Differentiation  & Extensions

Language is integral to learning. Keywords are those words which are central to the topic you are teaching.  Differentiate by:

• Providing students with a glossary of key words.

• Providing a list of key words and definitions which will be appropriate for the lesson.

• Providing a list of key words and examples of how to use them in a sentence.

Images which connect to the words being used help all students to access the work.

Differentiate by including relevant images on any resources you make.

A further advantage of images is that they limit how much text you can include.

Giving examples is an excellent way to differentiate.

Examples make something concrete. They make connections between things which are abstract (words, concepts and ideas) and things which are relevant to learners.

Examples can be related to experience, usage and appropriate context.

Whatever type of example you use, you will be helping students to develop their understanding.

Engage a student in conversation in front of the whole class. This could be done as part of a whole-class discussion or as part of a question-and-answer session.

Use your conversation to model how to use keywords, technical vocabulary or recently learnt ideas.

You might like to choose a student who you know is already confident with the material to have the conversation with.

Afterwards, set the class off an a discussion task which will involve them using whatever it is you have modelled.

Think carefully about how you explain tasks in your lesson. The method I favour is as follows:

• Clear, simple instructions on the board.

• Pictures where appropriate to accompany instructions.

• Verbal explanation accompanied by modelling.

Other options include:

• Students who understand what is being asked explain the task to the whole class.

• The teacher shows work produced by last year’s students (this will indicate how the end result of the task ought to look).

• Provide a checklist either on the board or in a hand-out. Students then work through this, one item at a time.

Envoys is an activity in which students all conduct research. Some then go off and teach while the remainder get taught. Here is how it works:

• Put the class into groups.

• Each group researches a topic. 

• One person from each group then moves off around the room and teaches the other groups about their topic.

• After each group has been taught by each envoy, the envoys return to their original groups.

• Here they are informed about everything which their original group has learnt.

Ask students to indicate how confident they are with the topic under consideration. Pair up students who are confident with those who are less so. 

The teacher can then work with students who are the least confident. 

Here are five ways for students to indicate confidence levels:

• Thumbs (up, down, in the middle).

• Moving to different parts of the room.

• Traffic-light cards (red, orange, green).

• On exit passes (make sure they write their names).

• By telling you directly (though this takes more time).

Ask for a student who feels they are an expert in the topic being studied, or who have finished their work first.

This student is then given a lanyard/badge saying "Expert". 

The class is set a task. The remainder of the class are informed that if anyone has any questions or concerns, they should head over to Expert’s for help first.

You might develop the activity by having two or three experts.

Present your students with model answers in order to show them what it is that you are looking for.

The two great benefits of model answers are as follows:

• They minimise ambiguity. This is because they demonstrate to students what it is that is being requested by a question or task. This gives students more confidence in what they are doing.

• They provide a model! The expectation is not that students will copy, but that they will witness how it is they ought to go about answering.

Stepped activities take students on a learning journey that gets progressively more challenging.

Plan for your lessons to include tasks which get increasingly complex or which require increasingly sophisticated thinking.

It is not necessary for all students to reach the top of the steps. Encourage them to keep working upwards, but if some reach a point that is causing them problems, let them stop there and work through it.

Stepped activities can be based on Bloom’s Taxonomy of educational activities. 

Create a set of generic extension tasks that can be used for a range of topics and lessons that are available for pupils when they have finished your work. These can be subject specific or liked with Bloom's Taxonomy. An example of one set can be found below.

Mission Ambition Extension Tasks - CLICK HERE 

You can provide students with explicit structure guidelines to help them with written work. Here is an example of an essay guide:

Paragraph 1 – Introduction

P.2 – First argument for

P.3 – Second argument for

P.4 – First argument against

P.5 – Second argument against

P.6 – Conclusion

Structure guidelines can be general or specific. You will need to judge what is most appropriate for  your learners.

Sentence starters are a great way to get students going. Here are five ways you might use them:

• Write them on your slides.

• Have generic ones stuck up around the room.

• Produce a sheet or booklet of sentence starters for students who struggle to get going with their writing.

• Create a couple of sentence starters with your class before starting the activity.

• Ask a couple of students who have started writing to read out the beginnings of their sentences.

A writing frame is like a listening frame (see a few slides previous) in that it does some of the work for the student.

This allows them to concentrate their energies on one task – the writing itself.

Writing frames can be highly structured, giving sentence starters or indications of content for every separate section.

Alternatively, they can be more akin to structure guidelines.

You can make some generic writing frames for particular genres (essays, reports, summaries etc.) and use these across lessons.