(Teaching to) Learning Differences

Teaching to learning differences is the idea that that all individuals are unique and learn in ways that are particular to them and that teachers must adapt their instruction to meet students varied needs.

Adapted from Tompkins & Ward (2016):

Research indicates that effective learning environments are responsive to student learning differences, both by building on the unique experiences and understandings that each student brings to a learning opportunity, and by continuously tailoring learning opportunities based on ongoing assessments of students’ progress across multiple dimensions of learning.

We propose two ways of thinking about teaching to learning differences:

1. What we call universal access refers to teachers’ work to support all students by designing and implementing equitable and inclusive learning environments.

2. Personalization is an approach in which the teacher provides different learning activities and supports to individual students or subgroups of students in order to move all students to the same learning goals.

While these concepts significantly overlap, we define universal access as addressing learning differences through whole class approaches, and personalization as addressing differences by tailoring different learning experiences to different sub-groups or individuals within the class. Both approaches are intended to engage all students in learning, challenging each student, acknowledge and build each student’s strengths, and to help students develop and keep improving. Both approaches are fundamentally grounded in conceptions of equity, with the intention being that all students reach expected, shared outcomes while benefiting from different approaches (universal access) or taking different pathways (personalization) to get to those outcomes.

Both involve new ways of thinking about five essential elements of differentiation:

• Pre-assessment: Responding to learning differences requires teachers to be informed as much as possible by detailed knowledge about students' specific strengths, needs, and areas for growth across multiple dimensions including students’ academic literacies, students’ motivations and orientations to learning, differences in how students learn, and personal characteristics.

• Assessment: Allowing students multiple ways to demonstrate knowledge and skills, providing both teachers and students with more accurate understandings of students' knowledge and skills.

• Content: Making content accessible by modifying and clarifying content in response to a student's readiness level, interests, or learning profile (see types of pre-assessment).

• Instruction (including both engagement & monitoring learning during instruction): Providing students with multiple ways to access content improves learning; monitoring students’ progress provides information to the teacher about how they might adjust instruction and to provide high quality feedback to the student.

• Environments: A classroom structured to respond to student differences should support, and is supported by, an evolving community of learners that is supportive, strengths based, and growth oriented.

These five essential elements, and a list of instructional strategies aligned with each, are captured in the Essential Elements & Strategies for Teaching to Learner Differences.

The research: While some have critiqued teaching to learning differences for a variety of reasons (which we outline briefly), we argue that the research makes a compelling case that teaching to learner differences is a more promising approach, and more likely to improve student outcomes, than other approaches (separating students into different classes or tracks, teaching to the middle, putting students in more or less rigid ability groups, etc.). However, teaching to learner differences involves learning new and complex instructional strategies. Research suggests that these types of instructional improvements cannot be mandated and instead requires improvement efforts that attend to the need for a shared vision of the change effort, clear goals, formal training, professional community that allows teachers to safely work through shared problems of practice, coaching and feedback, and relational trust, among many other factors.

This conception of learning differences draws significantly on the concepts of differentiated instruction, universal design for learning (UDL).

References:

Tompkins, R.P. & Ward, C. (2016) Teaching to learning differences knowledge brief. Lebanon, NH: Upper Valley Educators Institute