Reblogged from ’Dealing with Day-to-Day Differentiation’ on my personal blog …

This week I ran a session on differentiation with our NQTs. I felt it was a good, open session where we could all share some ideas and describe the challenges that we face in meeting the learning needs of all of our students.   The fact is that we all find it hard  – and that’s because it is; sometimes it can feel as if you’re never quite getting it right because someone or other isn’t flourishing.  As with many things in teaching, we need to aim high but we also need to be realistic, pragmatic and tolerant of imperfection in order to flourish ourselves.

To begin with, we talked about the myths ..

Differentiation does not mean that you must have tiered resources and tasks in every lesson.  It does not mean you should have must-should-could learning objectives. It does not mean that a lesson where every student is doing the same task is fundamentally worse than one where students do have different tasks.  Any given lesson snap-shot may not have explicit evidence of differentiation at all – and it could still be outstanding, or at least be leading to outstanding outcomes.

Differentiation needs to be seen as the aggregation of the hundreds of subtly different interactions that you have with each of your students, according to their level of attainment and progress.  Even OfSTED now officially do not expect that the needs of all students are being precisely and directly addressed in every lesson observation.  Differentiation is a long-term process that mirrors the long-term nature of learning and progress. (See Learning Arcs and Journeys)

We talked about some of the bottom-lines …

In real life, we have ups and downs.. and a bottom line. Dotted.

We all have ups and downs; we can all mess things up.  We all have lessons that seem too complicated to factor in yet another level of support or challenge; we have all had lessons where behaviour issues dominate or you do more didactic input and the differentiation is less evident. However, there are always two things that I’d say are non-negotiable:

1. Neglecting the basic access entitlement of students with particular learning needs. If you have a student that can’t read the text-book or follow the standard instructions because of learning difficulties or physical impairment, you have to sort them out every time.  You need to plan for their needs every lesson and go to them immediately to make sure they know what to do.

2. Setting work that is too easy for the top end. There is nothing worse than having students waiting for others to finish with nothing to do or simply having time for a good chat because they’ve completed a basic task.  Here the solution is to set in-built extension tasks as a matter of routine. “If you finish Task A, then go straight on to Tasks B, C and D”.   Of course, there is the issue that ‘more work’ doesn’t necessarily equate to ‘more challenge’. It’s better if each task is increasingly difficult  and you can always consider allowing students to skip Task A and B if they feel confident to tackle other tasks straight away.   At the very least, there should always always be a ‘what next’ if the initial task is quite easy.

We also talked about data …

We’re saturated with data but it only helps if it comes off the spreadsheet and influences our practice in the classroom, helping us to understand and address the needs of the hundreds of students that we teach as individuals. The main use of student data is to prompt you to ask questions about your perception of a student’s ability and progress.  Am I getting this person right? It pays to look back at prior attainment information a week or so after meeting a class for the first time and again after the first term. If you triangulate between the prior attainment info, your gut feeling and your own assessment data, you get a better idea.  Sometimes it’s quite revealing.  Oh gosh, I’ve been underestimating John all this time…. or perhaps I’m neglecting Michael’s underlying lack of confidence; his reading age is lower than I thought.

Most importantly, data helps to ensure that you never settle for mediocrity from someone who doesn’t perform in the way the data says they could.  Ben’s Official Target grade is A but his recent test score was C? Ok…something is going on there. That should catalyse a different response than if the prior attainment data suggested C would be a sign of good progress.

In my last comprehensive school job, I used to devise a differentiation guide for every class to help me plan lessons without forgetting about people. Other teachers made their own. An example is shown here. The grade here is artificial; in reality there would be lots of data points feeding into the crude categorisation: reading ages, MidYIS scores and KS2 entry data would play a part alongside other internal assessments.  The idea is to make it easy to think about the students in rough groupings rather than allow the complexity of the individual data sheet, usually presented in alphabetical order, to be overwhelming and ultimately unhelpful.

A sample differentiation guide. (from a boys’ school!)

I know a lot of people will go into ‘Growth Mindset’ shock.  It’s important to have that in mind.  You are not using this to pigeon-hole students indefinitely.. but sometimes you need to cut through the noise to get some shape to your class and make differentiation meaningful and practical. If you allow yourself to let a guide like this write students off, then it’s a mistake.  If you use it to prompt you to prepare more effectively to help them learn better, then it’s a good thing.

The dynamics of each class will be different but personally I try to teach Group 1 and 2 in the same way, teaching to the top and thinking separately about the students who might struggle.  However, even then, there are one or two students in most of my classes who stick out at the top, running far ahead of the rest, who need special attention.

An important source of information worth revisiting once you know a class, is the SEND register and associated documentation.  It’s painful to realise that you have overlooked the info suggesting Jameel should sit at the front or that Jay is dyslexic and has gets help outside the school.  It’s hard to take it all in at the start of the year so, from time to time, go back for a look at see if you need to adjust things.  You may even have positive information to feedback to the learning support team in your school.

Keeping it simple

In practice, there is one main form of easy differentiation: same resources, different questions.

In a mixed ability setting, when you are up against it in terms of fine-tuned planning, you can always create open-endedness through the questions you ask in discussion and the tasks you set based on the same key resources.  That’s an important skill to develop. Whether it is a piece of writing, some practical work or a set of responses to a debate or some theory in science, you can usually set students off in different directions from a common starting point.  It is easier if the standard resources (text books and departmental ready-to-use worksheets) have a level of tiering built-in, but even with identical resources you can often direct students to produce responses at different levels of sophistication.

Each specimen, lovingly nurtured. But not necessarily all at once.

Nurturing the students at the extremes …

Finally, teaching is a bit like gardening.  You have a group of individual specimens with their own precise needs and qualities and your job is to get them to flourish to the greatest possible extent. But, as with gardening, you often need to focus on one specimen at a particular moment. You can’t do it all at once.

You may feel that John is coasting a bit; he needs a push this lesson.  It may be that Albert has looked a bit bored of late. He might be finding things a bit easy; let’s really crank it up this lesson.  The last time Rory handed his book in it was a bit of a shocker; I need to sit with him this lesson and get a few things sorted out.  Daniel is always just below the top level. Why is that?  Is this an Austin’s Butterfly effect? Maybe he needs to do some re-drafting and I need to absolutely insist that he does it again and again until it’s hitting the top level.

That’s real differentiation: pushing, prodding, nudging, stretching…slow, subtle, nuanced, a step at a time, working around the class from lesson to lesson, to the greatest extent you can manage. It’s not a performance; it’s something you grind out over the long long run.

Within this, I think it helps teachers to forge special relationships with the students at the extremes – and their parents too if possible.  In all probability the strongest and weakest learners are likely to be the ones who you struggle with the most in terms of your planning and teaching. If you let them know very clearly that you are working for them, keeping an eye on them and giving them a bit of special attention, they will have confidence that, when things aren’t quite tailored to them, you haven’t forgotten. Their parents will know this too and that helps a lot.

My advice is always to try to be a teacher who champions the students with the greatest needs; it always pays off.  But, more generally, the main thing is to keep differentiation at the forefront of your thinking, doing your best to keep everyone in each class moving forward without limiting them.  It’s never going to feel that you’ve got it absolutely nailed – and that is teaching!

Related post: Great Lessons 4: Differentiation

I am a teaching Headteacher, interested in developing new ideas for teaching and learning, and regular contributor to conferences and CPD events locally and nationally .. and honoured to be the Chair of the Vision 2040 group.