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If you bring up differentiation among teachers, you’re not likely to hear a lot of enthusiasm. Some will readily admit they don’t differentiate as often as they probably should. Others see the value in differentiation but feel buried in work trying to make it happen. And some question whether differentiating instruction is a realistic goal at all.
I think a big reason for all this frustration is that many of you don’t have a simple, sustainable approach to differentiation. You’ve been told you should be doing it, but without the right tools or training, you may dive into the deep end with the best of intentions only to find you can’t keep up with the workload. When that happens enough times, it’s easy to conclude that it can’t be done.
But I also think many teachers are doing more differentiation than they give themselves credit for.
I’ll come back to that.
The original title of this post was “How to Differentiate Instruction,” but as soon as I started writing, I realized I was setting the bar way too high. Not only am I not an expert in differentiation — I look to people like Carol Ann Tomlinson for that — but a true set of instructions on differentiation would be way more than a single blog post or podcast episode could handle. And if I did manage to deliver something close to that, it might perpetuate the overwhelm all over again, setting an expectation that’s unattainable for most teachers.
Still, differentiation is incredibly important, and a series on unit planning would be incomplete without it.
So what I’d like to do here is offer an approach to differentiation that I think is more realistic than what many teachers have been working with. In the spirit of this Back to Basics series, I’m sharing my own process, heavily influenced by the work of others — both published experts and educators I’ve taught alongside. My hope is that it gives teachers who have become discouraged by differentiation a way back in.
My approach has three steps. I’ll preview them here, then I’ll expand on each one:
- Step 1: Start with elements of universal design. Plan some “big chunks” that give all students choices.
- Step 2: Plan differentiated responses to assessment. Anticipate the different needs your diagnostic and formative assessments might reveal and make a loose plan for how you’ll respond.
- Step 3: Capture micro-differentiation in your plans. You’re already doing a lot of differentiating in your interactions with students on a minute-by-minute basis; noticing and naming these moves in your plans gives you credit for that important piece of differentiating.
Step 1: Start with Elements of Universal Design
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is an approach to lesson design that anticipates differences among learners by building multiple options for engaging with, accessing, and participating in learning. These are not options only offered to students with identified needs; they’re available to all students for any reason.
Ramps on buildings are often used as an example of universal design: People in wheelchairs can only get into a building by using ramps, but people not in wheelchairs can also use them, and may opt to for various reasons, including just liking them better. Everyone has access to the ramp, and people can choose it if it works better for them.
Starting your unit planning with UDL is a great first step because you don’t have to think about how many students might need what adaptations or interventions; you’re setting it up for everyone to choose what works best for them.
But notice my wording in this first step: By “starting with elements” of Universal Design, I’m NOT holding myself to the standard of following every single UDL guideline with every part of my unit. I’m just trying to see if I can make some parts of the unit more UDL-friendly. For many teachers who already have many of their lessons in place or have a lot on their plate, the thought of designing units with UDL principles sounds great, but there’s just not enough time to do it perfectly. So they often give up before they ever try.
Let’s quickly review the UDL guidelines. I’m simplifying here to hit the big ideas, so know that each of these principles has more depth than I’m getting into.
UDL asks us to offer “multiple means” or options for:
- Engagement: How students become interested and invested in learning and sustain that engagement over time. This includes offering choices in how they work (like in groups or alone) and considering differing student backgrounds when it comes to prior knowledge and cultural references.
- Representation: How the knowledge is presented to students; for example, giving a choice between reading something or watching a video with the same content.
- Action and Expression: How students interact with and demonstrate what they have learned. This often looks like offering different alternatives to a paper-and-pencil test or giving choices of format on a performance assessment.
So before I layer on any other kind of differentiation, I look for places to proactively build in these kinds of options, taking a “something is better than nothing” approach, rather than looking for every possible way to make a unit universal.
Step 2: Plan Differentiated Responses to Assessment
All of your assessments leading up to the summative assessment can give you information about where students are on the path toward that final destination, and each one is an opportunity to differentiate based on the information you get from them. Rather than waiting until you have those results to figure out what to do next, anticipate a few likely outcomes and plan for how you’ll respond.
Responding to the Diagnostic Assessment
The diagnostic assessment should give you some idea of what knowledge and skills students are bringing with them into the unit.
If most students don’t know much about the material you’re about to teach, then they won’t necessarily need any kind of different treatment than what you have planned. But if the diagnostic assessment reveals that some are coming in with a lot of prior knowledge on the subject, there’s a risk of those students being disengaged throughout the unit. Even if they keep that boredom to themselves and dutifully trudge through the lesson, it’s a missed opportunity to help them grow.
So as you plan, consider how you’ll respond if the diagnostic assessment shows that some students have already mastered some of the material and what you might have them do instead. One answer to this is curriculum compacting, a strategy where students skip over some of the planned learning activities and do a “replacement activity” instead, which might involve enrichment, acceleration, independent study, or another activity that moves their learning forward.
Responding to the Formative Assessments
Formative assessments will tell you who is getting it and who still needs extra support during the unit. The results of these assessments will likely put students into one of three “buckets”:
- Ahead of Target: These students are picking up the content quickly and easily. If they seem engaged and interested, it may be that they are simply absorbing the learning well and don’t need anything more. But if they seem bored or frustrated with the pace of the learning, they may need an additional challenge.
- On Target: These students are responding to instruction pretty well. They may have a few misconceptions or make a few errors, but overall they seem to be getting it. They may not need any differentiated response at all; you might simply review a few common errors or briefly reteach something before moving on.
- Needs Support: These students are struggling more — you’re seeing bigger gaps in understanding, more misconceptions, more mistakes. You may even see an emotional reaction to a formative assessment, like a refusal to complete it or a breakdown of some kind. A more substantial approach is needed in response to this group: trying a different instructional strategy, working one-on-one, or providing additional scaffolding.
Planning for these different outcomes doesn’t mean you have to prepare three separate lessons in advance. Instead, think about how the lesson that comes after the formative assessment could accommodate different responses. For example, you might plan an activity students can do independently while you meet with a small group that needs extra support. If the assessment shows that most of the class is in the last bucket, you can use that same time to reteach the content to everyone. And if no one needs extra support, everyone can just do the activity as originally planned.
Step 3: Capture Micro-Differentiation in Your Plans
Earlier I suggested that most teachers are doing more differentiation than they think — let’s get back to that. When we talk about differentiation, the focus always seems to be on the formalized, pre-planned type; what gets left out is the kind teachers already do all day long.
Consider these examples:
- When you’re giving a lecture and choose to call on one student versus another to ask a clarifying question, you do that because you know this one can handle the challenge right now. You may ask another student a different, easier question based on the readiness you’re observing in real time.
- When students are doing independent work, you make sure to check on certain students more carefully because you’ve already seen that they tend to make more mistakes.
- When students are working, you might give one student a quick verbal prompt to get them unstuck, while another student gets a more detailed explanation or example.
Carol Ann Tomlinson uses the term micro-differentiation for these small adjustments teachers make to better address individual learner needs (2017, p. 4). This might include things like adjusting the complexity of a question, offering an extra prompt or scaffold, or giving a student more time to respond to a question. While these small moves aren’t always enough to meet significant learning needs, they’re an important part of differentiated instruction, and they deserve to be named in our instructional plans.
I would not recommend trying to document all of these: A few broad labels can capture most of your micro-differentiation moves:
- Targeted questioning: Adjusting who you question, when you check in, the amount of wait time you give, and the difficulty or type of questions you ask.
- Responsive scaffolding: Providing prompts, cues, clarification, examples, modeling, or other small supports as needed.
- Individualized feedback: Tailoring feedback to what each learner needs in the moment.
Adding these terms to your plans when you know you’ll use them, especially if your district requires you to identify differentiation strategies, can capture the micro-differentiation that happens naturally during instruction and may even remind you to do it more intentionally.
A Differentiated Lesson Plan Example
Now let’s apply this three-step process to the sample unit plan I’ve been building throughout this series.
Last time, I planned four days of instruction for our sample food safety unit, creating full lesson plans for the first two days and rough sketches of the last two. As I built these lessons, I was already incorporating quite a bit of differentiation, but I didn’t call much attention to it because I wanted to save that discussion for this last installment. Normally, differentiation would be an organic part of the planning process rather than something you add later. I’ve separated it out here so I can give it my full attention.
As you read through the differentiation decisions I made for the unit, you can follow along by looking at the sample unit, which you can grab at cultofpedagogy.com/sampleunit — it’s a downloadable PDF of the unit that includes the objectives I wrote in part 1, the assessment plan I created in part 2, two full days of lesson plans and summaries of days 3 and 4. The differentiation plans we’re about to make here will be integrated into those plans.
Step 1: Start with Elements of Universal Design
In my original plans, did I include any elements of UDL? Did I build in…
- multiple means of engagement? No.
- multiple means of representation? No.
- multiple means of action and expression? I did not.
So this is the first place I’ll make some revisions. Again, I’m not trying to do ALL of this in ALL of the activities. For a four-day unit, I’m just seeing if there are places where I could build some of these in.
Readings
There are a lot of places where students have to read something in order to acquire the content or participate in the learning: the jigsaw activity on day 1, the cooking simulations on day 2 (students have to read the recipes), the written scenarios in the gallery walk on day 3, the written scenarios in the summative assessment on day 4, the recipe search students do after the summative assessment on day 4, and the scenario in the diagnostic assessment.
If I can give students the option to listen to those texts rather than read them, I’ve added another means of representation to all of these activities.
In my situation, I’ll just create all of the readings in Google Docs. From there, I can offer a printed version or allow students to access the Google Doc on a device, where they can listen to the readings with a text-to-speech reader like ChromeVox. I could also include an add-on like Helperbird, which offers dyslexia-friendly fonts and translation, making the text more accessible to students who are still developing English proficiency.
Just this one step — creating all my readings in a digital format — gives me a huge bang for my buck here. I create the content once, then students have different ways to access it, adding an element of universal design to anything I do with reading.
Since the recipe search on day 4 is already built on a curated set of websites, I can just make sure those sites work well with screen readers, and that takes care of the listening option there.
Group Work vs. Solo Work
A few times during the unit, students work in groups: the jigsaw, the simulations, and the gallery walk. I could build in the option for students to work alone instead. If I have noise-cancelling headphones, I could make those available so students working independently can stay in the same room as the groups without getting distracted by the noise.
On second thought, I’m really not sure how to make the simulations work independently, since students have to watch each other and give feedback. So maybe the solo option won’t work for that one. Probably the best I can do there is think carefully about the groupings themselves, using what I know about my students to put together groups that are more likely to work well.
This offers another means of engagement.
Written Responses
On the assessments, the jigsaw graphic organizer, and the responses to the gallery walk, students are asked to hand-write their responses on paper. To build in more choice in this area, I could (again) create the response forms digitally first, then give students the choice of responding on paper or digitally. With the digital version, students could either type their responses or dictate them using speech-to-text software. In all cases, I would still end up with written text I could use to assess student understanding.
Doing this offers another means of action and expression.
Don’t Students Need to Build These Skills, Though?
Before we move to step 2, I want to pause for a minute, because these adjustments bring up a question I think is worth considering: If students always have the option to listen instead of read, type instead of write by hand, or work alone instead of in a group, will they miss opportunities to develop those skills? And aren’t those skills important?
I think they are. UDL isn’t meant to eliminate challenge or productive struggle; in fact, the CAST UDL Guidelines specifically call for us to optimize challenge and support, noting that “productive struggle is a key component of an engaging and rigorous learning experience.”
So how do we give students options but still prioritize productive struggle? I have two thoughts on this.
First, I think transparency with students is important. We can talk openly about the fact that reading, handwriting, and working with other people are all skills worth developing, and that part of becoming a stronger learner is figuring out when you really need a particular support and when you might be ready to stretch yourself a little. So while I would keep these options available, I would also encourage students to experiment: If you usually choose to work alone, try working with a partner sometimes. If you usually listen to text, try reading it sometimes. Pay attention to what happens. Over time, students can get better at making these choices intentionally rather than simply defaulting to whatever feels easiest or most comfortable.
Second, remember the goals of the lesson. In this unit, the academic focus is food safety. I’m not trying to teach or assess students’ handwriting, their ability to read written text, or their ability to work in a group. If one of those things gets in the way of a student learning or demonstrating their knowledge of food safety, giving them another option removes a barrier that isn’t relevant to my goal. In another lesson, one of those skills might actually be the goal; if I were explicitly teaching students how to collaborate, for example, working alone wouldn’t accomplish that goal. So the options we build in should always make sense in relation to what we’re actually trying to teach.
With these three options now built into my unit, I have given the unit a reasonable UDL treatment. I haven’t done everything I possibly could, but I’m hoping this will illustrate that a little can be a lot better than nothing when it comes to Universal Design.
Step 2: Plan Differentiated Responses to Assessment
Let’s start by considering the diagnostic assessment, which asks students to list the four principles of safe food handling and then analyze one scenario to identify what food safety errors the person is making. I’m expecting that most students will not do well on this, but for anyone who does, I’d like to build in some differentiation that gives them an extra challenge.
The first thing I would do with any students who perform well on the diagnostic assessment is just informally chat with them and find out how extensive their knowledge actually is. I don’t want to make the mistake of assuming they already know everything I’m about to teach and inadvertently have them skip material they could still benefit from.
If I do, in fact, find that some students are coming in with pretty comprehensive knowledge of this stuff, I’d like to offer some enrichment for parts of the unit. Three days’ worth of instruction isn’t an eternity, so I don’t need to come up with an entirely different project for them; they may choose to participate in some of the planned activities and simply do really well on them.
But for some parts — maybe the jigsaw — I’m going to offer an alternative. I’ll let these students look at all four jigsaw readings, and if they feel confident that they already know most of the material, I’ll give them a short reading on food storage and leftovers that goes beyond the basic principles we’re covering in class. It addresses things like how long different foods can be kept, what date labels actually mean, and how to make decisions about whether food is still safe to eat. After reading, I’ll have them identify three guidelines they think would be especially useful to someone cooking independently at home.
For the other activities — the cooking simulations, the gallery walk, and the Kahoot game — I suspect these students will enjoy using their existing knowledge to participate. And again, since this is a short unit, I’m okay with not creating a huge amount of extra challenge for them.
One thing I’ll watch for is whether their classmates start leaning on them too much. If everyone looks to the same student during a simulation to provide the instructions, for example, I may pull that student out of the group and have them serve as a subject-matter expert, checking the accuracy of other groups’ work instead. That way, the other students still have to work hard to apply their learning, while the student with advanced knowledge gets to use that knowledge in a different way.
Now let’s consider how I’ll respond to the formative assessments. I have two planned:
Entry Slip, Day 2
This is given at the very beginning of class to check on the previous day’s learning. All I’m asking for is that students list and define the four principles of food safety. While students work on the next task, I will sort the entry slips into three piles: (1) students who got most or all of the answers correct, (2) students who got a few answers incorrect or incomplete but whose misunderstandings could be addressed in a short conversation, and (3) students who are showing significant lack of understanding of the material.
Here’s my plan to respond:
For any misconceptions that show up in piles 1 and 2, I can briefly follow up with those students; if I see the same misconception coming up repeatedly, I might take a few minutes to address it with the whole class. Since we already went over the answers to the entry slip right after students submitted them, there’s a good chance many students already understand what they missed.
I’ll focus most of my attention on group 3, the students who are showing significant gaps in their understanding. I’ll put those students into the same group for day 3, when we do the gallery walk. As the other students work through the stations, I can do some small-group instruction with this group, then accompany them through the gallery walk to provide extra support and scaffolding as they analyze the scenarios.
Observation of the Other Activities
The other formative assessment I have planned is observation during the cooking simulations, gallery walk, and Kahoot game. Here I’m looking for students who are struggling. To add some structure to these observations, I could create a simple four-column chart with my students’ names along the side and one column for each of the four food safety principles. As I observe students demonstrating knowledge in each area, I can add a checkmark or a note; if I notice a misconception or mistake, I can note that too.
This should help me spot patterns in individual students’ understanding and also show me who I haven’t observed carefully enough. By the end of day 2, if I haven’t made any marks beside a handful of students’ names, for example, I’ll know to check in with them more closely during the activities on day 3.
Unlike the entry slip, though, I don’t necessarily need to wait until later to respond to what I learn through observation. A lot of that response will happen right in the moment, through the kinds of small adjustments I described earlier as micro-differentiation. And that brings us right into step 3.
Step 3: Capture Micro-Differentiation in Your Plans
As I just mentioned, some of my responses to formative assessment will happen right in the moment, through micro-differentiation. If I notice that a student is confused, for example, I might adjust the question I ask them, offer an extra prompt or example, or tailor my feedback to address the specific misunderstanding.
I can easily picture myself doing this throughout the unit as I circulate and observe students working. I’ll use targeted questioning, responsive scaffolding, and individualized feedback to respond to the needs I see in the moment. To keep documentation simple, I’ll just add a line to the differentiation section of page 1 of my unit plan to capture all of this.
We have reached the end of the four-part Back to Basics series, and now I have what I think is a solid plan to teach food safety. You can see all the parts put together at cultofpedagogy.com/sampleunit.
Obviously, I’ve taken my time with this process. Normally, putting together a unit plan would go a lot faster, because many of these decisions become more automatic with experience. But for this series, I wanted to slow things down and unpack the thinking that goes into each step.
What I’ve done here is a small taste of what I do in my online course, Mastering the Lesson Plan. In the course, we go much deeper into every part of the planning process, with practical tools, examples, and a large collection of instructional strategies to help you make those decisions more confidently and efficiently. If this series has helped you think differently about lesson planning and you’d like to take that work further, I’d love to have you join me in the course.
Mastering the Lesson Plan is our self-paced online course that will teach you how to build solid, engaging lesson plans and sequence them into comprehensive units of instruction. Whether you’re a brand-new teacher or you just want to tighten up on the fundamentals, this course will give you a clear, practical process for planning instruction from start to finish.
References
Tomlinson, C. A. (2017). How to differentiate instruction in academically diverse classrooms (3rd ed.). ASCD.
