Differentiated Instruction

How would classrooms look different if teachers could give each student the individualized support they needed to master any topic, skill, or strategy they encountered? While that might not be a reality due to time, planning, and content restraints, there is a way to get close and help every student get the most out of their learning: Differentiated instruction.

Challenges of implementing differentiated instruction

In a perfect world, students’ assessment results should make differentiation easier for educators. Common assessments allow for consistent administration and standardized results analysis. Formative assessments let educators pulse check students’ understanding and skills more frequently to pivot instruction and intervene with differentiated instruction where necessary.

But even in that perfect world, making differentiated instruction work in every classroom wouldn’t be without challenges. Some factors that can impact its success include large classes with students of differing readiness levels, minimal differentiation training courses for teachers, and extensive planning time.

Educators can overcome these obstacles by adding differentiation to their everyday routines and consistently adjusting which practices work best for their classrooms. Some other techniques to try include:

Using timely assessment data to create readiness-based student groups.
Asking administrators to host differentiated instruction professional development courses to ensure differentiation practices align with learning sciences.
Setting realistic goals or expectations for differentiated instruction, such as incorporating differentiation into lesson planning one assignment at a time.
Finding tools that support teachers in differentiating instruction in their classrooms.

Why does differentiated instruction work?

Despite any challenges that could happen when using differentiated instruction, the reality for teachers is always the same: help their students build skills so that they master standards, no matter their reading abilities or readiness levels. Differentiation is key to reaching this goal because it allows educators to determine which skills students are lacking that prevent them from meeting standards and provide tailored instruction to get them to mastery. This method benefits students of all intellectual and physical ability levels. Positive effects of using differentiated instruction include:

Providing flexibility to give students more options for how they can encounter material.
Helping students of all abilities learn faster, yield more effective results, and achieve growth.
Supporting English learners (ELs) to help them understand content and concepts while learning a new language.
Supporting students with disabilities by considering how they can work and learn within a greater classroom environment.
Creating more engaged and focused student learning environments, which leads to fewer disruptions, distractions, or discipline problems in the classroom.

Differentiation and accessibility

While differentiation is a way to make accommodations for high achievers and striving learners, there is another key piece of the puzzle that should be named explicitly: accessibility. Accessibility in the classroom looks like students with and without disabilities learning the same information, interacting and engaging with the same resources, and enjoying the same services without roadblocks.

Accessibility should always be a consideration when striving for differentiation. When you’re accounting 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 ELs, or making screen readers or other technology-assistive devices available in the classroom are both differentiation and accessibility accommodations.

Leveling texts to differentiate instruction

In classrooms where students have varying reading levels and learning needs, leveling texts to differentiate learning, especially to build background knowledge, can be a game changer for teachers. Reading appropriately complex texts lets students access grade-level curriculum and make progress in reading. According to educator and thought leader Timothy Shanahan, teachers can provide students with texts at various levels to help them meet a specific learning goal, like growing literacy skills or building background knowledge.

If teachers want students to grow their literacy skills and comprehension strategies, reading complex texts at or above grade level in teacher-guided reading instruction and small peer groups can help. If teachers 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 teachers 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. Plus, it removes the potential stigma students could receive from their peers about reading a different text that’s more or less advanced than the rest of the class.

Learn more about student reading levels

Differentiated classrooms with Newsela

If you’re looking for tools to help make differentiation easier across subject areas and assessments, Newsela has just what you need.

With our product suite, you can support and grow every learner with powerful differentiation and scaffolding tools. Pair them with engaging content that teachers can use for effective whole-class, small-group, or individual instruction, and you’re that much closer to creating a differentiated, accessible classroom:

Differentiation in daily instruction and assessment

With Newsela products, you can differentiate daily lessons by content, process, project, and learning environment thanks to helpful scaffolds like:

Leveling: Differentiate instruction with texts at five reading levels and 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.
Spanish content: Provide content at five levels to Spanish-speaking English language learners (ELLs), Spanish language learners, and bilingual education classrooms.
Paragraph counts: Help students follow along with paragraph counts alongside the article as they read or scaffold comprehension and other literacy skills in chunks.
Read aloud mode: Listen to any Newsela article at all reading levels.
Power Words: Practice in-context vocabulary with student-friendly definitions. (Newsela ELA only)
AI-powered supports: Surface before-reading activities, Tier 3 vocabulary, key takeaways, and more on every article.
Annotations: Highlight ideas, ask questions, provide context for students, and create different annotations for each level of an assigned text.
Question type variety: Give learners a variety of ways to show what they know
Real-time feedback: Give both personalized and automatic feedback to guide students to growth
Question hints: Scaffold challenging questions with hints and in-the-moment guidance

How school districts leverage Newsela’s differentiation features

How JS Morton empowered teachers with authentic common assessments and real-time results

JS Morton High School District 201 in Illinois needed a flexible, engaging formative assessment platform to meet the needs of its large population of current and former English learners. The district leveraged Formative’s 20+ activity types to give students more ways to show their knowledge.

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How Benjamin Banneker Academy drove reading comprehension through literacy skills practice

Benjamin Banneker Academy in New Jersey wanted a better way to differentiate instruction for K-8 students while practicing literacy skills. Teachers used results from the bi-weekly student quizzes on Newsela ELA to share insights across classrooms and provide real-time support, which led to typical-to-high reading growth from students who participated.

Learn more

Differentiated Instruction 101

Need a refresher on some of the key topics surrounding differentiated instruction? Browse the questions below to get the answers you need:

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 promotes the idea that every student can be successful with the right guidance and support. Differentiation motivates students to learn all material—even about topics that don’t excite them—in a way that meets them where they are.

According to educators and authors Carol Ann Tomlinson and Susan Dimirsky Allan, there are four areas where a classroom teacher can differentiate instruction. These include:

Content: The information the students need to learn. Differentiating content can include giving students different texts based on their reading ability or by offering the same texts at different reading levels.
Process: The activities a student does to engage with, make sense of, or master the content. Differentiating a process can look like using small-group or one-on-one activities during learning to version a task by student ability or interest.
Product: The projects, tools, or other means that challenge students to show or apply what they know, or extend their learning. Differentiating a product can look like providing multiple options and letting students choose how they want to complete a project or assessment.
Learning environment: The way the classroom looks, works, and feels. Differentiating the learning environment may look like adding alternative seating or holding certain lessons in the science or computer lab instead of the regular classroom.

Differentiated learning is not the same as individualized instruction or personalized learning. Think of differentiation as a change in how students learn. In contrast, individualized instruction changes when students learn something, like the pace of a lesson. It requires an individualized approach for every student, not groups of similar students.

Personalized learning is a mix of differentiation and individualized instruction. It’s concerned with both how and when students learn something and provides students with their own learning profiles and paths to follow. Unlike individualized instruction, which doesn’t involve student choice, personalized learning accounts for students’ interests and curiosities along with their inherent learning needs to create a personalized learning path.

All three of these learning methods have value and support student achievement. Differentiation, though, is scalable for an entire classroom, making it a natural choice for teachers looking to add tailored instruction to their lessons.

Educators are most successful with differentiation when they follow best practices for implementing these types of instruction strategies in their classrooms. One overarching strategy is to be flexible! Flexibility in a differentiated classroom makes it easier to adjust many elements to promote individual and whole-class success. Some areas of flexibility include time, materials, teaching strategies, student groups, and assessments. Other ways educators can implement differentiation in the classroom include:

Setting teacher-defined key concepts: When educators introduce the main ideas of a lesson before they teach, it’s easier to see what students need to know and how to challenge them appropriately for end-of-lesson or end-of-unit mastery.
Using teacher-modified content: 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.
Encouraging student agency: Adding student choice opportunities to a lesson challenges students to become more independent learners. Their choices also provide more data for teachers about the best ways to differentiate future instruction.
Leveraging student groups: A combination of whole-class, small-group, and one-on-one instruction gives students access to a wide variety of learning opportunities with classmates of a variety of readiness levels or interests.
Trying reciprocal learning: Invite students to teach and learn from each other by letting them share what they’ve learned and ask their classmates questions about the content or activities in a lesson.
Practicing ongoing formative assessment: Teachers can use everything a student says or does in the classroom to evaluate their needs and find the best ways to adapt instruction to meet those needs.

Learn more about how Newsela’s product power differentiation in daily instruction and assessment.

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