I’ve usually seen differentiation applied as a term about how to engage higher-ability learners, not struggling ones. How do you keep the top 10-20% of your class engaged in this model?
Pace and good foundational instruction. The gap between learners in my classes lessens because all students are taught and given opportunities to practice with the same baseline content, which helps.
I also move very quickly, which leaves those who have mastered the content, working on speed/fluency.
Finally, I do have strategies for extension if need be in my lessons; however, it's very rare I need to use these. Usually they sit in the form of some extension questions that students can work on if they finish tasks early, but they would rarely have the opportunity to do this - if they finish tasks too quickly, I move them all along.
"Our greatest tool for equity isn’t more pathways; it’s better instruction."
Your point that checking for understanding 100+ times in a lesson is actually key to keeping every learner plugging along in a rigorous lesson is right on. I wrote about some of the mechanisms I use in my class to do this here:
My grandson doesn't sight read because he has been told he must decode the words. The easily decodable books he has been given to read provide no incentive to read because they have no story. He is learning that school is doing what you are told to do even though you don’t know why. He is not learning that reading is fun, exciting and a path to new worlds.
I don’t recall a time when my first daughter couldn't recognise a word. As she learnt to say words, she learnt to recognise them. This didn’t happen when she was very young but she was certainly reading by the time she was three. I really don’t know how she did that.
Why bother to read phonetically indeed? Fluent readers rarely resort to using phonics. If a child can recognise a word on sight why teach them to read it phonetically? Wouldn't it be better to teach them new words?
I congratulate you on the thought and effort you put into this thinking.
We wee the 500 words or so you have written here but we don’t see the hours and hours of thought and balancing one idea against another to come up with a coherent and convincing case.
I definitely agree that teachers shouldn’t be including multiple different tasks in a lesson plan to cater for different students needs.
At the same time there are some things I would disagree with.
I do not believe there is “one carefully sequenced pathway through the curriculum”. This would assume that all learning takes place at school.
Let me tell you about some of my own experiences.
My wife and I have four daughters, all born in the eighties.
Our eldest was a fluent reader before she started school. In Grade 1, she was sent to the Grade 6 room to get reading material that matched her reading ability. I would be interested to know how you would handle a child like that. I can categorically say now that school failed her.
Our second daughter, two years younger was nearly at the same reading level as her older sister, but coped with getting reading material from school that was well below her level. She read much longer books at home and was happy with that. (She is now a senior paediatric neurologist.)
Our third daughter was completely different. She had extreme difficulty learning to read. Nothing we, or the school did, made any difference. It seems that there was a neurological development problem – that some pathways in her brain had not developed correctly. This was suggested when she was about 10 and she was given some exercises to do to help correct that.
She was also extremely imaginative and creative. One day she came home from school and said “The teacher was waffling on about something at the front of the class, but I was watching a bird in the tree outside the window.” What’s that about a horse and water?
She still has some problems reading and spelling but will quite happily read a 500 page book. She is the first of our daughters to be awarded a Masters Degree (in Special Education and getting HDs for most of her assignments.) She has also worked for eight years as a teacher in the East End of London. We believe some investigation early in her schooling may have caught this problem earlier. The tasks she was given in the early years were totally beyond her.
Our fourth daughter just didn’t let anything bother her. She would find her own extension tasks and do them. She has just been appointed as an Assistant Principal at a nearby Secondary School.
Our first daughter now has a child who has been formed in the same image as a mother. I’m grateful that she went through the earliest years of school before this current on explicit instruction came to the forefront.
Our second daughter has three children. The eldest (a son) is now just completing Foundation. Our daughter attends the school every Tuesday to help with reading.
She was horrified on her last visit when the students were being shown words on the screen one letter after another and would chant the name of the letter as it came up. For example the letters ‘C - A - T’ would come up and the children would chant them in response and then say “CAT” This same word was repeated several times until moving on to the next one.
The problem is that our grandson can recognise many words in a text by sight but will not read them because he can’t sound them out. This looks like cognitive overload in practice. His brain is working so hard to decode the words that he can’t get meaning from the sentence.
Finally, I don’t think it is a matter of different abilities. I believe it is a matter of different learning pathways. Why teach the word ‘CAT’ to children who already know it?
If we had a child helping out at her parents’ pharmacy would learn the names of many of the medications simply by seeing them so many times. We seem to be ignoring prior, and different, knowledge.
Having said all that, I thank for your thoughtful and stimulating piece.
Interesting points around phonics education. Firstly I am out of phase and speciality in the comments below.
If your grandson can sight read then why isn’t he sight reading? Although I see this as a different point to the phonics education you mentioned above. From what you’ve said there seems to be a difficulty around blending the sounds.
So can children learn to sight read, yes. Does this give them the ability to learn to read for themselves, no.
My own anecdote. My son was able to memorise whole books from quite a young age. He could retell stories pretty much word for word from sometimes only hearing them once.
This mimicked reading as he would turn pages say the correct words in the correct order on the correct pages. But he wasn’t he was recalling from memory.
So why bother to learn to read phonetically if he could just memorise text. Because it does just that it teaches him to read a year into phonics and he can now decode and blend most words - except “tricky words” those that don’t follow phonetics.
He sight reads many of these words, sometimes guessing. But he has the knowledge to decode words for himself even if he doesn’t know or recognise the word. Which means he can access more and more books. He can now choose his own books and have a go at reading them.
Your first daughter, what would she do if she got to a word she didn’t recognise? That she wasn’t able to sight read?
Have you read the research around phonics, EEF could be a good place to start?
Any thoughts on UDL?
I’ve usually seen differentiation applied as a term about how to engage higher-ability learners, not struggling ones. How do you keep the top 10-20% of your class engaged in this model?
Pace and good foundational instruction. The gap between learners in my classes lessens because all students are taught and given opportunities to practice with the same baseline content, which helps.
I also move very quickly, which leaves those who have mastered the content, working on speed/fluency.
Finally, I do have strategies for extension if need be in my lessons; however, it's very rare I need to use these. Usually they sit in the form of some extension questions that students can work on if they finish tasks early, but they would rarely have the opportunity to do this - if they finish tasks too quickly, I move them all along.
"Our greatest tool for equity isn’t more pathways; it’s better instruction."
Your point that checking for understanding 100+ times in a lesson is actually key to keeping every learner plugging along in a rigorous lesson is right on. I wrote about some of the mechanisms I use in my class to do this here:
https://www.middleschoolliteracyproject.org/p/the-power-of-paper
Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for your response.
My grandson doesn't sight read because he has been told he must decode the words. The easily decodable books he has been given to read provide no incentive to read because they have no story. He is learning that school is doing what you are told to do even though you don’t know why. He is not learning that reading is fun, exciting and a path to new worlds.
I don’t recall a time when my first daughter couldn't recognise a word. As she learnt to say words, she learnt to recognise them. This didn’t happen when she was very young but she was certainly reading by the time she was three. I really don’t know how she did that.
Why bother to read phonetically indeed? Fluent readers rarely resort to using phonics. If a child can recognise a word on sight why teach them to read it phonetically? Wouldn't it be better to teach them new words?
I congratulate you on the thought and effort you put into this thinking.
We wee the 500 words or so you have written here but we don’t see the hours and hours of thought and balancing one idea against another to come up with a coherent and convincing case.
I definitely agree that teachers shouldn’t be including multiple different tasks in a lesson plan to cater for different students needs.
At the same time there are some things I would disagree with.
I do not believe there is “one carefully sequenced pathway through the curriculum”. This would assume that all learning takes place at school.
Let me tell you about some of my own experiences.
My wife and I have four daughters, all born in the eighties.
Our eldest was a fluent reader before she started school. In Grade 1, she was sent to the Grade 6 room to get reading material that matched her reading ability. I would be interested to know how you would handle a child like that. I can categorically say now that school failed her.
Our second daughter, two years younger was nearly at the same reading level as her older sister, but coped with getting reading material from school that was well below her level. She read much longer books at home and was happy with that. (She is now a senior paediatric neurologist.)
Our third daughter was completely different. She had extreme difficulty learning to read. Nothing we, or the school did, made any difference. It seems that there was a neurological development problem – that some pathways in her brain had not developed correctly. This was suggested when she was about 10 and she was given some exercises to do to help correct that.
She was also extremely imaginative and creative. One day she came home from school and said “The teacher was waffling on about something at the front of the class, but I was watching a bird in the tree outside the window.” What’s that about a horse and water?
She still has some problems reading and spelling but will quite happily read a 500 page book. She is the first of our daughters to be awarded a Masters Degree (in Special Education and getting HDs for most of her assignments.) She has also worked for eight years as a teacher in the East End of London. We believe some investigation early in her schooling may have caught this problem earlier. The tasks she was given in the early years were totally beyond her.
Our fourth daughter just didn’t let anything bother her. She would find her own extension tasks and do them. She has just been appointed as an Assistant Principal at a nearby Secondary School.
Our first daughter now has a child who has been formed in the same image as a mother. I’m grateful that she went through the earliest years of school before this current on explicit instruction came to the forefront.
Our second daughter has three children. The eldest (a son) is now just completing Foundation. Our daughter attends the school every Tuesday to help with reading.
She was horrified on her last visit when the students were being shown words on the screen one letter after another and would chant the name of the letter as it came up. For example the letters ‘C - A - T’ would come up and the children would chant them in response and then say “CAT” This same word was repeated several times until moving on to the next one.
The problem is that our grandson can recognise many words in a text by sight but will not read them because he can’t sound them out. This looks like cognitive overload in practice. His brain is working so hard to decode the words that he can’t get meaning from the sentence.
Finally, I don’t think it is a matter of different abilities. I believe it is a matter of different learning pathways. Why teach the word ‘CAT’ to children who already know it?
If we had a child helping out at her parents’ pharmacy would learn the names of many of the medications simply by seeing them so many times. We seem to be ignoring prior, and different, knowledge.
Having said all that, I thank for your thoughtful and stimulating piece.
Interesting points around phonics education. Firstly I am out of phase and speciality in the comments below.
If your grandson can sight read then why isn’t he sight reading? Although I see this as a different point to the phonics education you mentioned above. From what you’ve said there seems to be a difficulty around blending the sounds.
So can children learn to sight read, yes. Does this give them the ability to learn to read for themselves, no.
My own anecdote. My son was able to memorise whole books from quite a young age. He could retell stories pretty much word for word from sometimes only hearing them once.
This mimicked reading as he would turn pages say the correct words in the correct order on the correct pages. But he wasn’t he was recalling from memory.
So why bother to learn to read phonetically if he could just memorise text. Because it does just that it teaches him to read a year into phonics and he can now decode and blend most words - except “tricky words” those that don’t follow phonetics.
He sight reads many of these words, sometimes guessing. But he has the knowledge to decode words for himself even if he doesn’t know or recognise the word. Which means he can access more and more books. He can now choose his own books and have a go at reading them.
Your first daughter, what would she do if she got to a word she didn’t recognise? That she wasn’t able to sight read?
Have you read the research around phonics, EEF could be a good place to start?
https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/teaching-learning-toolkit/phonics