Shouldn’t we all seek to individualize instructions to meet each child’s needs? Who could oppose “differentiation”? Well, I do.
Generally, differentiation means modifying instruction or content to meet the unique needs of each child. In that broad sense, all teachers differentiate. I change my analogy depending on a student’s interest and provide more one-to-one instruction during lunch or after school.
But in practice, differentiation has more specific meaning than that definition would suggest. It’s an attempted solution to a persistent difficulty: Children in a single classroom often vary by several grades in their reading and math ability; one child gobbles up early chapter books and another still slowly sounds out words. How can we challenge high-achieving students without leaving struggling students behind?
One approach would encourage teachers to separate children by their current skill level into separate groups or classrooms and teach to each level. Of late, this separation, sometimes called “tracking” or “ability grouping,” has fallen out of favor due to equity concerns, so schools instead throw children all into one room and expect a teacher to modify assignments and activities, sometimes making three or four versions of each, to properly align to each child’s level. This version of differentiation requires a high level of modification from the teacher.
For a number of years, as an English as a second language support teacher, my job was to differentiate. The more I did it, however, the more I saw the approach’s flaws. For one, no matter how sly or secretive I tried to be about modified assessments or activities, kids always knew. Among academically gifted students, there was a sense of unfairness as their peers got modified work. Among those needing support, a sense of embarrassment pervaded. And the justification of “different kids need different things” fell on deaf ears.
Perhaps more fundamentally, teacher time is limited. It’s all well and good to recommend that educators ought to modify activities and assessments. But they also must grade, contact families, go on lunch duty, watch recess, provide feedback, modify their instruction, sequence curriculum, prep the next day’s activities, script discussion questions, and more.
Teachers cannot do all things. As such, we must always ask not if any given instructional practice works, but how it compares to something else that a teacher could be doing with their time. In the case of differentiation, the evidence is lacking. There is plenty of academic literature on the topic—professors talking about the theory and why it ought to work—but comparative studies are few and far between.
One such study from researchers at the University of Connecticut, the University of Virginia, and Yale University found lackluster results. The topline conclusion focused on the difficulty of implementation. Scroll to the bottom, and the authors acknowledge in a small section about the impact on students that “there is no consistency in the few teachers who did make earnest attempts” and “the patterns of student achievement, student attitudes, or student self-concepts.” They could only “speculate” that “differentiation yields change.”
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a popular, holistic approach to education that emphasizes differentiating both tasks and assessments for students. A comprehensive review of UDL’s effects concludes that “the impact on educational outcomes has not been demonstrated.”
If anything, international evidence on the effects of differentiation points in the other direction. Greg Ashman, teacher and education researcher, has plotted the prevalence of individualized instruction against PISA scores among various countries. The trend suggests that more individualization actually decreases achievement.
But there’s a more fundamental problem with differentiation: It’s not clear what the term means, and that muddles any debate about it.
Consider a teacher that assigns a chapter of reading to a class about which they must write a structured, two-paragraph response. “Differentiation” in this context could mean extra support like explicit vocabulary instruction and guiding questions, modified tasks such as simplified readings and audio recordings, or altered assessments like allowing the student to record an audio response and providing sentences starters.
These are a hodgepodge of approaches. Some simplify the content, some support the student towards complex content, others modify the tasks, and still others change the final assessment. Similarly, sometimes differentiation means modifying assessments within a mixed-ability classroom, and other times it means separating students into homogeneous ability groups.
Perhaps this unclear nature explains the negligible, observable impacts of differentiation. The overbroad definition includes a mixture of effective and ineffective strategies. We lump all sorts of practices under the umbrella of “differentiation,” thereby designating them as “good” regardless of any evidence.
The continued use of the term “differentiation” then could justify the incorporation of ineffective teaching strategies. Perhaps we ought to toss it out in favor of debating more specific practices, honing in on what works—not just what fits under some broad, feel-good concept.
