Reach every level in a class you cannot see

How one teacher gives different students different work, pace and grouping, once the room they all sat in is gone.

Differentiation is not a separate lesson plan for every student

The phrase makes teachers picture thirty plans and one exhausted adult. That is not what it means. Differentiation is a way of adjusting a single lesson so that students at very different levels can all get somewhere with it.

Carol Tomlinson set out the formal version in 1999. The book works it through four things a teacher can vary: content, meaning what students read or watch; process, meaning what they do to practise; product, meaning how they show what they know; and grouping, meaning who they work with. A class studying the Civil War might have some students reading an overview of what the war was about while others read an in-depth look at the reasons for it. Same unit, same goal, a different door in.

It is also not individualized instruction, and the book is firm about the difference. Individualized instruction lets students advance through the curriculum at their own pace. Differentiated instruction keeps the whole class at the same point in the curriculum and lets each student engage with it at their own level. Class size makes this practical rather than optional: the National Center for Education Statistics put the 2019 average at 15.6 students for self-contained classes and 18.6 for departmentalized ones, with fewer than 10 in some remote areas and 40 or more in large urban ones.

Differentiated instruction means finding a way to engage and challenge all of the students in the room. How to Teach Differentiated Instruction in an Online Learning Environment

Every instrument of differentiation was built for a room

Observation, walking around, tables of four, a pop quiz on paper. These are the tools a teacher uses to work out who needs what, and every one of them assumes a room.

When schools closed in March 2020, teachers kept their lesson plans and lost the instruments. The teacher often could not see the class at all: some students had no camera, some kept it off, and the teacher's own screen limited how many faces it could show at once. Classroom activities assumed equipment that lived at school, which is why chemistry experiments stopped working. Quizzes were on paper. The book borrows Marshall McLuhan's line that the medium is the message. The curriculum did not change; the channel changed how everyone could interact with it, and the teacher's practice, the content and the medium fell out of sync.

The cost did not land evenly. In its 2022 study of nine year olds, the National Assessment of Educational Progress recorded the first decline in math scores it has ever measured and the largest decline in reading since 1990. Students in the highest percentile dropped 2% in reading and 3% in math. Students in the lowest percentile dropped 10% and 12%. NAEP named two reasons: the higher performing students had more access to a computer, a quiet place and someone to help, and more confidence in their own ability to learn in the remote format. Differentiation failed hardest for the students it exists to serve.

You cannot see the class, so put the seeing inside the work

Ongoing assessment is the foundation of differentiated instruction. Without it a teacher is guessing about who needs what, and every adjustment that follows is a guess too.

In a room most of that assessment is done by looking. The book calls this the gaze heuristic, the quick scan that tells you who is lost. Online it is gone. You cannot glance at everyone at once, and often you cannot see anyone. So the evidence has to be manufactured: the activity itself has to leave a record of understanding behind it.

The most useful instrument turns out to be the quiz, treated as an activity rather than a test. Build a series of ungraded quizzes with immediate feedback and let students retry, the way a game lets them retry. Some testing modules allow simple conditional branching, so a student can see what would have happened with a different answer. Meanwhile the system reports things a room never could: how long each student spent on a page, and which questions the whole class got wrong, which usually means the question was ambiguous or the teaching missed.

Researchers tend to attribute low impact of change proposals to deficiencies in knowledge and skills, teachers point at their lack of practicality. Westbroek et al., 2020, quoted in the book

Independent work is what frees you to teach one group at a time

The move a teacher makes constantly in a room is to kneel beside one table while the other tables carry on. Breakout rooms hand that move back, but only if the rest of the class has something real to do.

Groups come in two kinds and they do different jobs. Homogeneous groups gather students of similar ability so you can pitch instruction precisely: phonics with one reading group, comprehension with another. Heterogeneous groups mix levels by interest, learning preference or academic need, and pay off elsewhere, in peer relationships, in leadership, and in the plain fact that confident students who always speak first miss what the quieter ones can see. Whichever you use, every member needs a task that is genuinely theirs and can be assessed on its own.

Breakout lists have to be written before the session starts. Each group also works better with a frame: brainstorming before a new unit, a literature circle with an assigned discussion leader and a set of questions, think-pair-share, or a challenge to invent a mnemonic. The students who are not with you work on tiered activities, tasks written at different levels of readiness. Tiering can be invisible, assigned quietly in the background, or open, with students choosing which task to take. Give every tier a clear rubric. You can build the rubric with the class, but only if you are willing to change it: if you walk in knowing what you want it to say you are coordinating, not co-creating, and students know the difference.

The balance of together and alone flips when the class goes online

A day in a school building is mostly synchronous. Everyone is in the room together, and homework hangs off the end of it. Online, most of the learning happens asynchronously, and the live sessions are the small part.

That inversion decides what live time is for. The book maps it onto Bloom's taxonomy: spend time together on the things that need immediate feedback and other people, which is remembering and understanding new material, and leave applying, analyzing, evaluating and creating to independent time. William Horton's simpler categories say the same thing: absorb activities deliver new information, do activities give practice, connect activities tie the new to what the student already knows.

Live time also has a ceiling. Present no more than five new pieces of information before you stop for a poll or a five minute breakout to take the temperature of the room, and do not lecture in chunks longer than fifteen minutes. Between chunks, release students to move; an asynchronous task doubles as permission to stand up. And when you are presenting on a whiteboard, turn your camera off. This is the redundancy principle: people take in only so much through the eye and the ear at once, so do not compete with yourself, and never build text-heavy slides and then read them aloud.

Rebuild the room, not just the lecture

You can recognise a differentiated classroom by its layout. It has a front, tables for group work, a corner for talking, a place to explore and somewhere to sit alone. The layout is the instrument.

The mistake of 2020 was to rebuild only the front of the room, the teacher talking, and quietly drop the other four zones. Each one has an online form. The whole class gathers by video conference, and finished work goes to a shared space where everyone can see it. Group work goes to breakout rooms and wikis. Social learning goes to chat, public and private, to blogs, and to small group video calls. Exploring goes to tools students can make things with, like Scratch for stories and animations or Blender for 3D. Working alone becomes asynchronous, independent time.

Two extras are worth carrying across. A learning centre, meaning one topic with a pile of materials and a choice of activities, transfers directly: post the materials at several levels and let students move through them at their own pace. And give each student a private journal that only the two of you can read. Do not correct the spelling, because the object is communication. It is the closest thing online to the quiet word at a desk.

The screen carries some accommodations and drops others

In an inclusive class, differentiation is not only good practice. For a student on a 504 plan or an Individualized Education Program it is a legal duty, and moving online changed how hard that duty is to keep.

Some accommodations got easier, because software does them. Type can be enlarged, screen readers read documents aloud, videos carry captions and more of them now carry audio description, and extra time or break time is set once as an exception in the testing module rather than negotiated every time. Post recorded lectures so students can review them, offer a PDF or an audio file for students whose connection is slow, choose type that is easy to read, and be careful with colour coding so that a colour blind student is not shut out of the meaning.

Others got harder, and the hardest are the ones that need a person. An IEP often calls for a modified curriculum and one to one assistance, and inclusion support delivered face to face does not travel down a video call. Teachers made it work by bringing the inclusion teacher onto the call as a co-host, so they could chat privately with the students they support, and by sharing lesson plans in advance so those plans could be modified in time. English language learners face their own version of this: they are learning English and learning in English at the same time, so let them show understanding by speaking, by role play or in a one to one conference, when writing would hide what they actually know.

I have students who receive special education services, so that's been really interesting to try to figure out how to provide inclusion support over Zoom. A teacher in Texas, quoted in the book

One lesson, several levels, and no way to see the room

The subject did not change and neither did the curriculum. What changed is that the teacher lost the constant, wordless feedback a room supplies, and that feedback was what made differentiation possible in the first place.

Everything else in the book follows from putting it back deliberately.

The book quotes an article in the journal FACETS that is worth keeping: "Pandemic conditions have underlined the value of teachers' earned expertise that is not readily replaced by the improvised support of parents and families when learning takes place at home." The screen did not make the teacher less necessary. It made the teacher's judgement about who needs what harder to exercise, and therefore worth designing for.

Adapted from How to Teach Differentiated Instruction in an Online Learning Environment
Sheryll Piner  ·  © 2022 DVFZ Training Consultancy Services  ·  101 cited sources in the source edition