Curriculum 101: Easy differentiation tips for teachers

“Everyone’s a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

We’ve all heard the quote—we may even have heard it in school to justify "learning styles" led instruction. Over the years, it's become meaningless at least partially because shortened versions of the quote have circulated, such as “Don’t judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree,” which misunderstands the quote and misconstrues the message. 

Even though it’s become a cliche, there’s some meaning in there that drives right at the heart of differentiation:

Everyone has something that they’re good at.

Everyone demonstrates their skills in unique ways.

It harms people when we don’t allow them to demonstrate their skills, especially if we limit them to narrow ways of showing what they know–ways that may not reflect how they learn best.

Differentiation allows students to express their brand of genius, their mastery of the subject, and their skills in your classroom in the ways that are most comfortable to them. Differentiation isn’t without challenge, nor is it about keeping children in their comfort zone. It’s all about preventing that narrative from developing in a child’s brain that they’re stupid, all because they were judged by uniform, inflexible standards.

At Eduphoria, we know how difficult it can be to find time. Differentiation can feel overwhelming, as it often comes with the baggage of high expectations and insufficient support. That’s why it’s our goal to provide resources, advice, and tips on how to differentiate without adding time, shame, or unfair expectations to your workload.

In this resource, learn how to differentiate without the extra baggage.

A note about “can’t” and student capabilities

“Can’t” is often a no-no word in education. It seems and feels wrong to say that some children can’t do certain things. We’d like to discuss this very briefly before we dive into the rest of the resource because it’s important that educators know the difference between a “can’t” that’s imposed on the child by others and a “can’t” that’s imposed on the child by their circumstances or disabilities.

Now, just because a child has differences doesn’t mean that they can’t. It simply means that the ways in which they demonstrate their knowledge and skills will differ, and some methods of demonstrating knowledge will be much harder for them. If they’re repeatedly asked to demonstrate their knowledge in these ways, it could stand in the way of accurate assessment and reduce their confidence, thereby affecting their performance long-term.

In order to help a child achieve at their highest potential, we need to recognize what success looks like for each student and that not every path leads to the same kinds of jobs or goals. So, we should also acknowledge that every child has unique skills and learning differences that aren’t more or less valuable.

They just are. 

It also means that the ways that these students can should be treated as equally valuable as the typical ways of performance. 

What does differentiation really mean?

Since this is a 101 series, it’s worth reviewing the basics. Many people have misconceptions about differentiation, which add to the negative feelings sometimes associated with it.

Here’s what differentiation is NOT:

• Offering each individual student their own special brand of assignment or project
• Teaching each student individually every day, every class period
• Giving students the easy way out rather than challenging them

Rather, differentiation is a way to reach students where they are emotionally, academically, and behaviorally. And it doesn’t have to add hours to your planning.

Here’s what differentiation can look like:

• Allowing children to pivot mid-project or mid-lesson because something isn’t sticking
• Giving students agency and choice over projects, learning environment, and communication styles
• Giving students multiple opportunities and varied methods to both challenge their knowledge and skills and demonstrate their growth

Increasing accessibility and challenge

Through countless studies, we know that challenge is necessary for students to enjoy learning and stretch their knowledge. As an educator, you’ve probably already heard the terms “Zone of Proximal Development” and “scaffolding.” However, both of these concepts are essential talking points when discussing differentiation.

The Zone of Proximal Development is essentially the “area” of the bullseye where a student grows. It’s outside of their comfort zone but not in the area of the bullseye that’s so difficult that they’re unable to grow.

Scaffolding is a teaching method that allows students to incrementally reach outside of their comfort zone and stretch that circle to include other things that they can tackle on their own. One of the ways we can do that is by challenging them with teacher or partner-assisted activities. 

We can also give them academically challenging projects that use the skills they’ve already mastered (rather than in ways that are counterintuitive to them), thereby allowing them to climb the tree with some assistance.

For example, if you have a student who struggles with presentations in front of the class but excels on paper, you can stretch them to the next level of knowledge and skill by allowing them to give that presentation with their written essay or notes in hand. You’ve taken something that they’re confident in and allowed them to stretch their comfort zone with a safety net.

When students start doing things they were previously unable to do, even with assistance, their confidence grows. They’re more motivated to take on additional challenges. They’re more resilient to failure. We talked about this extensively in our resource on metacognition and student agency if you’d like to see the research that supports this.

Now, conversely, if students are consistently asked to exist in the final outer ring of the bulls-eye, the area where the challenge is too great, their confidence suffers, their motivation drops, and they begin to, as the phrase goes, believe that they are stupid.

Co-teach with students with the magic of “choice”

“Choice” is another loaded word for classroom teachers. It comes tinged with fears of anarchy, loss of control, or even an overloaded curriculum that places the burden on the teacher to create an abundance of options for students to choose from.

We understand where those fears come from and hope to challenge them with examples of choice that help teachers maintain control, challenge students, and give students agency without increasing the instructor’s workload.

Create a skeleton to work from to reduce planning time

The above photo is an example of a framework that you can give to students or keep in your back pocket, so modifications can be mixed and matched to the individual’s preferences. You can also allow choice on some things while reducing choice on others. For example, let’s say you have an assignment that students have to complete in the way you prescribed. It’s an essay, and you know of a handful of students who really struggle with writing. So, while you’ll grade them the same way that you grade all of your students, according to a well-developed rubric, you can allow them to verbally explain their thesis and supporting points, create a visual to go with it, or even talk about the research they did, awarding them the points that are the most accurate representation of their mastery level. 

While you'll have to measure mastery and award points for children in learning domains that they aren't good at, if there are overlapping standards that must also be measured, allow them opportunity to demonstrate that mastery without being harshly punished for their lack of skill in a certain area. For example, in essay assignments, children are often scored on grammar and spelling. There aren't many ways to be flexible about that; however, if the essay is also measuring the student's mastery of a standard that requires character analysis, perhaps you can give them additional opportunities to show their understanding outside of the essay, such as by explaining their points verbally when writing is difficult.

This way, with a selection of ways that they can experience choice, students are being challenged and stretched, and you’re getting an accurate understanding of their abilities to better support them.

Use the internet and creative student examples as exemplars

You don’t have to create exemplars for every option you give your students. Let’s say you want to give students three options for an upcoming end-of-unit project. You’ve written an example essay, but you don’t have examples for the audio-visual project or the 3D model. 

You can do a quick search on YouTube for video essays, especially centering around subjects your students are interested in. Create quick instruction documents for creating slideshows, source them online, or even generate them via AI. Be aware that there are many video tutorials online for free software such as i-movie, so you don't have to create these instructions yourself. You may be surprised at how often students exceed your expectations when there’s a slight bit of ambiguity in terms of what they can create. However, it’s still important to create that rubric explaining which skills and concepts you’re expecting to see.

In terms of using student work, you can always ask around to see if your colleagues have existing examples of excellent student work. You could even assign a student who is ahead of their peers a personal project that you hope to allow as an option for future assignments, if this is something that your workload and classroom environment allow for.

An understanding of “wiggle room” can take some of the burden from you

If you, as the educator, establish a precedent and an understanding in the classroom that children are free to put forward their own ideas, modify assignments, and ask for modifications, then you aren’t actually increasing your workload to help students advocate for themselves. 

And, you aren’t obligated to say yes if a student really is missing the point or you won’t be able to accommodate them.

Let’s say, for example, that you tell students they’re allowed to submit their own project ideas, though you’ve provided them with several choices. If you have that skeleton or structure in place, let’s say, a generic rubric that applies to many different kinds of projects, then you haven’t had to add any extra work to your plate by allowing them to create their own project idea.

Download our generic project rubric here.

As another example, if your student is struggling with a project and thinks that working with a friend might help them get unstuck, then allowing that wiggle room (with some supervision and structure) can help them without adding extra work for you! It may be a good idea to have some guiding questions for partner groups to discuss.

Here are some guiding question examples that might help:

• Are you feeling stuck because there’s a lot of work ahead of you or because you don’t understand something?
• Can you create a to-do list that can either help you break up the project into smaller pieces or that will help you tackle a misunderstanding?
• What are some resources you can turn to for questions about the topic?

Using data to make individualized teaching decisions

We’ve recently published a resource on how classroom teachers and curriculum managers can incorporate principles of MTSS in their classrooms. MTSS is all about using data to make informed decisions that prevent students from falling behind or struggling unnecessarily. If you’d like more information about the ways you can screen and monitor students without major disruptions to your classroom routine, be sure to give that article a read.

Now, using data to make decisions, even on the fly, is differentiation. 

Each student’s data tells a story about them. It’s the most objective observation you can get about where they are in the unit, what they love, what they’re good at, and where they struggle. It’s this information that best arms the instructor to speak the student’s language back at them.

Because we know that data can also be overwhelming for the classroom teacher with a million other figurative balls in the air, we’ve got tips to help you use data for differentiation that are easy, fast, and effective.

Tips for individualizing per classroom

At the classroom level, data can help you determine which students need something more or something else than typical instruction. Your data routine can make a big difference in how easy this effort is to implement.

Here’s the order of operations we recommend for group-wide data analysis:

• Analyze assessment scores for the entire group.
• Identify where the majority of the group is meeting or mastering the standards.
• Identify where the majority of the group is approaching or not meeting standards.
• Identify outliers. These are the single students or smaller groups who are excelling or are struggling in ways that the rest of the group is not.

And there you go! This is an easy, four step process that fulfills the most important step toward differentiating at the classroom level. This is much easier if you have software like Single Test Analysis, but you can also create your own data visualizations using Sheets or Excel.

When you have this data, you can make classroom-wide decisions, groupings, and curriculum changes that benefit the group.

For example, say that you identify group-wide weaknesses in an important learning standard that your school is closely monitoring for state assessments. Well, thank goodness you have that data because you can now reteach the entire class this important topic.

If most of your students are meeting or mastering the standard, then you can create small groups for group or one-on-one reteaching. 

This is differentiation. You’re identifying the individual needs of the students and meeting them through instruction. However, you can take this a step further by differentiating per student, and we’ve got tips for that, too.

Tips for individualizing per student

First, let’s acknowledge that you probably can’t spend time analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of every student in your care. Many of you are teaching a hundred or more students every day. That’s why we suggest creating monitor groups.

Monitor groups are your students who need more support than your students who typically do well or very well without intervention. They may have academic, emotional, or behavioral needs that exceed that of the base group of students.

Once you have your monitor group, you can dig down into the individual student’s data to decide next steps that will help them grow.

For example, look at your assessment data to see where the student’s depth of knowledge currently stands for the unit. In our software, the instructor can see this information through Single-Test Analysis via the Learning Standard Summary.

This information can help you figure out which assignments, projects, or lessons can help the student reach the next level.

Next, look at the individual questions the student missed. You can gather an abundance of data about the student’s misconceptions based on how they answered the questions, but if you use the student confidence tool in Aware or assign reflection questions, you can get even more detailed information about their learning gaps, metacognitive skills, and problem-solving practices.

This will help you tailor your one-on-one or group reteaching to the student, skipping that stage where you muddle through the “why” with the student. Why did they miss this question? What are they missing? What misconception did they have? What steps did they take? The test question and their answer has much of the information you need.

Don’t forget to figure out where the student excels. Even students who aren’t performing well on assessments have skills, passions, and expertise that can be used to motivate them to the next level of learning in their weakest areas.

For example, when I was teaching at a Title I school, I had many students reading at a 3rd grade level in their Sophomore year of high school. As an English Language Arts teacher, it was difficult getting them to commit to reading-based assignments when they could hardly understand the words on the page. We were often able to overcome these weaknesses, complete assignments, and stretch their comfort zones with reading when they found out that the library offered biographies on their favorite sports figures, magazines on cars and car repair, or even their favorite books from Middle school, such as the Hatchet series by Gary Paulsen.

So, while we were learning and mastering complex standards such as inferencing and archetypes, we could use the stories they were comfortable with. They were learning the material with confidence because they didn’t have to feel stupid while trying to learn difficult skills with difficult material.

Give them something. Give them their interest or their skill, then pair it with something they have a lot of difficulty completing. They can lean on their skills and knowledge to bridge the gaps in other areas. And they’ll enjoy doing it!

Finally, it would be worth looking at the student’s personal data and talking with them to find out their personal preferences. If you haven’t checked on your student’s documented accommodations, it might be a good idea to revisit them. The student’s disabilities, accommodations, and supports tell you a lot about how they learn and demonstrate knowledge. Make sure they’re receiving all of the support they’re entitled to.

Whether the student does or doesn’t have these accommodations documented, talk to the student. Ask them about what distracts them from completing work, where they have the most fun in school, what their strongest or favorite subjects are, and what they love to do when they’re at home.

It could be that a student who is struggling with turning in assignments on time needs visual reminders or they forget that they have homework. You can then work with that student to complete homework during class time while they’re being monitored. You could also help them program reminders into their phones, so they get that visual reminder away from the classroom.

Perhaps you have a student who gets headaches under fluorescent light. See if it would be possible to switch to natural light, hang Christmas lights, or use lamps. Maybe they could even be referred to the diagnostician for testing that could pair them with glasses for light sensitivity.

Only do what you can do, but don’t opt out of the small things! They can make a big difference for the student.

Differentiating resources shows that you care

One final method of differentiation is to choose resources that represent the children in your classroom and their many, different walks of life.

As a former English teacher, I often heard complaints from students that the resources they were forced to read were boring or didn’t apply to them (so, then, why should they care?). Of course, we tried to find a balance between exposing them to the classics (especially the interesting ones) while picking resources that spoke to them and their current situations.

We understand that sometimes there is a lack of flexibility in choosing resources for your curriculum, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t supplement your lessons or your classroom library with resources that they can choose and enjoy for their own projects.

If you’re not sure where to start, here are some tips and online resources to help:

• Ask them what they like! If your students are allowed to chat during work time, you’ll hear a lot about what they like just by walking the room. Next, use the people, shows, movies, games, and memes they reference to create connections to the lesson, which, as we know, is an effective way to help students learn new material.
• Use a variety of different mediums. Don’t just ask them to read from a textbook. Add videos, images, anecdotes, and activities to a lesson. A variety of resources not only helps the knowledge sink in for students to whom the medium of the lesson doesn’t matter very much. It also widens the net for students who don’t learn in the typical way.
• Use movies and visual media rather than text. You can teach them valuable skills through movies which are more universally accessible to students than books, especially books typically assigned through curriculum packages. This list includes a variety of movies and lesson ideas to help your students learn in a way that’s fun for them.
• Make sure your bookshelf has exciting reads about topics that interest your students. Here’s a list of suggested material for middle and high school students, and here is one for primary school students. You can also create forms for students to request certain books. The school or public library may have it, or you can add it to your wish list for future purchases.
• Ask about your students’ favorite YouTubers, podcasters, and celebrities. There may be areas of cross-over that you weren’t even aware of. For example, there are tons of YouTube-based literary analyses on movies and TV shows that can help your students think about the media they love without even knowing that they’re learning critical metacognitive and analytical skills.

It’s okay if your students laugh at you

I remember one lesson in particular, taught from a slide deck my former teacher-of-the-year colleague created. The deck included a picture of an absolutely obscene decked-out car as a metaphor. I’m fairly sure we were using it to visualize what literary devices do to writing or some similar message.

It’s worth noting that my students came from a community where cars were everything. They were status symbols, and they were often rebuilding and augmenting their own cars from the time they were old enough to reach the hood. I had many students who were enrolled in classes for Automechanics. It was a passion for many and a commonly understood piece of culture for most.

When this picture popped up on the screen, the students were engaged, let me tell you. It instantly started a debate about how ugly the car was, the paint job, the lifted wheels, the rims, the tint. Then, because they all thought the car was ugly, we got to have a discussion about what too many literary devices can do to writing!

They were discussing the subject, flowery language, with extremely strong opinions. They had a voice and a connection, and suddenly, they were ready to enter into the assignment because they not only understood the metaphor but cared about it.

I think back on that day quite fondly and wish I had gotten to experience more moments like that in my classroom. They often laughed at me for not quite understanding what I was referencing from their world, but at least they were engaged.

Getting to know your students is half the battle

There are many differences in opinion about how much of teaching should be relational. While it’s always a good idea to draw boundaries between yourself and the student, you can still learn who they are without breaking boundaries. You can still learn who they are in an academic sense just by being in the classroom and among the students.

We want to encourage you that if you’re already learning about them, you know what they like, you hear about their personal lives (whether you ask or not), then you’re already most of the way there.

Use your knowledge and care for the students to make them feel like they’re a part of the classroom. Your knowledge is data. When paired with their test scores, assignments, and discussions, you can start to give each student a classroom experience that feels tailored to them and with none of the shame and pressure that sometimes crops up in differentiation efforts.

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