The old short-hand definition of differentiation is teaching different pupils differently – TDPD – and that sounds instinctively right. Of course, we naturally think, all young people are unique and deserve to be treated as individuals with enormous potential! Whilst that is categorically true, it is not the same as saying that all young people should be taught differently.
Despite each one of us being unique, we learn in very similar ways – through hearing and reading words, and through images, for example, and especially when these are combined. In ‘Visible Learning and the Science of how we learn’, John Hattie and Gregory Yates say this: ‘From time to time, we come across theories describing visual learners, or auditory learners, or tactile learners or whatever. But… we are all visual learners and we are all auditory learners, not just some of us’. Daniel Willingham makes a similar point, in his article, ‘Teaching to what students have in common’: ‘Research shows that instruction geared to common learning characteristics can be more effective than instruction focused on individual differences’. The common learning characteristics that Willingham cites are 1) The need to have factual knowledge, because all domain-based learning (physics, geography, history and so on) depends on it; 2) The importance of practice, including achieving automaticity in key basics such as number bonds and times tables, reading, constructing sentences and so on 3) The important part feedback plays in improving our performance.
If it wasn’t possible to teach based on students’ common characteristics, it would be impossible to teach a class of 30 students – something that state-school teachers up and down the land do all day every day. The problem with differentiation is thinking that we must somehow manage the learning of 30 unique young people by teaching each one of them differently – that is a recipe for teacher burnout, and/or regular guilt pangs for the craven failure to differentiate for every individual student every lesson of every day.
Teaching succeeds, on the whole, then, because students share many common characteristics and because we all learn remarkably similarly. Helpfully for teachers, Ofsted weighed in on this issue in their 2019 ‘Education Inspection Framework Overview of research’, where they said, ‘In-class differentiation, through providing differentiated teaching, activities or resources, has generally not been shown to have much impact on pupils’ attainment… On the other hand, adapting teaching in a responsive way, for example by providing support to pupils who are not making progress, is likely to improve outcomes. However, this type of adaptive teaching should be clearly distinguished from forms of differentiation that cause teachers to artificially create distinct tasks for different groups of pupils…’
I remember a school where some years ago teachers in the Maths department were systematically creating up to five differentiated worksheets for each lesson of each day, to differentiate within classes by creating five distinct groups of learners, whose learning was moved along by doing these worksheets for a good portion of each lesson. Aside from the enormous waste of paper, what an extraordinarily unrealistic expectation on those poor teachers!
David Didau has described this whole-sale workload-heavy Differentiation as ‘one of the darkest arts in teaching’, enumerating several reasons why it is unhelpful, the chief one of which is that it often caps, in advance, what Disadvantaged students can do.
Teachers must not feel guilty that they don’t teach each of their students differently; it would be wrong if they did! They need to teach to what students have in common and then, during lessons, adapt their teaching based on the information they gather about their students’ learning. In practice, that involves supporting individual students who are struggling with the work, pausing to reteach concepts where it is clear that many students haven’t ‘got it’, and providing extension work for those who did ‘get it’ and have finished early (after checking that they have done it right). Adaptive teaching involves differentiating in ways that are realistic, and effective. Ah, I hear those poor Maths teachers sigh… that’s a relief!
