Differentiated Instruction
My role in its downfall
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Some teachers fall into the differentiation trap. Some schools cause this. Outside commentators—people who rarely have to make it work—insist the law of the land, the United Nations and the Pope demand differentiation and any teacher who does not comply is a wrong ‘un. What is going on and why is this a problem?
No true Scotsman
Once you start chasing differentiation, you never stop. There is no destination, only more differentiation.
The No True Scotsman fallacy is an informal logical fallacy that goes something like this:
Me: “No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge”.
A Scotsman: “I do”.
Me: “No true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge”.
How does this relate to differentiation? If students are not thriving, despite your best efforts at differentiation—staying up until 3am making three different versions of every resource—then that’s because you are not doing it properly. Baked into many implicit definitions of differentiation is that it works. Why else, for example, would Australian teaching standards require it? Therefore, if it does not work, it cannot be true differentiation. You must be doing it wrong.
Defining Differentiation
I have written a lot about differentiation in the past and this usually prompts at least a few people to get in touch and tell me their personal definitions of differentiation, making the case that the form they use is effective or necessary. Essentially, differentiation can mean any approach where you discriminate between students. So, in theory, cold calling specific students, based on the level of challenge the question requires, could meet this definition. So could ‘setting’ or ability grouping—placing students into different maths classes based on their prior performance, for example.
However, this is not usually what proponents of differentiation have in mind. Often, it is presented as an alternative to ability grouping. In this model, differentiation is intended to take place within the one classroom. Here’s a definition provided by Carol Ann Tomlinson, a major proponent, and colleagues in 2003:
“Differentiation can be defined as an approach to teaching in which teachers proactively modify curricula, teaching methods, resources, learning activities, and student products to address the diverse needs of individual students and small groups of students to maximize the learning opportunity for each student in a classroom (Bearne, 1996; Tomlinson, 1999).”
Just consider the enormity of what that implies.
Proponents also tend to sidestep the idea that differentiation is a response to varying student ability, perhaps revealing that they view ability as something inherent rather than a quality that can be purposefully increased by a high quality curriculum and effective teaching. So, they look for other ways to categorise student difference. This probably accounts for the popularity of the myths that we should take account of students’ varying learning styles and multiple intelligences. This is what Tomlinson and colleagues have to say in the 2003 article:
“As it is beneficial to student learning for teachers to respond to their readiness levels and interests, it also appears beneficial to address student variance in learning profile. Learning profile attends to efficiency of learning (Tomlinson, 2003). The term learning profile refers to a student’s preferred mode of learning that can be affected by a number of factors, including learning style, intelligence preference, gender, and culture.”
More recently, Tomlinson seems to have stopped explicitly referring to learning styles, but she still holds to the concept of each student having a ‘learning profile’, whatever that is.
Opposite things
In reality, nobody can practically vary the curriculum, teaching methods, resources, learning activities and the tasks students are asked to complete, simultaneously and all within the same classroom. But for advocates, this is a feature rather than a bug because it means that critical teachers are always open to the accusation that they are not doing it properly.
Another problem with the catch-all definition of differentiation is that it can mean opposite things. Imagine a student struggles with writing. One solution may be to give them a different way to record their learning. For example, they could make a podcast. That’s why Tomlinson and colleagues’ definition discusses modifying student products.
An alternative approach may be to still ask the student to produce a written account, but to help them with that by providing a scaffold for completing the task as a ‘we do’ with lots of teacher guidance.
The podcast accommodates the student’s need whereas the scaffold addresses it. These are opposite strategies. I would always prefer to address rather than accommodate, although I do accept that there are times when accommodations are necessary. The problem is that ‘differentiation’ means both. I can say I am differentiating and you can say you are differentiating and we can mean opposite things.
Go and find the evidence yourself if it means so much to you
I began tackling differentiation almost as soon as I began blogging. Ten years ago, two Australian academics took to The Conversation to write an ‘explainer’ about differentiation, arguing that it is poorly understood: “Differentiation is a long word that sounds complicated,” they began. As an example of someone misunderstanding differentiation, they linked to a blog post of mine. I believe they also linked to an article I had written for the tes, but that link no longer works.
At that time, members of the public were allowed to comment on articles in The Conversation and so I responded to the debate. If you are at a loose end then I suggest reading the comments because they are entertaining.
One of the authors asserted that ‘it is clear that differentiation is effective’ but provided no evidence to support this. I was of the view that those promoting differentiation were the ones with the duty to provide evidence for the practice. However, as the other author replied to me (I was completing my PhD at the time):
“As a PhD student you have ample resources at your fingertips to search the literature in both special and inclusive education, although I note that neither is your area of research.”
When I raised the example of a large study of which Carol Tomlinson was co-author and that had failed to find evidence to support differentiation, the response was that the teachers had not implemented it properly.
This debate did not really go anywhere, but it was not without merit. It formed the background to one of the authors and one of the commenters joining up with two other colleagues to conduct a scoping review of 20 years of differentiation research that was published in 2020. They found:
“Only a small group of studies focused on differentiation's impact on student outcomes and these typically only examined specific elements of differentiation or its use in specific academic domains. The diversity of focus and methodological approaches across the 34 studies prevents comparison of findings and weakens the evidential basis to make claims of either differentiation's effectiveness or indeed its ineffectiveness.”
Two of these authors now tend to focus more (see e.g. here and here) on promoting MTSS (Multi-Tiered Systems of Support, also known as Response to Intervention) which has a stronger evidence base. In MTSS, all students are given ‘tier 1’ instruction in their regular classroom. Those who don’t make progress are given ‘tier 2’ small-group instruction and those who still fail to make progress are given intensive, one-to-one ‘tier 3’ instruction. It can be adapted for any learning objective, from reading to self-regulation.
Is it a form of differentiation? Almost anything is, but it’s not the kind envisaged by Tomlinson. It’s not the kind that trainee teachers have been expected to enact or that qualified teachers in some schools are still expected to execute.
Differentiation and the law
If you read through the comments on the 2016 piece in The Conversation, you may notice something curious—the assertion that teachers must use differentiation because it is the law. This is a stretch and as with anything else in this discussion, it depends on what you mean when using the term. Regardless, even if it were a flat-out, faithful interpretation of the legal position, it is not an argument. Presumably, teachers will always seek to act lawfully, but that does not prevent them disagreeing with a particular law.
I am writing this post from a room in the London Borough of Westminster where there is a uniform speed limit of 20 miles per hour. I don’t have a car, but if I were to drive through Westminster, I would obey this limit. That does not stop me thinking it is silly and it doesn’t stop locals from questioning their elected officials and asking them to justify such a low speed limit.
What is clear—and what this almost always boils down to—is that in most Anglosphere education systems, there is a duty placed on teachers to implement reasonable adjustments for students with disabilities and disorders. In Australia, that duty is enshrined in the Disability Standards for Education, 2005, a document that also points out that there is no duty to make ‘unreasonable’ adjustments.
You might be wondering why we are, quite suddenly, talking about what appears to be the completely different issue of disability. Let’s park that for now.
What is reasonable and what is unreasonable? That is the question. Imagine, for example, an educational psychologist suggests a student with ADHD should be allowed a fidget toy in class or, as I have seen on occasion, be allowed to play with Blu Tack. I cannot find a strong evidence base for such interventions, but an expert—a qualified educational psychologist—reckons it might help. The only way to determine the law’s position is to test it in court, but nobody wants that and so, as a teacher, I am going to let the student have their toy.
Other adjustments are of more obvious value. A student who has hearing loss in their left ear might be placed on the left side of the classroom so they can better hear the teacher.
Are fidget toys and classroom positioning forms of differentiation? Again, we are up against that slippery and elastic definition, but both are far removed from modifying the curriculum, teaching methods, resources, learning activities, and student products.
Sometimes, an educational psychologist will reasonably suggest the use of explicit teaching and consistent classroom routines for specific students with ADHD or ASD. Such a suggestion clearly is grounded in evidence. However, that’s how I teach anyway. Do I have to go further and demonstrate how I have been explicit and routine with identified individuals in ways different to the rest of the class in order to prove I have made an ‘adjustment’?
What is going on here? Why the sudden diversion into disability legislation? Well, advocates of differentiation think this a great way to end any debate. You have to do it. It’s the law.
When you really do have to do it
No doubt, some of you work in settings that necessitate differentiation of the type envisaged by Tomlinson and colleagues. For example, if you teach in a small school with a single, multi-age classroom, you will need to give different tasks to different students. This will involve the teacher moving between students to give instruction and setting seat work for those who the teacher is not currently interacting with.
The point is that this is probably not optimal. Instead of close to 60 minutes of teacher input per hour, it drops to just a fraction of this. If I were in this position, I would value high quality textbooks and other materials. I would probably set more seat work for the more advanced students, requiring them to work independently for more of the time and focus my attention on those with the greatest need.
Sometimes, teachers highlight that they teach, say, a Year 7 mixed ability mathematics class in a secondary school where the students range seven or eight years in what they can do. Part of my response to this is glib and unhelpful—that we would be better trying to avoid such gaps arising in the first place—and part of my response is that this is partly a school-made issue where an ideological commitment to mixed ability teaching is providing further barriers. However, if a teacher finds themselves in this position, there’s not a lot they can do and group-based differentiation may be the practical necessity.
The malaise
Differentiation, as traditionally imagined, may sometimes be necessary, but that does not make it the strategy of choice when other options are available. This means that school leaders who are ideologically committed to differentiation may be part of the problem rather than the solution.
It seems like an obvious idea. In a class of 25+ students, there will always be some variation in prior knowledge—although not ‘learning profiles’ or other made-up differences. It therefore seems logical that splitting them up into three or four groups and giving those groups different teaching and tasks to complete would be effective.
However, there are two main problems. On what basis is a teacher deciding who gets what? I suspect few teachers give a placement test when deciding who to allocate to each group and so the process is based on a mix of observation, feels and prejudice. A student may therefore be given less challenging work and yet, if given the chance, may be capable of rising to higher expectations. Although I am a pragmatic about setting or ability grouping, when used, I insist that all classes should be taught the same curriculum, with the level of scaffolding varying. That way, class placement does not become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Nevertheless, let us imagine we have a perfect process for allocating students to groups within the classroom. The supposed benefit is they have more targeted teaching. But the cost is that they now have far less teacher input because the teacher must navigate different groups engaged in different tasks.
That’s why in 2016, I was pretty confident no strong evidence would be found for differentiation and that’s why I hold to the same view now.
Greg, thanks for the analysis of differentiation in this article. The analysis raises savvy points, especially that "differentiation" is a very elastic, adaptable, and flexible concept and that the evidence of benefits in outcomes for differentiating is a bit like like the new clothing worn by the unnamed emperor in the Hans Christian Anderson fairly tale.
The discussion provides an opportunity to ask what is, to me, a fundamental question: What is *un*differentiated instruction? I suspect some would answer by suggesting that Big DI is an example, but most reasonable folks know that Big DI includes low-stakes ability grouping (low, middle, and high groups for math that might differ in membership for language arts) and different numbers of practice opportunities according to whether the learners are "firm."
It's important that you mentioned special education, too, because the topic is particularly relevant there. That's because "differentiation" has application at two (or more) levels in special education. First, at a broad policy level, educators differentiate education simply by having special education: These students get general education but these students get special education. Second, at the level of individual students, we differentiate instruction by providing an Individualized Education Program or an Education, Health, and Care Plan or an Individual Learning Plan. I know these terms are not strictly aligned, but they all represent efforts to differentiate instruction.
There are important (to me, at least) concerts about associating special education with differentiation. Those considerations at too numerous and detailed to present in a comment on your post, but let me please point to those general and individual aspects of differentiation when applied to special education and note that I plan to present them in greater detail elsewhere.
And please let you thank you once again for broaching this topic!
What Greg describes here is what's been one of my greatest frustrations with education discourse, which is that once words become trendy, they get applied to every situation with wildly varying and sometimes opposite meanings. So it is with differentiation, which as Greg points out can mean both accommodating or addressing difficulties when they are identified in individual students, which are two very different strategies, and for rhetorical purposes can even mean accommodation as applied to students with disabilities, which is a legal requirement.
As another example, Greg's expressed in the past his opposition to Universal Design for Learning (UDL), which he described as "a form of differentiation". Now UDL is both a trending hashtag and (I believe) a registered trademark of the research institute that introduced the term, and who presumably gets to define what it means even if they do so in self-contradictory ways, but if we look at the original idea of applying universal design concepts to educational design, that should make it the *opposite* of differentiation. The whole point of universal design is that objects of design should from the outset be accessible to all users without needing costly refitting in order to provide accommodation. The standard example is buildings where connections between the floors are entirely done through ramps (with an absence of stairs). I've seen researchers include under the label of UDL the act of ensuring, in a web-based course, that pdf files provided to the students include the actual text of the document rather than simply encapsulating images, say of scanned textbook pages for example. The reason being that text-to-speech software is able to deal with the former and not with the latter, so students who rely on this kind of software would not be able to read them. Though at this point we might say that this is simply common sense or standard educational design principles, and doesn't need the label of UDL.
Also, interestingly, the first link I see at the bottom of this page goes to Greg's post about "Freddie deBoer's act of intellectual fraud". Which makes me chuckle because right here, Greg says that "[i]n a class of 25+ students, there will always be some variation in prior knowledge—although not ‘learning profiles’ or other made-up differences." The whole point of deBoer's interest in education discourse is that there are and will always be variations in prior knowledge (as well as inherent ability) between students, and no pedagogical intervention can change this simple fact about the world. This made him suspicious of the reported miraculous results in some southern US states caused by the renewed emphasis on phonics and on a knowledge-rich curriculum (as well as "accountability"), especially given the many ways in which school leaders and politicians can fudge the numbers if there is incentive to do so, which placed him at odds with Greg and with the science of learning crowd. But we all agree that phonics isn't going to make intellectually delayed students into geniuses, and also isn't going to solve racial disparities in economic outcomes in the United States.