The Classroom

What Is Differentiated Instruction? 4 Types of Modifications

Katrina Freund

Aug 23, 2024

What Is Differentiated Instruction Blog Hero

A classroom where every student gets the individualized support they need is one with higher engagement, better student outcomes, and happier learners. But, providing this individualized support can be challenging. With limited planning and instructional time, how can teachers meet the wide range of needs in their classrooms? Enter the strategic use of differentiated instruction.

Today, we’re answering the question, “What is differentiated instruction?” and looking at how you can differentiate certain areas of your classroom instruction to support students in ways that help them learn best!

What is differentiated instruction?

Differentiated instruction is a teaching approach or process that allows educators to tailor instruction to their students based on data and observations about their learning readiness and interests. It helps teachers respond to variance among learners in the classroom.

Differentiation helps educators move away from a one-size-fits-all approach to teaching. It fundamentally encourages educators to teach to the students in front of them. Ultimately, differentiation can motivate students to learn all material—even topics that don’t excite them—in a way that meets them where they are.

Why is differentiated instruction important?

All teachers have the same goal: Help their students build skills so they can master standards, no matter their readiness levels. Differentiation is the key to reaching that goal because it allows educators to determine a student's strengths and areas of improvement and tailor instruction to support each child’s growth. This method benefits all students. Positive effects of using differentiated instruction include:

Providing students with flexibility when encountering information and class materials.
Helping students learn faster and more effectively.
Supporting English language learners (ELLs) to help them understand content and concepts while learning a new language.
Supporting students with individualized education programs (IEPs) by considering how they can work and learn within a greater classroom environment.
Creating more engaged and focused student learning environments leads to fewer disruptions, distractions, and discipline problems in the classroom.

4 types of differentiated instruction

One of the benefits of differentiated instruction is its flexibility in meeting students where they are and across their various needs. Student needs vary:

Across content areas, such as excelling in ELA but struggling in math.
Within content areas, such as excelling at reading but struggling with writing.
Across the school year, such as struggling with a skill at the beginning of the year but excelling at it by the end.

To address all of these areas, educators and authors Carol Ann Tomlinson and Susan Dimirsky Allan identified four areas where you can differentiate instruction. They include:

1. Content

Content is the information students need to learn. Leveling readings is one way to provide different access points to the content students are mastering. In classrooms where students have varying reading levels and learning needs, leveling texts, especially to help build background knowledge, can be a game changer.

According to educator and thought leader Timothy Shanahan, different levels of text will help students meet different learning goals.

For example, suppose you want students to grow their literacy skills and comprehension strategies. In that case, reading complex texts at or above grade level in teacher-guided reading instruction and small peer groups can help. If you want students to build background knowledge on a topic or read independently with fluency and accuracy, reading less complex texts at a reading level that’s just right for them could be a helpful option.

When you can assign leveled versions of the same text in class, it allows all students, regardless of reading ability, to participate in the same discussions and share ideas.

2. Process

Process is any activity a student does to engage with, make sense of, or master content. Examples of differentiating a process include:

Using tiered activities that teach the same skills with different levels of support. Students at the lowest level receive the most support and those at the highest level receive more challenges.
Varying the time students have to complete a task, such as providing extended windows for formative assessments.
Offering manipulatives or hands-on support for certain activities.

3. Products

Products are the projects, tools, or assessments that challenge students to extend their learning or show and apply what they know. Differentiating a product could look like:

Providing choices for how students can complete performance task formative assessments, such as a writing assignment, oral presentation, or a model.
Using rubrics that match students’ varied skill levels.
Giving students the option to work independently or with a small group to complete a project.

4. Learning environment

The learning environment is how the classroom looks, works, and feels. Differentiating your learning environment may look like:

Providing materials that reflect diversity.
Setting clear guidelines for independent work that match students’ needs.
Developing routines and procedures to aid students in getting the help they need from educators, peers, or independent research—like consulting a dictionary to look up what words mean.

To make your differentiated learning environment “work,” explain to your students how some people need quiet, distraction-free spaces to learn and others need collaborative, noisy environments instead. Then, at different times throughout instruction, you can create these types of learning environments for your students to help those with different needs learn best.

Student characteristics to consider when differentiating instruction

When choosing what area or areas you want to differentiate, the first thing you do is consider how it’s going to benefit your students. To do that, you can look at two key areas of their education and personalities. Then, you can group students by these three key areas to make differentiation easier. The characteristics include:

Readiness

Readiness is a student’s knowledge and skill level for any given subject or topic. Background knowledge, life experiences, and previous education can all affect students’ readiness levels.

Readiness levels can vary across or even within subjects. For example, in social studies, students may have deep knowledge of the American Revolution but not the Seven Years’ War. Therefore, their readiness level for understanding American Revolution content would be higher.

In contrast, some students may have a high readiness level in all areas of math but a low level for all areas of social studies if they lack background knowledge on the topics. To find students’ readiness levels for a specific topic or subject, you can look at:

Standardized test scores
Past grades
Formative assessment results, such as bell ringers, pretests, or self-evaluations

Interests

Interests are the subjects, topics, and skills that students like or are curious about. For example, some students might like science better than ELA. Or, they might be more excited to learn about the animal kingdom than how electricity works. Interests can also include what they like to do outside of school, such as sports, hobbies, or the content they consume.

Knowing your students’ interests can help you make content and in-class topics more exciting and relevant for them, where applicable. For example, if you’re trying to help students work on silent reading fluency and give them various text choices for reading, you may include ones about Taylor Swift, hockey, or pets if those things interest your students.

To learn more about your students’ interests, simply ask. Have them complete ice-breaker activities at the beginning of the school year or new quarter. You can also have them keep an ongoing interest journal where they can write or draw about their current fascinations.

Myths and facts about differentiated instruction

With so much information available, how do you know what’s true and what isn’t about differentiated instruction? Explore some of the myths and facts around the discipline and what they mean for implementing differentiated instruction in your classroom.

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Myth: Differentiated instruction requires too much work.

If you’re new to differentiation, it can feel like there’s too much work to do to align your lessons and teaching methods with best practices. That’s not true, especially not when you have the right tools and administrator support.

Worthwhile differentiated instruction requires strategic work, like targeted lesson planning, but that doesn’t mean more work. It just means more thoughtful work. When starting differentiated instruction in your classroom, set realistic goals or expectations. For example, you may incorporate differentiation into your lessons one class or assignment at a time. Then, you can take what you learned from those first few lessons and apply them strategically to others more easily.

Once you understand how it works and get to know your students and their needs, differentiating can start to feel second nature. Using timely assessment data and helpful edtech and instructional tools can streamline the process.

Myth: Differentiated instruction can replace special education support.

Differentiated instruction does not replace special education supports, like an IEP or intervention. Instead, it’s a tool you can use with these additional supports to ensure students get the help and scaffolds they need to reach their education goals.

Differentiation takes into account classroom accessibility so that students with and without disabilities can learn the same information, interact and engage with the same resources, and enjoy the same services without roadblocks.

When you account for differentiation in content, process, product, and learning environment, you can also consider how to make these areas more accessible. For example, offering texts in other languages for ELLs or making screen readers or other technology-assistive devices available in the classroom are both differentiation and accessibility accommodations.

Myth: There’s insufficient research about differentiated instruction to justify using it in the classroom.

Though there are more heavily researched-backed frameworks that you may use in your classroom, like the science of reading in ELA, that doesn’t mean that differentiation is baseless.

Educational psychologist Lynn McQuarrie and colleagues have found that differentiation strategies designed to help smaller groups of students—like ELLs, struggling readers, and gifted students—are actually applicable across the classroom to help all students learn. The same study found that students with learning disabilities benefited more from differentiated instruction than their grade-level peers.

Another study found that reading differentiation for elementary school students helped new readers improve their literacy skills compared with students who didn’t receive differentiated instruction.

Fact: Professional development can help teachers get better at differentiating instruction.

As new differentiation research and best practices become available, teacher training and professional development (PD) can help you improve your instructional practices. You can request formal PD sessions from your administrators to ensure all teachers in your school or district get the same training. You can also sign up for solo courses or webinars to boost your individual differentiation knowledge and skill sets.

How can teachers use differentiated instruction in the classroom?

Educators are most successful with differentiation when they follow best practices for implementing it in their classrooms. One overarching strategy is to be flexible! Flexibility in a differentiated classroom makes it easier to adjust many elements simultaneously to promote individual and whole-class success. Other ways educators can implement differentiation in the classroom include:

1. Setting your lesson objectives early

When you set your lesson objectives early in the planning process, it’s easier to see exactly what you want your students to learn. Then, you can figure out how to challenge them appropriately to reach end-of-lesson or end-of-unit mastery through differentiated content, processes, products, and learning environments.

Sharing the learning objectives with students also helps set their learning goals. When they know what they need to do by the end of a lesson or unit, they can take some responsibility for their learning. Students can practice self-monitoring to see if they’re reaching their goals and can adjust (with your support) if necessary.

2. Creating assignments with varied tasks and materials

When teachers modify lesson activities and content, such as providing all readings in both text and audio formats, they find key opportunities to meet learners where they’re at. It lays the foundation for scaffolding and growth as students work through appropriately challenging assignments.

With varied tasks and materials, you can differentiate for students at different readiness levels while still teaching the same topics—and sometimes even the same content—to everyone, but in a way that’s most accessible to each of them.

3. Introducing information using multiple modalities

Not all students learn best by listening. Or reading or watching videos. If students have only one method to learn information, not everyone will succeed. When you provide multiple modality learning aids throughout a lesson, you can share and reinforce concepts in different, more accessible ways. Some of these aids could include:

Explainer videos
Tangible manipulatives
Informational texts
Static visuals like charts, graphs, or illustrations

4. Choosing student working groups intentionally

Using a combination of whole-class, small-group, and one-on-one instruction gives students access to a wide variety of learning opportunities with classmates at the same and different readiness levels. You can use flexible grouping to best address the learning needs of all students at all times. This includes adding grouping methods like:

Whole-group: Entire class
Small-group: Between two and six students
Pairs: Two students, sometimes three if you have an odd number in your class
Independent: Students work alone

In homogeneous groups, students with similar needs can focus on specific content or skills. Heterogeneous groups, with students of varied needs or dissimilar interests, can learn and work together to improve.

It’s important to consider all these factors when setting up groups. First, decide what you want students to accomplish by working in groups. If you need them to practice certain skills with extra scaffolding, homogenous small groups may work best. But if you want students to teach and learn from each other, heterogeneous pairs, small groups, or whole-class instruction may be best.

Group assignments can be fluid for each lesson, depending on the learning objectives.

5. Trying reciprocal learning

Invite students to teach and learn from each other with reciprocal learning. In this flipped classroom method, students learn deeply about a topic and share what they’ve learned with the whole class in their own words using their own methods and examples. Giving students ownership increases student engagement. A jigsaw activity is a perfect way to try reciprocal teaching.

In a jigsaw lesson, students work with their classmates to learn more about niche areas of a larger topic. Then, they combine what they have learned, like a jigsaw puzzle, which is how the activity gets its name. You can assign each student a subtopic that connects to a greater content topic in your lesson.

For example, if you want students to learn about the branches of government, you may assign students subtopics like the legislative, executive, and judicial branches. Students work independently to research their subtopics. Then, they come together with their larger group to share information and fit their pieces together. These small groups typically also do a performance task to share information about the greater topic with the rest of the class.

Download your printable: Jigsaw worksheet

6. Encouraging student choice and agency

Adding student choice opportunities to a lesson challenges students to become more independent learners. Their choices also provide more data about the best ways to differentiate future instruction.

While you likely can’t cover students’ personal interests in every lesson—such as letting them read about Beyoncé instead of the New Deal—you can still provide choices in other ways. Using text sets may be a way to do this. It gives students options for reading texts on the same topic or theme but still having a say in what they read.

Choice and agency may also involve letting students choose how they complete a performance task, such as writing an essay or drawing a diagram.

7. Use ongoing formative assessments

You can use ongoing formative assessments all year to evaluate your students’ needs and adapt instruction to meet them. Frequent knowledge and skills assessments help you get the data and information you need to differentiate instruction in the moment. You can give formative assessments before, during, or after a lesson to get the data you need to help differentiate at any time.

Newsela makes differentiated instruction easy

Newsela’s products make it easy to differentiate instruction in any subject. Here are just a few of the ways you can use our tools to differentiate in the classroom:

Assign texts at five reading levels and use teacher controls to set the level for students. Lock the level to give students practice with grade-level or appropriately challenging texts, or choose the Newsela recommended level for independent reading.
Provide Spanish content at five reading levels for Spanish-speaking ELLs, Spanish language learners, or bilingual students.
Help students follow along with paragraph counts alongside the articles as they read or scaffold comprehension and other literacy skills in chunks.
Listen to any Newsela article at all reading levels with read aloud mode.
Practice in-context vocabulary with student-friendly definitions through Newsela ELA’s Power Words.
Surface before-reading activities, Tier 3 vocabulary, key takeaways, and more with AI-powered supports on every article.
Highlight ideas, ask questions, provide context for students, and create different annotations for each level of an assigned text.
Give learners various ways to show what they know with 20+ question and content types on Formative.
Give both personalized and automatic real-time feedback to guide students’ growth.
Scaffold challenging questions with question hints and in-the-moment guidance.

Ready to try these features for yourself? Sign up for Newsela Lite and start your 45-day trial to experience the best of Newsela ELA, Newsela Social Studies, And Newsela Science for free.