Students usually need to become familiar with the key information or material about an area of study before they can successfully look at its implications, meanings, or interrelationships. However, once they grasp the information in a concrete way, it's important that they move on to meanings and implications.

Students usually need to become familiar with the key information or material about an area of study before they can successfully look at its implications, meanings, or interrelationships. However, once they grasp the information in a concrete way, it's important that they move on to meanings and implications

The goal of differentiated instruction is to make certain that everyone grows as much as possible in all key skills and knowledge areas, moving on from their starting points.

Successful partnering between teacher and parents is based on proactive communication. Call a student's home occasionally with positive news about a child. From time to time, send home class newsletters—electronic or print, based on the format most likely to reach parents, and in the parent's primary language when that is feasible. Share goals for specific projects, how various procedures are working in class, and so on. Spotlight a broad range of students in the communications. Ask for parents' reactions and suggestions related to their child's experiences in your class. Work with your school to make school "invitational" for parents, just as you do for students, so that many more parents feel comfortable in joining forces with you to create a classroom in which individuals are known and honored, and in which much is expected from every student.

In a differentiated classroom, some of the traditional ground rules about "how we do school" change. Your students and their parents—a category that includes all primary caregivers, such as grandparents, other custodial relatives, and legal guardians—may initially need your help to understand and feel comfortable with the new look and feel of the classroom. After an initial period of uncertainty, most students and parents respond quite positively to a setting that treats individuals as unique people and where learning is active and engaging. This chapter offers some strategies for making students and parents feel "at home" in a differentiated classroom.

Have a plan for students to get help when you're busy with another student or group. Be sure students know when it's OK to come to you for help—and when it's not—and that there are several options for finding help when you are unavailable. For differentiated instruction to succeed, students must understand that it's never OK for them to just sit and wait for help to come to them or to disrupt someone else through off-task behavior, and that it's each student's responsibility to seek and to offer help in responsible ways as needed. You can help students learn to work collegially by suggesting that they ask a peer for clarification when they get stuck. Some classrooms have an "expert of the day" desk where one or more students especially skilled with the day's task serve as consultants. Astute teachers ensure that all students serve as "experts" at one time or another. (Students can assist by checking answers, proofreading, answering questions about directions or texts, and helping with art or construction tasks.) Or students may try to get themselves unstuck by "thinking on paper" in learning logs, for example.

5. Use "anchor activities" to address "ragged time" and free you to provide focused attention on students. Because having all students finish all tasks at the same time is not a goal of differentiation, "ragged time"—periods where some students have finished while others are still working—is a reality in a differentiated classroom. Having certain independent "anchor activities" to which students automatically move when they complete an assigned task is important both to maintaining a productive work environment and to ensuring wise use of everyone's time. Reading, journal writing, creating a portfolio of work samples (paper or digital), and practicing (spelling, computation, vocabulary, writing, art techniques, language sounds or speech patterns, skills in a sport, etc.) are the sorts of tasks that are well-suited to this purpose.

Study your students. No teacher will ever have full knowledge of his or her students, but a teacher who studies students from day one, with the intent to continue developing insights about each child throughout the year, will be in a far better position to teach them well than a teacher who does not have that priority or a teacher who concludes that there are too many students to know them as individuals. There's no explicit formula for learning about students, but there are a number of good approaches to try.

Mr. Jackson assigns each student to a table. Some tables are stocked with a blue cube and others with a green cube. Students at blue cube tables are working at or below grade level in reading and writing in class and on formative assessment tasks. Here are the blue cube tasks: Describe an ant community in pictures or words. Compare an ant community to your community in pictures or words. List words that tell your feelings about watching an ant community. Describe the parts of an ant community and what goes on in each part by using words, by using pictures, or by building it. Describe a way that an ant community helps you understand living and working together in a community. List the good and bad things about an ant community. Students at green cube tables are performing above or well above grade level in reading and writing in class and on formative assessment tasks. Here are the green cube tasks: Describe an ant community using at least three sentences with at least three describing words in each sentence. Use a Venn diagram to compare an ant community with the community of the animal you selected. Pretend that ants think like people (which they don't, of course). Create a comic strip or panel that tells what you think about what an ant feels like as it goes through a day in its community. Do the same thing with another kind of animal from a different sort of community. Make a diagram of an animal community with parts labeled and tell what each part is for. Write a rule for living together in a community and tell how it would be useful in two different communities. Write a song or poem or draw a picture that tells what you think is best and worst about being part of a community.

Differentiating process according to readiness means matching the complexity of a task, materials, and support to a student's current level of knowledge, understanding, and skill. For example, when providing students with guidelines for writing a persuasive essay, a teacher might distribute three different versions of directions, using ongoing assessment information to match each student with the version best suited to the current state of his or her persuasive writing skills. Some students receive an annotated template on which they can write their initial draft, other students receive a checklist of attributes that they can use to monitor or review their initial draft, and still others receive a checklist of attributes featuring items that are more sophisticated in language and expectations.

Any effective activity is essentially a sense-making process, designed to help a student progress from a current point of understanding to a more complex level of understanding. Students process and make sense of ideas and information most easily when teachers ensure that classroom activities Are interesting to students. Call on students to think at a high level. Require students to use key knowledge, skills, and understandings (KUDs) and to grasp how these elements are connected.

When a teacher introduces a concept to the whole class, chances are that some students will grasp it instantly and be ready to move on to application right away. Others, however, require a little more time—or even a lot more time—to make sense of the "input" the teacher has given them. In such cases, minilessons are a valuable way to differentiate content. Based on persistent formative assessment of student understanding, the teacher may reteach one subgroup of students using a different approach than the one initially used, meet with another subgroup to extend their understanding and skill, and assemble still another subgroup to review content they missed during absences over the last few days. Minilessons can be quite effective in targeting content to students' interests and learning profiles as well as to their readiness.

Differentiating content according to readiness means matching the material or information you're asking students to learn to a student's current proficiency in reading and understanding. For example, it is a poor use of time to ask a 5th grader who reads independently at a 9th grade level to do most of her work in a grade-level reading series. It is equally inappropriate to ask a student who currently speaks and understands little English to read independently from a grade-level U.S. history book. One way to approach readiness differentiation of content is to use the Equalizer (see Figure 9.1, p. 85) as a guide, asking yourself if the materials are at an appropriately challenging level of complexity, independence, pacing, and so on for all the students who would be using them, and making adjustments accordingly.

Content is the "input" of teaching and learning. It's what we teach and what we want students to learn. There are two ways to think about differentiating content: (1) as adapting what we teach or want students to learn or (2) as adapting how we give students access to what we teach or want them to learn.

There is no recipe for a differentiated classroom. Teachers construct differentiated classrooms in varying ways depending on their own personalities, the nature of the subjects and grade levels they teach, and the learning needs of their students. Teachers who differentiate instruction have at least two things in common, however: a conviction that students differ as learners, and a belief that classrooms in which students are active learners, decision makers, and problem solvers are more natural and effective than those in which students are passive recipients of information.

These five teachers use a variety of instructional strategies to help them match content, process, and product to the readiness, interest, and talents of their academically diverse students. Among the strategies described were pre-assessment and formative assessment, interest centers and learning centers, small-group instruction, interest-based resources, alternating similar-readiness and mixed-readiness working groups, tiered lessons, student choice, student discussion and problem-solving groups, options for varied modes of expression, front-loading vocabulary, differentiated homework, reading materials at varied levels of complexity, peer reading partners (reading buddies), and peer reviews.

Mrs. Riley uses a number of differentiation strategies, but one she finds quite natural is the use of learning centers and interest centers. Based on an assumption that all learners need exposure to the same content, she used to create centers and then send each child to every center. Now, after designing a variety of centers based on her students' current points of development with key knowledge, understandings, and skills, Mrs. Riley often assigns students to specific centers based on her formal and informal assessment of their readiness. There are also points in the center activities when students make choices about their work in ways that address their interests and preferred ways of expressing what they are learning.

DO think about your own learning preferences and how those influence your instructional plans. DON'T assume that all of your students learn best in the ways that you learn best.

Gender also influences how we learn (e.g., Gilligan, 1982). As is the case with culture, there are learning patterns within each gender but great variance as well. More males than females might prefer competitive learning, for example, or more females than males might prefer collaboration. However, many males will prefer collaborative learning and many females will prefer competition. Whereas females might tend to process ideas more intuitively and males more logically, those preferences will also vary considerably within a gender, and the numbers will change with time and in response to context. Since gender norms and preferences are culturally constructed and reinforced, it makes sense that some of the same behaviors we think of as culturally influenced can also be influenced by gender—expressiveness versus reserve, for example, or a group orientation versus an individual orientation, or analytic versus creative or practical thinking.

"Learning style" refers to environmental or personal factors that may impact the learning process. For instance, some students may generally learn best when they can move around; others need to sit still. Some students enjoy a room with lots to look at, color, and things to touch and try out. Other students appear to function best when the environment is more "spare" because they find a "busy" classroom distracting. Some students need a great deal of light in a room in order to feel comfortable. Other students prefer a darker working space. Some students will learn best through oral modes, others through visual means (which might be further broken down into a preference for images vs. a preference for reading and writing), and others through touch or movement. Many students are perfectly comfortable learning in a variety of modes.

One of the great pleasures of teaching is the chance to introduce students to a world full of ideas and opportunities. Interest-based instruction not only draws on interests students have but can also help them discover new passions. Once again, there are many approaches available to teachers. Here are a couple of examples.

Teachers who care about their students as individuals make it a priority to find out about the interests students bring to the classroom with them, and teachers who care about differentiation find a way to use these insights to inform their planning. Dynamic teachers also try to create new interests in their students. When a teacher is passionate about a topic and shares the passion with his or her classes, similar interests often emerge in some of the learners. A teacher who raises intriguing questions, introduces ideas that make content vibrant, and supports students in learning more about those elements also helps to generate new student interests.

A wise teacher knows the importance of having a plan to "hook" and engage students with the topic at hand. Engagement is a nonnegotiable of teaching and learning. Key motivators for learning are a voice in and choice of topics, work that is personally meaningful, and a feeling of ownership of the task at hand. Tasks that tap into student strengths and build a sense of competence in the learner are also strong motivators.

Build bridges between students' first languages and English. Doing this means tapping into background knowledge and contexts for topics and skills explored in the classroom as well as drawing on rudimentary knowledge of students' home language. Less obviously, it requires you to be sensitive to your own use of language—to avoid rapid speech and jargon or slang, to use synonyms to communicate meaning, and to be generous with wait time so that ELLs have time to process one idea before being bombarded with the next. It means supporting ELLs in building skills in their home languages. And it often means encouraging ELLs to use their home language to bridge to English. They might, for example, initially write in their first language and then translate to English, or express an idea orally in their first language to clarify their own thinking and then reply in English.

Ensuring clarity about where students should end up as a result of a sequence of learning is fundamental to educational success. Understanding the students we ask to learn is foundational to creating learning opportunities that enliven them. Remembering that we cannot reach the mind we do not engage ought to be a mandate for instructional planning. Offering multiple and varied avenues to learning is a hallmark of the kind of professional quality that denotes expertise. Our students, each of them, are individual reminders that we can never stop attending to either the art or the science of teaching.

Many teachers think they are differentiating instruction when they let students volunteer to answer questions, grade some students a little harder or easier on an assignment in response to the students' perceived ability and effort, or let students read or do homework if they finish a class assignment early. Certainly such modifications reflect a teacher's awareness of differences in student needs and, in that way, the modifications are movement in the direction of differentiation. While such approaches play a role in addressing learner variance, they are examples of "micro-differentiation" or "tailoring," and are often just not enough to adequately address significant learning issues.

Most teachers remember the recurrent, nightmarish experience from their first year of teaching: losing control of student behavior.

A math teacher often differentiates process (activities) for her students based on their readiness levels by assigning or offering homework assignments on the same topic at varying degrees of difficulty. She helps students determine which assignment would be most likely to both clarify their thinking and challenge them appropriately.

Three dimensions of student variance guide planning for differentiation: readiness, interest, and learning profile. We know that students learn better if tasks are a close match for their skills and understanding of a topic (readiness), if tasks ignite curiosity or passion in a student (interest), and if students have the freedom to work in a way that is more efficient or that makes learning more accessible for them (learning profile)

Remember that everyone's next step will not be identical, and that every student needs scaffolding in order to stretch.

Plan with flexible grouping in mind. In a differentiated classroom, you will often design tasks for students based on your best current evidence of their readiness for and interest in those tasks, as well as how they might work most effectively with the tasks. At such times, you may want to assign students to an appropriate task based on observation and formative assessment information. At other times, you may want students to quickly discuss an idea with a nearby or pre-assigned thinking partner.

Mutual respect is a non-negotiable. It will never be the case that we like everyone with whom we spend time. On the other hand, the classroom is a better place when we realize that everyone in it shares a need for acceptance, respect, security, contribution, and success. It is a powerful life lesson that regardless of age, gender, culture, speed of learning, language, dress, and personality, we all feel pain, joy, doubt, triumph—the human emotions. All lives are made better when they are treated as valuable and worthy of respect.

Much of the time, all students should be called on to use what they learn to solve knotty problems that defy a recipe-like answer, even though some will need to go about the task in a different way. Some students may need more scaffolding than others to make and support an argument, for example. Some may benefit from using more advanced resources as they construct their argument. Some may profit from a mini-lesson that recaps how to make and support a solid argument. Some may need to develop their arguments orally and have their work written by a peer or adult. Some may need to use materials in a language other than English, or write initially in a first language and then translate into English. But if we acknowledge that argumentation is a valuable skill, we must commit to helping all students master it by providing the appropriate scaffolding.

Most of us have not been trained to look at teaching in this light, but we are learners, too. We may not be able to transform our image of ourselves in a flash, but we can and should remake ourselves over the course of a career.

For instance, most of us who teach know that a lesson that "hooks" students has many merits. Differentiation affirms that principle but also reminds us that what may hook one student might well puzzle, bore, or irritate others.

Asking students to be a part of goal setting with you, to keep track of their work and how it demonstrates their work habits and growth, and to communicate this information to parents can be beneficial for everyone. It helps students develop responsibility for and a voice about their own work. It helps ensure that both you and the parents hear the same student messages about what's working and what isn't. It clarifies to parents why it matters so much that students have work that matches their needs. It also addresses the reality that learning itself is learned, and that students who have cooperative teacher-parent partners in finding an optimum learning match are fortunate indeed.

The first time advanced learners meet failure—or anything other than predictable success—can be a devastating hit to their self-esteem and self-image

On one hand, the public expects "normed" report cards. On the other hand, ample evidence indicates that traditional grading practices often do not communicate or motivate as we would like to believe they do.

Remember that there are many ways people can express themselves. Help students get out of the poster/report rut of products. Figure 14.2 lists just some of the possibilities they might consider for product formats.

Sometimes the product format is a given, shaped by the requirements of a curriculum (e.g., writing a persuasive essay, designing an experiment, and so on).

One of the most significant draws of product assignments, then, is the opportunity they give students to do work that feels significant and important and has ties to real life. They are often created to be shared with a meaningful audience.

Use many avenues to learning. Some students learn best with their ears, some with their eyes, some with touch or movement—many with a combination of inputs. Some are solitary learners, some really need to interact with friends in order to learn. Some students work well by gathering details and constructing a bird's-eye view of what is being studied. Others will not learn unless the bird's-eye view is clear to them before they encounter the details. Teachers who provide students with varied ways to access information, explore ideas, and express learning open the way to success for many more students. If a student has opportunities to hear about an idea, sing about it, build a representation of it, and read about it, that student is far more likely to find a way to achieve success.

Watch your students. Listen to their questions, answers, and conversations

Despite our differences in what we believe a good education to be, we all generally agree on the importance of ensuring all students maximize their capacity as learners within that particular framework.

We actually know a great deal about how people learn. For example, we know that each learner must make meaning of what teachers seek to teach. We know that the meaning-making process is influenced by the student's prior understandings, interests, beliefs, how the student learns best, and the student's attitudes about self and school (National Research Council, 1999).

Kids of the same age aren't all alike when it comes to learning any more than they are alike in terms of size, hobbies, personality, or food preferences. Kids do have many things in common, because they are human beings and because they are all young people, but they also have important differences.