Invisible differentiation

We’ve all heard that metaphor for swans – you know the one, bird serenely gliding on the surface hiding legs frantically paddling beneath. It’s an image that often comes to mind when I see the best teachers. Of course, make it look too easy and observers think it is; a trap that newly qualified teachers regularly fall into.

One way to glide serenely is to make your differentiation seamless. In ANY classroom group – and I’ll just repeat that for those nutters who think that ’setting’ gives them a chance to avoid it – in ANY classroom group, one has to differentiate the learning for the range of learners. However, it would be crass to give one student a resource that is obviously made for a ‘brighter’ kid and another one a resource that clearly isn’t.

Just like you and I, students don’t appreciate being labelled, especially with an audience of their peers. Imagine for a second that you were attending a training course and the trainer gave detailed and challenging tasks to the five others sitting at your table. To you she gave a simplified version, in large print, with a patronising graphic. Even worse, you were made to sit at a table separate from the rest of the teachers (perhaps with crayons and a ‘colour-me-in’ cloth) and then given simplified work. And then imagine that this happened day after day. How would you feel? How would you behave?

This is not to suggest that teachers should avoid differentiating for fear of upsetting their students, far from it. What the best teachers do is to make the support invisible. Well, almost. To demonstrate this, have a look at the starter on paragraphing below. This tiny piece of work is designed to get students thinking about grouping sentences by topic.

The two resources are almost identical but the subtle use of the italicised text gives an extra support to those students who might need it.

One of the pressures of being an advanced skills teacher is that some folk just can’t wait to find something that you’ve missed. They will then race across the staffroom to inform you of your error (no, I am not exaggerating). Such an instance occurred once when I was being observed in my teaching by a colleague who – how do I put this delicately – was just looking for a mistake. He seized upon the the idea that I had not differentiated the learning and, in the feedback from the observation, savoured that criticism just a little too much. Of course, he’d missed it. It was a subtle use of colour on certain resource sheets given to less able students. The fact that I had to point it out, saddened me but also reassured me that, to the less able and self-conscious students, I had achieved the trick of invisible differentiation.

If you’d like the ‘badger starter’, the two versions can be downloaded below.
Badger paragraph starter 1.doc
Badger paragraph starter 1b.doc