Strategies from Jordan Lukins, an assistant teaching professor of special education, and former elementary special education teacher, Pre-K-12 autism specialist and elementary resource teacher with the Alamance-Burlington School System. 

Four Tips for Differentiating Instruction

1. Implement Universal Design for Learning (UDL).

Universal Design for Learning, or UDL, isn’t exactly differentiation, but it is a way to reduce how much we need to differentiate to address individual student needs. UDL is a proactive approach to planning instruction that is accessible and flexible from the start. By embracing the idea that “what is necessary for one is beneficial for all,” UDL involves building in options for all students instead of making individual adaptations for specific students. Some great ways to get started with UDL include presenting information to all students using a variety of formats (e.g., text, verbal, visual, video); offering different ways for students to engage with learning (e.g., working independently, with a partner, or in a smaller group; providing a menu of activity choices); and allowing students to show what they know in various forms (e.g., write a paper, give a presentation, create a project).

2. Use Flexible Grouping.

 Flexible grouping is at the heart of good differentiation. Importantly, flexible grouping doesn’t mean that students should always learn in homogeneous (or same-ability) groups. Although these groups can be necessary for providing targeted instruction to students with a common need, heterogeneous (or mixed-ability) groups are beneficial for problem solving tasks, general practice and activities based on shared interests. Teachers should change their groups frequently based on student data and learning goals. 

3. Adjust the cognitive complexity of tasks.

When we are interested in differentiating content in the classroom, either to provide more support or more challenge, we can think about changing the level of complexity. For some learners, we might need to make the content more concrete by using manipulatives, drawing a diagram or connecting to real-world examples. In other cases, we might want to make the content more abstract by challenging learners to synthesize multiple ideas or to apply information in a novel way.

4. Provide multiple entry points into an assignment.

Teachers, for example, could provide multiple entry points to an elementary lesson on writing a complete paragraph. When asked to write a paragraph on a topic of their choice, students might be provided with sentence stems (“Did you know that ?; “One fact about is _”) and a word bank of relevant nouns and verbs. Students could have the option of writing by hand or typing on a computer. They could also be given a set of challenge questions to help them expand their paragraph, such as “Why is this important?” or “How does this connect to a different topic?” Teachers can assist students in identifying which supports are most helpful for their learning.

Once students have written their paragraphs, the teacher could use these samples as data to form homogeneous groups for follow-up instruction. For example, one group might receive a mini-lesson to reteach the basics of capitalization and punctuation, while another receives an extension lesson on using adjectives and adverbs to add detail to their writing, and still another receives explicit instruction on using a subject and verb to write a complete sentence.