Differentiating for All My Kids? Every Day? Impossible!
The first time a teacher said this to me, I tried to convince her otherwise, but I’ve come to accept that she was right. Let me share why I changed my mind. First, some background.
Differentiating is the process of adapting the learning process for individual student needs. In this process, a teacher is responsible for knowing each student’s individual profile – his reading, math, and writing skills and deficits, his prior knowledge, his interests, and his mindset about learning.
If he has a disability, the teachers (both special and general education) also need to know the specifics of his disability profile. In other words – not just that he has a learning disability, but what specific kind of learning disability – auditory processing? visual integration? sequential memory? In effect, differentiation requires teachers to hypothesize about the learning process of each student in advance and strategically design successful channels that will optimize success.
I questioned the practicality of differentiation when I taught a graduate course Instructional Methods for Secondary Special Education. I required my students (mostly practicing teachers) in collaborative groups to develop a unit plan with all three types of differentiation: content, process, and product. I created a virtual class list of 24 students including ones who were gifted, average with some skill gaps, and others with specific disabilities. I kept my profiles secret until half way through the semester.
My graduate student teams submitted their unit frameworks, expected outcomes, and tentative learning activities. When they submitted their pre-assessments, I provided the scores their virtual students had earned as well as their reading/ math scores on state tests. We examined the data, and they decided how they would differentiate the content to fit students’ reading or math abilities and their guesses about prior background knowledge.
When they submitted their plans for class activities, assignments, and formative assessments, I provided scores aligned with my secret profiles for the students.
My students protested that the grades didn’t fit with what they had expected. They asked me if there was other information about the students that I hadn’t revealed. We talked about whether most teachers in practice looked deeper.
How many knew what to do with more detailed individual information about their students? Who had the time?
Then I revealed that Laliya didn’t speak English, Sofie was legally blind and liked to pretend being sighted to fit in. Andre was gifted and bored. Theo had a specific learning disability (strong auditory memory but a nonreader); he could excel if the lesson had included auditory input. The list went on. My students were speechless. They went back to the drawing board.
They ambitiously spent the second half of the semester differentiating the learning processes to fit each student’s needs. They also created a range of summative assessment options to differentiate the final products to be more valid measures of student achievement. Note that it took a whole semester for my students to develop a differentiated unit plan based on individual student needs (and they didn’t have to research in confidential folders). By June, they understood the process of differentiation. But they protested that they could not do this on a daily basis for the three or four classes of students that they met each day. I could see their point.
When I was investigating personalized learning, I re-discovered UDL, which had originally been conceived as a process for providing curriculum access for students with severe disabilities.
Universal Design for Learning was re-conceived in 2014 as a framework for providing ALL students multiple means of engagement, multiple means of representation, and multiple means of action and expression.
The key for UDL is that STUDENTS learn the methods that work best for themselves; STUDENTS make choices about how they will learn and how they will provide evidence of their own learning; and STUDENTS become owners of the learning process.
