Traditional classrooms of the past may have featured anecdotal opportunities for students to show or tell of their personal hobbies, interests, or even passions, but a differentiated classroom incorporates this technique much more systematically. The methods for collecting useful information for planning instruction, assessments, and the learning environment (etc.) are fairly straightforward to implement. The two most common ways to learn what students interests are is to survey students indirectly, and the second method is to simply ask them directly. Other ways of learning about student interests, include setting up activities, groupings, assignments, and tasks in such a way that you can observe student preferences through the choices they make.
Tomlinson (1999) lists 15 different strategies (pp. 61-93) that support working from student interests: