This is a revised version of the article that originally ran in the October, 2011 issue of AMLE’s Middle Ground magazine. Rick intends this as a myth-buster for some of the differentiation misconceptions circulating in today’s political climate.
The most common sentiment I hear among those who practice differentiated instruction (DI) is that DI is just good teaching. It helps increase students’ learning over what otherwise could be achieved by a one-size-fits-all approach. Simultaneously, DI builds learner dexterity and self-advocacy so students can handle anything that is not differentiated for them.
Why, then, why would any educator declare differentiated instruction a corruption of curriculum and instruction, as author Michael Schmoker first did in 2010? Or dismiss learning styles as unsubstantiated by research, as University of Virginia Professor Daniel Willingham has? Educators, as a result, are left in flux: Do we differentiate instruction, assessment, and/or curriculum – or not?
Not just a gentle ripple across a sleepy mountain pond, the statements of these respected thinkers created white-capped, crisscrossing currents that capsized more than one school’s differentiation efforts. While questioning conventional techniques is a necessary hallmark of professional practice, these postulations created misinterpretations and misguided responses. Years later, confusion lingers, and some teachers have used these theories to justify unresponsive teaching practices and to declare students’ failures as the fallout from diluted curriculum and over-hyped fads. I would like to correct these misrepresentations and put educators’ minds at ease: Differentiated instruction, often better labeled as, “Responsive Teaching,” is highly effective practice. Students learn more with it than without it. To knowingly omit differentiated instruction from our classrooms is a willful act of educational malpractice. We should worry when a colleague, our own child’s teacher, or a policy-maker expresses pride in not differentiating.
Consider the following examples of differentiation instruction and where you would find fault with the teaching:
- Mrs. Hunt provides three examples of a math algorithm successfully applied because her student, Eric, doesn’t understand it after just two.
- Gabriella re-does an assignment after receiving corrective feedback from her teacher.
- Grebing draws upon his knowledge of Kira’s background in baseball to construct an analogy that helps her understand the world of geometric planes.
- Uri is encouraged to use one of three other methods to learn his content vocabulary after experiencing frustration using flash cards alone.
- Nicole demonstrates close to 100% mastery of the unit goals on the pre-test, so Mr. Lounsbury truncates the first few days of learning for her and provides a satellite study instead that allows her to take the topic much deeper than that planned for the rest of the class.
- Because of a learning disability, R.J. uses a sliding aperture made of cardstock, interlocking L’s in order to focus his eyes on just one portion of the busy text and not be distracted by the rest of the page.
- After a lecture, six students still don’t see the relationships among different elements in the topic, so Mrs. Hollas pulls them to a conference table and helps them create a hierarchal graphic organizer that enables them to see how some elements are subsets of others.
- Gregorio isn’t engaged with a topic that normally excites him. Mrs. Silver sits beside him and asks quietly if something is on his mind today.
- Matt, an English-as-an-Additional-Language student, is falling behind, and it’s due to his lack of familiarity with academic terminology.
- Ms. Nickelsen incorporates additional academic vocabulary-building activities into the unit, she highlights key words on task direction sheets, and she confirms directions individually with Matt several times a week.
Most of us find little to fault in these scenarios. As ethical teachers, we would never leave students to ignorance, or let their immaturity serve as full measure of their potential. Instead, we assess students as they learn, then we respond to the insights generated by that data, and we adjust instruction accordingly. If differentiation seems like common sense, it is.
So why would Schmoker or any education leader or practitioner attack DI? Perhaps it’s a lack of thorough understanding of DI, or a response to hearing distorted interpretations of differentiation from colleagues, such as an over-reliance on just learning styles or multiple intelligence theory as sole methods of responsive teaching. Whatever the case, the attacks were unwarranted, and in some places, illogical. As a result, we’re left with confusion in the profession and, for the students of teachers who embraced these arguments, frustration.
In his article, Schmoker writes, “In a series of e-mails, I explained…that there was no research or strong evidence to support its widespread adoption. I asked, with increasing importunity, for any such evidence. Only after multiple requests did I finally receive an answer: There was no solid research or school evidence.”
He later writes, “We now have evidence that the investment in DI…was never fully warranted. It is on no list, short or long, of the most effective educational actions or interventions.” Differentiated instruction is too large a collection of principles and strategies to serve as a proper, narrowed focus for scholarly research. Asking for the research on DI is similar to asking for the research on good teaching — Where do we begin to answer such a question?
Because most differentiated approaches involve using more than one strategy at a time, in response to changes in students, and because life throws many unanticipated curveballs into the messy business of learning, it’s hard to protect the integrity of the experimental design and declare causation, let alone correlation, when looking at differentiation’s impact. We can do it over time, of course, and with a great array of observations, but it’s hard to draw the conclusion: Was Melanie’s lack of performance due to her parents’ separation? A new baby brother? ‘Teacher’s use of manipulatives? Choice of novel? Poverty? Lack of a rich literacy environment at home? Bullying? Too few practice sessions? Too many tests on the same day? Teacher use of a confusing metaphor during the instruction? No visuals during the lesson? No breakfast that day? Illness earlier in the unit? Substitute teacher didn’t teach the right lesson earlier that week? Something else?
Convinced by poorly drawn conclusions from limited studies, some of which are more politically motivated than pedagogically driven, some educators and policy-makers justify bans on responsive teaching. This is professional cowardice masquerading as reasoned discernment, and our students deserve better. To get closer to truth when critiquing differentiation, we need to see research on its component elements, such as:
- tiering for readiness,
- flexible grouping,
- scaffolding,
- adjusting the pacing of delivery or support so content is more meaningful and easily retained in long-term memory,
- using respectful tasks,
- adjusting the amount of practice for different students according to what is needed,
- rephrasing an example so it makes better sense to a student,
- using descriptive feedback to revise students’ skills and knowledge,
- compacting curriculum so advanced students don’t stagnate,
- adjusting sleep patterns to improve memory,
- providing nutritious breakfasts to those who do not have them,
- building prior knowledge where this is none so information “sticks” in the mind,
- coming to know our students well so we know what buttons to push in order for them to learn well, and
- designing lessons to increase what students capture the first time the topic is taught rather than relying on hours of remediation to fix misconceptions and build missing foundations.
As a frequent reader of Schmoker’s other works, I know he sees the instructional value of these elements. Few would doubt their veracity. Here’s the thing: These are all elements of differentiation. As Diane Heacox wisely reminds us, differentiated instruction is a mindset, not a set of recipes to follow. We respond to what we perceive students need in order to learn, and if that differs from child to child, we adjust instruction accordingly, rather than leaving them floundering. Is it really acceptable to say to 11 year-old Jeremy, “You didn’t learn it the way I taught it, and that’s just tough. Get used to it, kid.” This is unconscionable. Schmoker writes, “[D]ifferentiated Instruction…claims that students learn best when…grouped by ability, as well as by their personal interests and ‘learning styles.’” No, it doesn’t and it never has. Yes, we might group according to readiness, which is more accurate and helpful a term than are the connotations and limitations of the word, “ability.” Yes, we might group students according to passions and interests from time to time, just as we might group them according to learning profiles, which are very different than learning styles. A learner profile is a set of observations about a student that includes any factor that impacts his learning, positively or negatively. Figure 1 is a partial list of what might be included in those learning profiles that inform teachers about the context of students’ learning.
Figure 1: Sample Factors to Include in Learning Profiles
Family dynamics Transiency rate
Social-Economic status IEP
504 Plans English Language Learner status
Learning disabilities Gifted/Advanced
Physical health Emotional health
Speech and Language Issues Behavior/Discipline concerns
Nationality (if influential) Diet (if influential)
Religious affiliation (if influential) Technology access and use
Multiple Intelligences Arts – comfort/proficiency
Personal background/experiences Leadership qualities
Ethics Collaborative nature
Personal interests: sports, music, Weekly schedule
television, movies, books, Politics (if influential)
hobbies, other Home responsibilities
ADHD Tourette’s Syndrome
Asperger’s Syndrome Down’s Syndrome
Hearing or Visual challenges Auditory Processing issues
Learning styles can be on this list to the degree that we find them a justified consideration: Do boys in middle school learn differently than girls, and if so, what does that mean for instructional design? Are there strong differences in learning and expressions of learning between introverts and extroverts? Do we need to support students coming from significant and ongoing trauma differently than we do with students who are not experiencing that trauma? Do some students need time to reflect quietly before diving into a task? Does a child need to fiddle with something in his hands to keep his attention on the speaker at the front of the room? Does that student need to use a laptop or is it better for him to record information using paper and pencil?
I agree with Schmoker, Willingham, Hattie, et al. that we do not have as much research on learning styles as we need in order to make all the claims our profession makes about them, but Schmoker in particular is guilty of creating an inappropriate synecdoche of learning styles, using a small portion of something to indicate the larger whole. Worse, he judges the whole based on the limitations of one of its smaller pieces. This is neither accurate nor helpful.
Schmoker writes, “I saw frustrated teachers trying to provide materials that matched each student’s or group’s presumed ability level, interest, preferred ‘modality’ and learning style. The attempt often devolved into a frantically assembled collection of worksheets, coloring exercises, and specious ‘kinesthetic’ activities.” He writes later, “With so many groups to teach, instructors found it almost impossible to provide sustained, properly executed lessons for every child or group-and in a single class period. It profoundly impeded the teacher’s ability to incorporate those protean, decades-old elements of a good lesson which have a titanic impact on learning, even in mixed-ability classrooms.”
If this chaos is happening, it is a corruption of differentiation. No one is asking teachers to differentiate 24-7. It is physically impossible. We do it as warranted, that’s it. As the curriculum conveyor belts they are today, schools were not meant to teach all students, only the ones who get it first. The differentiation mindset and practice were developed to mitigate the negative aspects of schools designed as assembly factories while working with inconsistent and morphing humans. On top of this, some policymakers feel righteous by arbitrarily declaring 4th graders learn this, fifth graders learn that, and this over here is just for 6th grade — Woe to those who do not keep up – when we practitioners know full well that it might take two years for some individuals to learn something important, and others may need only two weeks to master something, yet we’ve slotted it as a six-week unit of study.
The truth is that we don’t have time to teach well in a 50-minute period even when we don’t differentiate, so we might as well do the best we can and try something different when students struggle, need something more advanced, or just a different approach. Those “protean, decades-old elements of a good lesson” are well-defined in the differentiation canon.
When we graduate and go into the working world, we have a skill set that matches a job’s skill needs. We gravitate, i.e. self-differentiate, towards those jobs we’re good at doing. Working in a company, each employee doesn’t need to be at the same degree of proficiency in, or even have at all, the same set of skills. In schools, however, we have to be good at everything everyone else is good at doing, all at the same time and to the same degree of proficiency. No wonder we adjust things occasionally, or often, for students for whom the regular, one-size-fits-all classroom doesn’t work. We teach so that students learn whenever and however it occurs, and that may take different paths for different students. We don’t just present curriculum and document each child’s rise and fall with it. In addition to others, Schmoker writes that, “[Differentiation] dumbed down instruction: In English, “creative” students made things or drew pictures; “analytical” students got to read and write.”
Again, nothing could be farther from the truth. This isn’t even close to differentiation ideology and practice. With these comments, Schmoker lets his fiery contrarianism get away from him, relying on the personal observations of a minority of teachers poorly implementing differentiation.
Differentiated instruction is far more demanding on students than undifferentiated approaches. It provides the proper challenge at the proper time in the learning, and it always pushes students to transcend current status. There’s no room for “foo-foo-fluff” activities such as drawing and coloring a character from a novel when he’s supposed to learn how to analyze literary devices. We don’t ask a student to do an oral presentation on Argon when he can’t balance chemical equations; we teach him to balance those equations. We might change the path he takes to get there, but the ultimate goal is never diluted – he will balance chemical equations. If watering down is happening in the name of differentiation, blame the teacher trainers for imparting an inaccurate mindset and practices, or administrators for letting it happen in their buildings, but don’t impugn the whole of differentiation.
Finally, Schmoker lists the three big elements needed to teach students well:
1. “…[C]oherent, content-rich guaranteed curriculum-that is, a curriculum which ensures that the actual intellectual skills and subject matter of a course don’t depend on which teacher a student happens to get,”
2. “…[S]tudents read, write, and discuss, in the analytic and argumentative modes, for hundreds of hours per school year, across the curriculum.
3. “…[C]lear, curriculum-based objective and assessment, followed by multiple cycles of instruction, guided practice, checks for understanding (the soul of a good lesson), and ongoing adjustments to instruction.”
Differentiated instruction elevates each of these aspects, it doesn’t diminish them. The third description, in fact, is one of the biggest tenets of DI. What does Schmoker think, “…cycles of instruction, guided practice, checks for understanding…and ongoing adjustments to instruction” mean? They call for us to be reiterative in students’ learning and to differentiate instruction as necessary so that all students, not just the easiest ones to teach, learn that content-rich curriculum. In another article, Schmoker calls for teachers to check for understanding repeatedly as well (“What Money Can’t Buy” Phi Delta Kappan March 2009 Vol. 90, #7, p. 524-527 ). And why check for understanding? So we can adjust (differentiate) instruction as needed. With these declarations alone, Schmoker nullifies his entire anti-differentiation premise.
Consider the four non-negotiables of differentiated instruction as identified by Dr. Carol Ann Tomlinson, one of the original targets of Schmoker’s negative commentary on differentiation, in her response to Schmoker published in Ed Week:
“(1) a learning environment that provides high challenge and support; (2) quality curriculum that emphasizes deep understanding of content and ensures that both teachers and students recognize what is essential for students to know, understand, and do; (3) formative assessment that allows teachers to know where students are relative to essential outcomes; and (4) adapting instruction, using the formative-assessment data, to ensure maximum success of each learner.”
Look familiar? It’s exactly what Schmoker is calling for us to do. Tomlinson continues,
“There is obviously no research to support a frantically assembled collection of worksheets and coloring exercises. By contrast, abundant empirical research and research from neuroscience support the assertion that students learn when work is appropriately challenging for them, and conversely, do not learn when work is consistently too easy or too hard; in other words, student readiness matters. Research also shows that students learn better when they find work personally relevant and engaging; in other words, student interest matters. The third element of the model, learning profile, represents research evidence on how gender, culture, intelligence preference, and learning style may impact learning. While some experts question the concept of learning style, other skilled researchers who have recently studied available data on the topic conclude that the jury is still out on its validity. Many experts caution, as do we, that using instruments lacking in validity and reliability to categorize individuals as having a particular learning style is unwarranted.”
For a quick reference to some of that research, here’s a summary from ASCD.
Readers are invited to read John Hattie’s Visible Learning work that Schmoker uses to justify his anti-differentiation stance. Hattie synthesizes over 800 meta-analyses of education studies, and many of them point positively to responsive teaching practices for students’ learning. To his credit, Daniel Willingham, author of Why Don’t Students Like School (2009) and Outsmart you Brain (2022), among others, and one of Schmoker’s go-to researchers for proof differentiation doesn’t work, has posted videos declaring the lack of research on learning styles, not differentiation, is the concern. In fact, he says that we should differentiate according to students’ personality, motivation, and interests, and that students are not interchangeable among their classes, adding, “I wouldn’t want a child of mine in a class where a teacher didn’t at least try to [differentiation].”
Willingham and Tomlinson are correct. Most students can learn by hearing, seeing, and doing. It helps in some situations to hear something spoken aloud, to see content laid out in a drawing or photo, to get the larger context of something specific we’re studying, or to see the motion of multiple parts working together to perform a function via computer animation, but almost all students can learn well in each of these ways, and even better if combined. Just because someone enjoys listening to information doesn’t mean we teach them how to build an engine by oral descriptions alone. We show them how it works, and we ask them to take apart an engine and put it back together, and then do it multiple times, throwing in a curveball once in a while so they can think flexibly about it.
If we use a baseball scoring analogy to teach statistics to a baseball player, a student may recognize the clear application of the topic and remember the concepts better as a result. That’s successful differentiation and good teaching. This does not mean, however, that we must use baseball every time we teach this child, that all baseball players learn best through baseball analogies, or that they cannot learn well through other strategies employed with the rest of the class. It means only that we know our students well, and we successfully use that information to plan lessons to provide what each student needs to be successful. As Tomlinson wrote back in 2010, “The goal should not be to pigeonhole students, but rather to provide options for learning and to help students become increasingly aware of what supports their learning at a given time.”
Differentiated instruction has become prevalent because it works, not because it is an overhyped, shaky theory. Most critics cite the lack of research in learning styles as proof of its misplaced orthodoxy, but this is reckless because it assumes a false equivalency that learning styles and differentiation are the same thing. They are not. Educators with little time to analyze the data are misled. It’s similar to pronouncing SmartBoards as an instructional failure because some teachers use them as drying racks for t-shirts after the class tie-dye activity. We see the silliness right away.
Learning styles are neither the definition nor the primary component of differentiated instruction. If we are convinced of their limited effectiveness by the research and our lived experience as educators over time, stop using them. I am convinced and I have. Declaring differentiation wrong due to scant evidence on learning styles, however, is ignorance, not epiphany. I genuinely enjoy Schmoker’s writings and many contributions to our profession, but he and others have missed the boat on this one. It’s beyond time for them to set the pedagogy straight so our students can get back to learning successfully.
Rick Wormeli is a long-time teacher, consultant, and writer living in Herndon, VA. He can be reached at rick@rickwormeli.onmicrosoft.com, www.rickwormeli.com, @rickwormeli2 (X), and @rickwormeli.bsky.social (BlueSky)