Differentiation? I hate the word as I hate Hell, all ludicrous bureaucracy, and thee!
Er… Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
Differentiation is one of the darkest arts in teaching. The generally accepted position is that differentiation is wholly good, and this is the cause of the wracking guilt felt by harrowed teachers: it may well be good, but it’s bloody hard work. My bottom line is this: any policy predicated on the idea that teachers should work harder is doomed to failure.
Thankfully, teaching’s enforcement arm seem, at long last, to agree:
“It is unrealistic … for inspectors to necessarily expect that all work in all lessons is always matched to the specific needs of each individual.”
Subsidiary guidance supporting the inspection of maintained schools and academies, December 2013
Tom Sherrington writes in his hugely popular post on differentiation that, “every class is a mixed ability class so, regardless of our views on selection or setting, all teachers need to cater for students with a range of skills, aptitudes and dispositions.” But does this mean we have to flay ourselves producing individual lesson plans for all the uniquely different little blighter we teach? Like many of the slippery terms used in education, differentiation can mean all sorts of things depending on who’s talking and in what context. Does it mean coping with difference? Learning for all? Success for all? As the landscape’s changed over the past few years, there’s an increasing consensus that ‘success’ should be differentiated: our examination demands winners and losers. Where does this shifting terrain leave us? Claiming that differentiation just means we’re special and different and should be treated as such is bland to the point of meaninglessness.
So, let me offer my own definition of differentiation: Getting all pupils to do something they find really hard. Increasingly, I see our job as being not to make work easy, but to make it as hard as possible so that pupils will make mistakes. Mistakes are the very stuff of learning. If your pupils aren’t making mistakes and struggling, you’re not doing your job.
Show me a teacher who doesn’t fail every day and I’ll show you a teacher with low expectations for his or her students.
Dylan Wiliam
Obviously, we’d all want to argue that we have high expectations for our students, so it’s helpful to think about what we do in this way. Teaching to improve short term performance is teaching that seeks to make things easy for our pupils. Teaching that explicitly seeks to improve long term retention and transfer of skills and knowledge is teaching that will result in pupils making mistakes.
Consider this example: The chemical symbol for lead is Pb. What’s the chemical symbol for lead? Of course it’s a caricature, but like all caricatures there’s enough truth in it for us to recognise something naggingly familiar. This is how we’re encouraged to teach, and it’s designed to minimise mistakes. There’s no real progress in knowing the answer to a question you’ve just been told. This then is an example of the low expectations we should aim to avoid.
Teach to the top, support at the bottom
Pupils should be expected to get over the same bar, but will need different ladders*. Effective differentiation aims to start with end point and plan how to get all pupils there. This depends on three things: 1) the quality of routines and relationships, 2) the teacher’s commitment to explicit modelling and scaffolding, and 3) marking.
The better your students know what to expect and the better you know your students, the better your ability to differentiate will be. Routines need embedding. They take time and effort to embed. Spending time teaching pupils how to enter the room, present work, respond to questions etc. may seem trivial, but they are groundwork for everything else. When routines are established, relationships can grow. But just knowing their preferences and idiosyncrasies is not enough; you should also know the data. I’ve blogged before on how data can be made meaningful. This much is, I think, obvious.
2) Explicit modelling and scaffolding
One sure-fire way to demonstrate low expectations is to rely on success criteria: they are nothing more than a terrible checklist of low expectations. If we want our pupils to produce high quality work then we will need to provide them with exemplars to deconstruct and commit time to modelling the meta-cognitive processes an expert engages in. Year after year, I’ve watched Wimbledon without getting any better at tennis. How can this be? Unfortunately, we don’t learn well from watching experts work. I only started to get better at tennis after taking lessons and having the processes broken down so that I could recognise and understand what I should be doing. If we fail to model exacting standards, pupils will fail to achieve them.
Scaffolding is the art of knowing what someone is capable of and then supporting them to do something beyond their current capabilities. The trick is remove the scaffolding as quickly as possible so that pupils don’t become reliant on it. This is the problem with writing frames; the scaffolding is hard to remove. You can go through the process of using Black Space to increase lexical density, but it’s far simple and much more straightforward to provide the scaffolding at the point of speech. For reasons that are mysterious to me, it’s a magical fact that pupils are able to write what they can say. If we prompt them to ‘speak like an essay’ they’ll be able to write like an essay. “Oracy,” as James Britton said, “is the sea upon which all else floats.” If you can say it, you can write it. You can read about this in more detail here.
I’ve made a bit of a name for myself by banging the ‘marking is planning’ drum, but I’m also convinced that marking is the most effective way to differentiate. Seeing what mistakes our pupils have made and then giving them specific feedback which they are directed to act on in lesson time is the only sane way to ensure that pupils do have work with is matched to their specific needs, regardless of whether it’s necessarily expected Ofsted inspectors.
And proofreading is an important part of this process. If you’ve embedded the routine that if work isn’t proofread it isn’t marked, then pupils will become skilled at spotting their mistakes. The mistakes we spot ourselves are the ones we’re most likely to learn from. It’s all very well the teacher pointing out where you’ve gone wrong and providing instructive feedback, but it’s so much easier and more beneficial if you can do it yourself. The practice of engaging meta-cognitively with your own work is hugely powerful lever for learning.
And that is how I think we should best approach differentiation. Not as a back-breaking exercise in producing teetering piles of pointless paperwork, but by having consistently high expectations of every student we teach, regardless of their ability and by encouraging them to make, and learn from, their mistakes.
*@TWDLearning came up with this neat summary.
Related posts
Differentiation: to do or not to do
Building challenge: Differentiation that’s quick and works
Differentiating the responsive way from Andy Tharby is also good.
And, surfing the differentiation zeitgeist, Tom Sherrington synchronously posted this today.
A very well reasoned article and quite a refreshing change from the bold quasi religious rhetoric we so often encounter. This is the kind of understanding that has been, and still is to a great extent, missing from the eloquent speeches promulgated by the boys in ‘Westminster Towers’. At present we are the ‘ blind led by the blind and beaten by the paymaster with a big stick ‘. The educational rule book has been constantly re written by order of the current blue eyed boy in parliament until, to some extent, the staff are disenchanted and certainly demoralised. True teachers are born I believe, not made, but most of those who really can teach find they cannot work in the present environment. Where do we go from here?
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David, I think you pretty much summed up many of my feelings about differentiations. The straight jacket of ‘three groups, three activities’ was one of absurd attempt to find a standardised approach to differentiation that misses the whole point of the technique. Carol Ann Tomlinson, who has spent a very ling tome talking and writing about differentiation always has said it starts with knowing your students – know where they are before you start. And then you aim high and support those who need it. I know from my own experiences that as a teacher the moment I stopped trying to run the ‘3 ring circus’ and just set out to know, challenge and support, the better my teaching became and I am pretty sure the better the learning (although perhaps I was looking at performance!).
As for failure I think it is impossible to learn without it – complete success (i.e. 100%) means the students are coasting, not learning.
I teach in Primary and differentiation is made up of 3 distinct groupings – those deemed higher ability, those deemed lower ability and those that fit in the middle. There are also those that sit outside the lower ability group and have additional differentiated support. The only group that is challenged is the higher ability but then you usually have year group teachers above requesting you don’t use activities from their curriculum to challenge higher ability groups in lower year groups due to cross coverage.
There’s also the issue with year groups with more than one class; SMT usually requests all classes in each year group follow the same planing and that also means in some cases, using the same differentiated activities with every class no matter if they don’t fit each class – all in the name of consistency.
Add to that the fact that differentiated work is usually pitched at the middle grouping, with an added problem or two for the higher ability and additional TA support for the lower group and there you go.
Differentiation is another box to be ticked in most primary teachers’ plans.
Really? That’s appalling! So often on Twitter I hear primary teachers telling me the ills of education are confined to the secondary sector. Maybe this an area in which primary teachers could learn from us?
Thanks, DD
Trust me when I say I’m learning.
Particularly agree about marking as differentiation, had a debate at school the other day about this. Ofsted have commented about nit picking up misconceptions in lessons. For some, surely that’s what marking is for? My fear is teachers will be afraid to guide or support groups anymore!
Thought provoking, great article. I regularly tell students “if it is not hard, you’re not doing it right”
[…] Differentiation? I hate the word as I hate Hell, all ludicrous bureaucracy, and thee! Er… Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet Differentiation is one of the darkest arts in teaching. The generally accepted position is that differentiation is wholly good, and this is the cause of the wracking guilt felt by harrowed teachers: it may well be […]
David, when I first saw you say that if the work isn’t challenging then the students won’t progress as fast and far as they are capable of, I thought that was spot on. I still think it is. But, it has now manifested itself in dogma: if students aren’t making mistakes then the teacher is failing. Making mistakes (that survive into the work marked) is one indicator that the work is either challenging or the student has misunderstood, or has been careless, or lazy. Having given this some thought I am of the view that this is an oversimplification. In current high stakes education such a thing is dangerous. I recently read on twitter that a teacher’s lesson had been graded as needs improvement by Ofsted because the children appeared to be able to do the work they had been given.
Challenge is the key. This does not inevitably mean that the student won’t be able to carry out the task. Often a more challenging task will be an extension on previous work, which still requires significant cognitive effort to get right. If the student is thinking and reviewing as they are going along, then this might not manifest itself as a mistake in the finished work. Speed of completion is also significant as is extent of work achieved. Where the student started from (at the beginning of the unit) and how far they got to is also an indicator of the effectiveness of the teaching; as is how long they retain the learning.
One approach is to manifestly design lessons so that the challenge appears as mistakes in the work. However, it is also possible to envisage an approach where the steps taken are more incremental, but the overall challenge is as great, in that the day to day cognitive effort required is the same.
I hear you, and I take the point about dogma. But you’ve already agreed that you thought what I was trying to say was ‘spot on’.I agree with everything you’ve said but I do think that forcing students into ‘mistakes’ is important. If feedback is only able to comprise itself of ‘well done’ then it’s pointless. So, to that end I’ve experimented with giving pupils less time, enforcing certain conditions and using more sophisticated rubrics (e.g. A level marks schemes for GCSE work) in order to give the most able students the experience of receiving feedback which will actually help them improve. It’s not meant to be dogmatic, but having the view that if the work is too easy you’re not doing your job properly is a useful way to examine your thinking.
Are you really arguing that I might be misinterpreted?
Yep, I’m really saying you might be misinterpreted. Re-framing the position as ‘ensure high challenge’ and then giving the examples of how you do this would not be open to such misinterpretation. I think that education is rather feverish and high stakes at the moment. As such, care is needed for those (such as yourself) in a position of wide influence. (I do think your contributions are important).
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I found your presentation at TMSolihull last night a real intellectual delight. Fab to see that there are teachers who reflect deeply about our profession and don’t accept soundbite solutions. You put across my doubts about the current idea of differentiation much better than I did last night. I hadn’t seen this post before so am relieved that my ‘coming out’ about differentiation isn’t a mad idea!
That’s very kind. And yes, much evil done in the name of differentiation!
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“Does it mean coping with difference? Learning for all? Success for all? As the landscape’s changed over the past few years, there’s an increasing consensus that ‘success’ should be differentiated: our examination demands winners and losers.”
The exam system in England has always struggled to reconcile two conflicting aims. Most of the arguments about, and changes to, the exam system have been driven by advocates for one aim or the other. One aim is to set a standard that students either meet or don’t meet. That has advantages; I wouldn’t want the bar to be lowered for doctors, dentists or engineers, and ‘grade drift’ is pernicious. However, the exam system has also tried to showcase students’ strengths. That also has advantages; it gives students the opportunity to demonstrate what they are good at and how hard they have worked. The only way the same exam system can fulfil both aims is to offer a wide range of subjects with a wide range of grades.
That still leaves students with difficulties with speech, language, reading, comprehension and writing skills at a disadvantage. There were good reasons why written examinations replaced the old viva voce system, but the format of the exam means by definition that some students are barred from demonstrating their particular strengths.
Then there’s the issue of the ladders. Because support for children with learning difficulties (of whatever origin) is budget-driven rather than needs-driven, support from outside school is usually deferred until schools have demonstrated that their own ladders aren’t sufficient. By that time, the children in question are not only ‘behind’ but they have tattered self-esteem and a perception of themselves as failures. How is making school work as hard as possible going to address that?
Counterintuitively, teaching and learning don’t just involve teaching and learning. If the ladders that help children address the barriers to learning that arise in the shape of problems with physical health, mental health or socio-economic environment, aren’t put in place until children are 9 or 10 or aren’t put in place at all, no amount of making work harder or having high expectations will make the ladder long enough.
Thanks for this Sue – I written a new post where I address some of these points: https://www.learningspy.co.uk/learning/high-expectations-enough/
But on the making of school work as hard as possible: the key word here is ‘possible’.
[…] night someone retweeted a tagline from a post I wrote earlier this year: “teach to the top, support at the bottom”. Inevitably […]
[…] night someone retweeted a tagline from apost I wrote earlier this year: “teach to the top, support at the bottom”. Inevitably perhaps, […]
[…] Differentiation? I hate the word as I hate Hell, all ludicrous bureaucracy, and thee! Er… Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet Differentiation is one of the darkest arts in teaching. […]
[…] Practical differentiation: high expectations and the art of making mistakes – David Didau […]
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