Differentiation is referred to as a High Impact Teaching Strategy. To be clear; there is no empirical research evidence that indicates that one class taught with differentiation in place performs better than one without. There is, however, a moral purpose to our teaching, that we should do our best to cater for the diverse range of students in our care.
Tomlinson (2014) identifies four forms of differentiation. To see how they may be applied in Tier 1 teaching in Mathematics see her book “The Differentiated Classroom.”
Some teachers interpret differentiation to mean providing different work for students according to their ability. This can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, where students in the ‘bottom group’ do poorly. This is sometimes referred to as the ‘Matthew Effect’ – the poor get poorer. There is plenty of research about the impact of having high expectations.
In mathematics most people think of differentiation in terms of the content, but consideration needs to be given to the:
- process,
- product and
- learning environment.
For differentiation to work well, the teacher needs to have a good understanding the subject and ways of teaching it, often referred to as pedagogical content knowledge.
Formative assessment will need to guide the various adjustments made to the teaching.
Intervention
Whilst differentiation can help many students access the year level curriculum, there comes a point where more than differentiation is required to help a student. That is, targeted small group (4 students Tier 2) intervention is required.
It is unreasonable to expect that you can differentiate your way out of serious gaps in learning. Also, even within an intervention program there should be scope for differentiation.
Most jurisdictions refer to the RTI Triangle, which indicates that even with high quality, differentiated Tier 1 teaching there are still likely to be 15 percent of students requiring Tier 2 intervention (small group 4 students) and 5 percent who will require constant and ongoing Tier 3 intervention.
Intervention in Counting and Addition / Subtraction is the purpose behind the Bond Blocks kits.
Effective Intervention
The Grattan institute summarised key findings for effective intervention and stated that intervention needs to occur outside the time currently devoted to that learning area. That is, intervention occurs on top of tier 1, whole class teaching. Maths intervention cannot occur in maths lesson time, otherwise the students needing intervention will further miss out on key content and understandings.
Intervention is costly in terms of resourcing, staff time and room allocation. This is partly why we designed the Bond Blocks Kits. After a teacher has administered the placement test they can allocate students to small groups and an Education Assistant can run the four 8 – 10 minute sessions per week using the teaching videos and lessons. Each intervention lesson includes options for differentiating not only the content but the process e.g. desk visuals.
Skilled teachers or Education Assistants will also need to alter the product and learning environment to meet the needs of diverse learner.
Course:
The Teaching for Impact: Differentiation 45-minute video PL touches on these topics.
Reference:
Tomlinson, C. A. (August, 2000). Differentiation of Instruction in the Elementary Grades. ERIC Digest. ERIC Clearinghouse on Elementary and Early Childhood Education.
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED443572.pdf
