiation has always involved adapting your planning and your teaching to meet the needs of the learners in front of you.

For me, differentiation is all the practical strategies, activities and techniques teachers use to personalise learning.

For ease, we can break that down into my five categories of differentiation: Activities, Questioning, Words and Writing, Things the Teacher Can Do and Things You Can Ask Learners to Do or Use.

This blog falls into the category of activities.

Using Worksheets to Differentiate

Once upon a time, differentiation was looked at as a question of how many different worksheets you needed to create for your class.

Such an approach was never sustainable, nor was it necessarily very good differentiation.

In many cases, it stymied learning, either by putting arbitrary limits on learners (based on who did what worksheet) or by shoehorning content into worksheets that simply weren’t very good.

Sometimes, a worksheet is the right choice.

Sometimes it isn’t

That’s the professional judgement a teacher makes.

And when we do decide that a worksheet is a good option, there’s lots we can do to differentiate our resources.

Here are four examples.

Create a variety of worksheets in advance of the lesson, of increasing difficulty

You could use a model to underpin this, for example: from the most concrete thinking to the most abstract thinking.

Learners can then progress through the worksheets, meeting higher levels of challenge as they go.

Keep it open, so all learners have the potential to push on to the hardest worksheets.

Recognise that pragmatically this might not happen, but that it is always better to allow for it, as opposed to cutting certain learners off from high challenge (by designating that they can only do certain worksheets).

Create multiple worksheets that lead on from one another

Learners must work through these.

When they complete the first, they move on to the second.

When they complete the second, they move on to the third.

And so on.

This creates a sense of progression and, for many learners, is motivational as it rewards goal-directed behaviour. (If I can complete this worksheet, it opens up the next one for me.)

An interesting option here is to tie the worksheets to the solving of a problem, or the answering of a question, with each worksheet giving learners an element of the solution/answer they are seeking.

Create worksheets that include open questions or tasks

These give learners plenty of routes through which to complete their work. This, in turn, means that learners can opt for a path that plays to their strengths,

Questions and tasks of this type are open-ended, providing scope for learners to interpret them in different ways.

An added benefit of this is that it gives you access to lots of information about what learners are thinking.

Information you can use to assess learning in the moment – and then adapt things in response.

Create worksheets that provide learners with various options or choices.

This gives learners freedom and independence, which tends to be motivational, playing into the core human need for autonomy.

By giving learners options or choices, you invite them to make decisions about what they will do and how they will do it.

This binds them into a task, giving a sense of ownership.

How can using worksheets differentiate?

In the first two cases, the variety of worksheets provides learners with a variety of options.

More-able learners will potentially be able to work through more worksheets than their peers or can spend longer on those that are more challenging.

Less-able learners will be able to experience success by working through some worksheets or by focussing on ones that are simpler or which contain more concrete (and less abstract) tasks.

However, it’s important to remember that we do not limit learners by only allowing them to access certain worksheets.

There should be a sense of progression.

One that all learners can access but which, pragmatically, we recognise some learners are likely to get further through than others.

(Though, by keeping it open, we also recognise that our predictions might not be accurate and that learners always have the capacity to surprise us to and to go beyond what we might expect them to do.)

In the last two cases, the worksheets provide learners with a starting point (and perhaps some additional structure).

They can move off from here in a way that takes account of their current levels of knowledge and understanding, leading to a personalised engagement with the task.

Using Extension Tasks to Differentiate

An extension task is something we add onto a segment of a lesson to stretch the thinking of learners who complete the main activity.

It can take many forms but ought always to involve a greater degree of complexity or challenge than what has gone before.

Avoid extension tasks that are more of the same.

They are not an extension.

They are repetition (and tend to quickly demotivate learners).

Extension tasks are not confined to the most able learners; they are for all learners who complete the main activity.

Learners will engage with them on their own terms (for example, more-able learners may produce more nuanced responses) but may require some assistance to get going.

Here are five examples of easy-to-use extension tasks you can adapt for a wide range of lessons.

A philosophically informed or concept-led question relating to the topic of study

This requires learners to think more deeply about the topic and the ideas upon which it rests.

For example, in a maths lesson on probability, we might have an extension question like: Is it possible to accurately calculate probability for things that might happen to you next week? Why?

In a Year 4 English lesson, we might ask an extension question like: How do you know something is a story? What makes stories different from other types of writing?

And in an A Level politics lesson, we might have a question like: Is there an optimum balance in a society between freedom and security? Or is the question itself a false choice?

A question that asks learners to evaluate or synthesise information relating to the topic

Both these skills require high-order, abstract thinking.

Questions based on such processes therefore cause learners to think more deeply about the information at issue.

These are the top two levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy, giving us a guarantee that the level of challenge is high.

Here is a set of evaluation keywords you can use to develop such questions:

• Appraise, Argue, Assess, Critique, Defend, Evaluate, Examine, Grade, Inspect, Judge, Justify, Rank, Rate, Review, Value.

And here is a set of synthesis keywords:

• Combine, Compose, Construct, Create, Devise, Design, Formulate, Hypothesise, Integrate, Merge, Organise, Plan, Propose, Synthesise, Unite.

A task that must be completed in a short amount of time (which is specified precisely)

Given a certain window in which to act, one must think quickly and carefully.

Decisions must be made at speed, and attention must be given to the work itself as well as the timescale in which the work is being completed.

As a result, such tasks are challenging.

For example, ‘You have ninety seconds to devise a new solution to the problem of people not recycling enough. Time starts now.’

Or, ‘You have two minutes to rewrite your last paragraph so it includes two additional keywords – and you’re not allowed to use a list.’

Ask learners to write and answer an exam-style question about the area of study

The challenge here is two-fold.

First, learners are compelled to think about the topic from a different perspective.

One that contrasts with what they are likely to have done previously in the lesson.

Second, they must manipulate what they have learned to create an appropriate response to the question they have written.

Ask learners to come up with a question they think you won’t be able to answer

This is fun!

Learners like trying to catch you out.

It is also challenging for two reasons.

First, developing questions requires synthesis. Learners must think through what they know about the topic and use this to generate something new.

Second, coming up with a question you think can beat the teacher means thinking about what the teacher knows and what kind of a question might get the better of them.

Which is tricky.

How do extension tasks differentiate?

Extension tasks are a way to stretch and challenge learners who work more swiftly than their peers.

They encourage those learners who quickly get to grips with an activity or topic to think more deeply about what is being studied.

They cause learners to reassess what they have already done and to think about it with greater care.

In a sense, extension tasks re-contextualise what has gone before.

They are a great tool to motivate more-able learners.

But, by keeping them open and accessible to all, they can also work to motivate and engage any learner in your class.

For example, by being an interesting or rewarding goal for completing the main activity.

Something everyone can aspire to achieve.

Using Further Reading to Differentiate

Another way to challenge learners who complete the work you have set is to give them further reading.

This can come in multiple forms:

• Newspaper, magazine or website articles connected to your subject/the topic.
• Extracts from books connected to the topic or subject.
• Textbooks containing information beyond that which has been looked at in class.
• Textbook extracts in which the material studied in class is considered at a more sophisticated level. For example, this might involve GCSE learners being given an extract from an A Level textbook.
• A piece of writing written by an older learner that relates to the topic of study.

In the first and last cases, the teacher can put together and laminate a collection of these.

This means they are on hand, ready to go, and can be used repeatedly.

Further reading is of benefit to learners as an end in itself.

With that said, here are five ways you can structure it, should you wish:

• Provide learners with a set of questions they must answer on completing their reading.
• Provide learners with one question or statement that is to inform their reading or which they must respond to having completed their reading. For example: How could we use what you read about in the next part of the lesson?
• Ask learners to summarise the reading. You can caveat this with a further instruction like: ‘in no more than three sentences,’ or, ‘for an audience of young children.’
• Give learners time to complete the reading. When they have finished, discuss the text with them. You could focus on whether they understand what they’ve read, the relative merits of the piece, or an analysis of how the text connects to the lesson.
• Ask learners to translate the text. By this I do not mean from one language to another, but instead from written English into a diagram, comic strip, flow-chart or some other visual means of communication. This brings in another layer of challenge, as the learner must now consider how they can accurately convey through a different medium what they’ve been reading about.

How does further reading differentiate?

Learners who have completed the work are given an opportunity to explore the topic in greater depth.

The teacher can select reading material that will challenge learners’ thinking and that is appropriate for the age group.

Further reading for a Year 5 class will necessarily be very different from further reading for a Year 11 class.

The principle is the same, but the content changes, based on the teacher’s knowledge and judgement.

By using structuring activities like those above, you can encourage learners to think in different ways about the topic and, potentially, to challenge their perceptions.

By choosing texts that are more challenging and more complex than anything looked at in the main body of the lesson, we ensure learners who get onto further reading experience a higher degree of challenge than their peers.

Differentiating with Visits and Visitors

Visits and visitors are a great way of differentiating.

They are engaging for learners for the following reasons:

• They are interactive
• They are unusual
• They are a change to the routine
• They bring learning alive
• They are different to most of what goes on in the classroom

It is a good idea to plan work around a visit or visitor so that learners get as much as possible from the experience.

It will also help to ensure their learning is captured so you can build on it and use it in subsequent lessons.

Here are five things you might plan around visits or visitors:

• If you have a visitor coming into your lesson, work with your learners in advance to create a set of questions that you will ask them.
• If you have a visitor coming into your lesson, divide your class into groups and ask each group to research a different aspect of the topic the visitor is going to talk about. Develop this by instructing groups to create short presentations they can give to the rest of the class and the visitor.
• If you are going on a visit, spend time beforehand working with your learners to explore ideas, people, events and concepts connected to the place you are going to visit.
• Give learners a worksheet they must complete during their visit. Try structuring this so it feels like an investigation. This creates a natural forward momentum, sustaining learners’ interest in the visit.
• In either case, follow-up the experience by asking learners to create something encompassing all that happened (or that focuses on a specific aspect of the trip). A good strategy here is to give learners a range of options from which to select. For example: What did you learn from the trip, and what interested you the most? Create an advert, comic strip, speech or visitor guide that answers the question for me.

How do visits and visitors differentiate?

Visits and visitors are a change to the routine.

They offer learners the chance to experience something different; to step out of normal habits.

For these reasons they are likely to be engaging and motivational.

Visits and visitors are interactive.

In the first case, learners are going into the world and learning in context.

In the second case, learners can talk and interact with someone who comes from outside of school and who has an area of expertise unlikely to be replicated among the teaching staff.

The normal ‘rules’ of school life are suspended when visits or visitors are involved.

I do not mean the rules concerning behaviour, good manners and the like.

Rather, I mean the tacit rules governing how learners and teachers interact, the nature of classroom learning and the expectations of what will happen during a lesson.

The upending of these ‘rules’ creates space in which learners can act differently and in which learning can take place in unfamiliar ways.