What are the most common myths associated with a DI approach? Perhaps you have heard or been a part of discussions about what differentiated instruction involves. Even for those who are sympathetic to the rationale for and methods of a differentiated approach may find some aspects problematic. Sometimes the statements made about areas that are problematic also reflect underlying assumptions. You probably have either heard the following “Urban Legend” questions or perhaps have asked them yourself.
Urban Legend #1: Doesn’t differentiation lower standards and expectations for students?
Reality: DI maintains high standards as the “constant” and recommends that the means or pathways to learning constitute the “variable.” The teacher may use a variety of strategies to ensure that standards are not modified, and work to create as many avenues as possible for students to achieve the same standards, but in different ways. To borrow a farming analogy, a farmer always tries to grow healthy plants (i.e., standard), makes numerous decisions and takes many actions before planting (i.e., pre-planning/curriculum design), and makes necessary adjustments (e.g. weeding, feeding, even transplanting) at the first sign of anticipated trouble in the health of a plant (i.e., early intervention). A farmer can’t expect a healthy plant to exist where she hasn’t also invested in a variety of ways in advance. This criticism might be more accurate of a traditional classroom in which a teacher may inadvertently lower standards for struggling students or unintentionally conclude that some students can’t learn.
Urban Legend #2: Doesn’t differentiation create unwanted dependency on the teacher to orchestrate learning?
Reality: Teachers who employ DI actually use a “whatever it takes” approach and welcome the challenge of structuring the learning environment so that all students can be successful, self-directed, motivated learners. If anything, an interdependency between the teacher and student is the goal, not an unhealthy dependency on the teacher. In the traditional classroom where the majority of instruction occurs through a lecture or “sage on the stage” presentation format, instruction is very teacher-centered. In the traditional classroom the operating norms include passivity and teacher-directed tasks. The fear that an unhealthy dependency on the teacher might be occurring in a differentiated classroom might be more accurately be feared in a traditional classroom where a majority of activities are strictly teacher-directed and little attention is paid to student interest, motivation, aptitude, or readiness to learn.
Urban Legend #3: Isn’t differentiation incompatible with learning standards and standards-based teaching?
Reality: A “one size fits all” system has a much greater potential to require a teacher to retro-fit the curriculum after students don’t “get it” the first time than a differentiated instructional approach. The standards or benchmarks that each state has delineated subsequent to NCLB do not provide any guidance on “how to teach” decisions. NCLB does provide considerable accountability for results, however, and such accountability warrants a differentiated approach across the educational system. Any approach that anticipates the skills, motivations, and needs of students in a way that allows the teacher to design learning situations to produce a higher degree of student achievement toward standards is a step in the right direction from a standards perspective. A differentiated approach seems to do just that, while the traditional “one size fits all” approach does not.
Urban Legend #4: Doesn’t differentiation require the Teacher to use a hodge- podge of tricks that are unsystematic?
Reality: Learner variance is real, and teachers who teach a mythical “perfect learner” are likely to disregard students who struggle because they don’t fit that mold. When practicing differentiation, teachers make decisions and adjustments based on the success of their students as measured by a variety of formative assessments that inform instruction. Far from using a bag of tricks or haphazard strategies, teachers look to make instructional, assessment, and curricular choices that will produce learning that was previously not observed. Flexibility, not chaos, is the result. In many ways, if what is referred to as “tricks” is synonymous with the expertise a teacher has in his or her “tool box” – then a teacher in a differentiated classroom may not object to the term “tricks.” However, the methods utilized by teachers to respond to the diverse needs in their classroom will likely have some fairly sophisticated thinking behind these so-called “tricks.”
Urban Legend #5: Isn’t differentiation just for kids who have labels (LD, ADHD, ELL, Title 1, HiCap, etc.) or those who truly need something different?
Reality: Even valid labels (e.g., Learning Disabled) are powerless to inform teachers on matters concerning how to teachevery student who may have that particular label. Any “one size fits all” system applied even to a particular sub-group may be limiting in terms of the teacher’s ability to make critical adjustments as the need arises. Labels may be a conventional funding mechanism, but they are not an appropriate instructional mechanism. Labels do not determine appropriate instruction -- teachers do.
Urban Legend #6: Won’t differentiated instruction take too much time away from other important things I need to be doing for my students?
Reality: If by doing “important things” we always mean the success of each individual student, then a differentiated approach should consistently prove to be a safe choice. It is not an “extra” set of tasks teachers do outside of the role they have as instructional leaders, but it is exactly what teachers do. Some aspects of implementing a differentiated instructional approach are time intensive, particularly the first time they are implemented; but the instructional inertia gained should pay dividends later. Some might say you have to slow down sometimes to go fast.
Urban Legend #7: Isn’t differentiation just “tracking” within the general education classroom instead of “tracking” in separate rooms through pull-out instruction? Don’t I differentiate when I send my students to the Title 1 room or Special Education classroom?
Reality: The practice of intentionally using flexible grouping arrangements within a classroom and using a wide range of processes to support learning is not synonomous with “tracking” or even “ability grouping.” DI can be effective with groupings of all sorts of arrangements (e.g., multi-skilled, homogeneous skills, homogeneous interests, etc.). Pull-out models should be used for a very small percentage of students, if at all, and would be better if resources (e.g., Title 1) were a “pull-in” model or incorporated into facilitation of groups.
Urban Legend #8: Isn’t a differentiated classroom too noisy, confusing, unstructured, disorderly, and chaotic for some students to learn in?
Reality: While the “one size fits all” approach may afford the teacher a certain appearance of orderliness, structure, and compliance, there are significantly fewer opportunities for students to learn via higher thinking skills and processes. An observer of a differentiated instruction classroom will have very little context for knowing all of the decisions and rationales a teacher might have for structuring the learning environment and will have to suspend judgement until the formative assessments can show the effectiveness of the methods employed. To borrow an analogy from the sports world, every sport has a neat orderly pattern to set boundaries for the participants – but the rules of the game don’t dictate what each player must think, perceive, run like, or do. So it is in a differentiated classroom. What might be chaos to an outside observer might be like running the “red-turtle-99-on-hut-1” play for a football team.
Urban Legend #9: Isn’t differentiation unfair because a teacher who differentiates doesn’t treat all students the same?
Reality: Providing an equitable learning experience does not mean providing an equal, or same, learning experience. A “one size fits all” system has a greater potential to create injustice by providing to all students what may be viable for only a few students, thus marginalizing the needs of some. The teacher who differentiates assumes variability of learners in advance, and embraces a variety of ways to address needs. Teachers with “favorite ways of teaching” that don’t correlate with their students’ “favorite ways of learning” are probably more likely to create inequities, even while claiming things in their class are equal.
Urban Legend #10: How is differentiated instruction a research-based approach to instruction?
Reality: Both NCLB and IDEA support a “whatever works” approach to providing instruction to students, and while they do not prescribe particular methods, they do provide a framework for what it means to say something is “scientific research-based” (SBR) instruction. Likewise, a teacher using a differentiated instruction approach looks for evidence that decisions made by the teacher, in partnership with the learner, are actually working. Strategies a teacher uses may range from those that clearly have the highest status under an SBR analysis, and can include those that are viewed as appropriate but may not have met all the NCLB criteria as SBR yet. Student progress monitoring is practiced, and data-driven decision making leads the teacher to pursue research-based methods. While there is research to show the effectiveness of a variety of approaches that could be employed in any differentiated classroom, ultimately the teacher must make contextual decisions and adjustments even after utilizing “best practice” approaches IF the formative assessments show that approach is not working.
Urban Legend #11: Doesn’t differentiation require too much of teachers and too little of students?
Reality: This approach does take work, and while it can be complex at times it also results in the increased engagement of learners. A traditional “one size fits all” classroom may actually exemplify this criticism, as all too often students who “don’t get it” are marginalized and later not held accountable for learning. Nothing conveys “Don’t bother trying” to a student more than public failure followed by more of the same approach that didn’t work. Thus teachers in a traditional classroom can fall prey to a pattern of blaming the student for not learning, and in the end may expect too little of students, and of themselves as teachers.
Urban Legend #12: Wouldn’t differentiation eliminate the basis for grading (A, B,C, D & F).
Reality: All teachers should be concerned with the success of their students as learners, and perhaps more importantly, a student’s own ability to communicate about their learning goals and accomplishments. Historically, grades have been used to communicate whether students have achieved learning objectives. DI maintains that each student, to a large extent, is in competition with him/herself, or striving toward personal growth, and the traditional grading scales may not capture that as well as some teachers would like. Grading of student work is a huge topic and one that tends to generate more heat than light. There are a variety of ways to provide meaningful feedback to students and parents that do not have to include the traditional grading scale. Many now use a type of hybrid that includes standards-based reflection as well as classroom performance-based indicators toward meeting the standards. It is interesting that the traditional “one size fits all” classroom grading scale acknowledges a level of diversity in grading (A, A-, B+, B, B-, C+, C, C-, D+, D, D-, and F = 12 variations of grades) that may not be equally matched with instructional approaches used by the teacher.
Urban Legend #13: Aren’t I already differentiating by giving a lot of choices?
Reality: Choices are essential in all classrooms, not just differentiated ones. However, in a traditional “one size fits all” classroom the choices vary only trivially, amount to meager variation, and do not reflect an intentional process of working to maximize what is known of student interests, aptitudes, and attitudes toward learning. Token choices are tokens of the traditional “one size fits all” approach and not a truly differentiated one.
Conclusion
Perhaps the misconceptions mentioned above are not your own. Have you heard some of these shared by your colleagues? Are there others that you know exist but were not mentioned? As you read through these “urban legends” about differentiation, hopefully they sounded very foreign to you. If they are not foreign to you but are actually statements you support, then these are good items to reflect upon further to determine whether they help you to reach the needs of all learners.
Additionally, one of the challenges potentially facing us all is to have a way of articulating a response to a co-worker who espouses such views consistently. Since that may be counterproductive to the mission of the organization we work for, we might want to think through how to discuss these beliefs. More to the point, we should be able to offer a rationale to our colleagues where such dispositions could have the impact of placing students at risk for failure, either intentionally or unintentionally.