This post originally appeared on Quill and the Classroom.
Imagine you’re at the front of a fifth-grade classroom, preparing to teach the day’s reading lesson. You survey the broad range of knowledge and skills your students have mastered so far, and the differences are daunting. One kid breezes though Percy Jackson novels in his spare time. Another reads grade-level text slowly and laboriously.
What’s the quickest, kindest way to get everyone productively engaged?
The answer most teachers have been given, for years, is differentiation. We “meet students where they are” by adjusting the content, process, or product to account for the different starting points of individual learners. Teacher preparation programs—including mine—taught educators to guard against overwhelming students with unfinished learning by right-sizing instruction to match what they were ready to do.
It sounds compassionate. It may even feel compassionate. But differentiation never ends.
Too often, differentiation becomes a rationale for giving students who are behind their peers easier texts and tasks. And that is where the trouble lies. A teacher who provides 2–3 separate lessons today will find herself leading multiple lessons tomorrow, and next week, and the week after that. . . forever.
Because when students repeatedly receive less-demanding content in the name of “meeting them where they are,” they have less exposure to sophisticated language, knowledge, grade-level ideas, and ambitious thinking. We make it harder—not easier—for them to ever catch up. Keith Stanovich describes this as The Matthew Effect, borrowing from the Biblical principle that the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.
That’s not compassionate. It’s cruel.
So what’s a teacher to do? If we shouldn’t differentiate by downshifting what students learn or what we ask them to do, how should we respond to differences among students? How can we respect “where they are” while making sure they get where they need to go?
The answer starts with that question. We need to guide all students to the same learning destination, while varying the support they receive along the way. That means providing extra, temporary support that helps all students access grade-level content without removing the intellectual work we ultimately want them to learn to do themselves.
It also means creating cultures of learning where students can comfortably ask a clarifying question, make a mistake, and request and receive scaffolds without stigma. For example, a novice may need vocabulary explained, a dense sentence unpacked, the text read aloud, or a complex task broken into manageable chunks.
These help grant access to complex content to students with unfinished learning, but they should not make the learning easier. That is not the goal. Learning should be difficult because thinking is hard—not because students are unnecessarily confused or overwhelmed by everything that surrounds that thinking.
This is why I’ve officially retired the word differentiation from my coaching vocabulary in my work with schools. I find it far more useful to ask: What support does this student need to access the same critical content as their peers?
Teaching to the Top
Scaffolding instruction sounds hard. Crafting custom supports that meet a student’s individual needs adds a layer of planning and effort overtop teachers’ already heavy workloads.
But compare that to differentiation as it’s commonly experienced, where students receive different texts or tasks depending on where they fall on the mastery spectrum. Struggling students get one text, grade-level kids another, and students at the upper end of achievement might receive something more advanced–a tougher text, or a more rigorous writing task to follow.
There are many issues with this well-meaning idea that result in toxic teaching mutations.
There’s the issue of teacher workload. Are teachers really supposed to create two or three different lesson plans for different groups of students every day? That is essentially what many of us were taught. If we managed to pull it off, we wore it like a badge of honor. If we could not, we felt as though we were failing our students.
I can say from experience that, as a teacher in urban schools in my 20s, I regularly worked 12-plus-hour days trying to meet this impossible standard. In those first few years, there were nights when I was so exhausted that I did not have the energy to walk up the stairs to my bedroom and crawled instead. Planning so many lessons across multiple classes was time-consuming and exhausting. And in the end, my students weren’t making the progress I thought that they were capable of…disheartening especially because of the level of effort I was putting in. It is no wonder teachers burn out, and that schools like those I taught in continue to see such high teacher turnover rates.
There’s another way.
Instead of designing multiple versions of a lesson, do what Rachel Ball and Alex Fairlamb describe as “teaching to the top” in their book, The Scaffolding Effect. Instead of lowering the bar to meet students where they are, keep the bar high: provide all students with grade-level, critical content like complex texts and aligned writing tasks. Then adjust the support students receive based on their level of expertise.
Consider that fifth-grade reading lesson you were about to teach at the start of this essay. It starts with a vocabulary discussion, previewing important critical words and phrases that they will see in the day’s reading, to reinforce advanced students’ knowledge and kickstart new learning for students who are behind. Then everyone reads the same grade-level text, with key words on tap to ensure the content is accessible to all. It culminates in a writing task that deploys that same vocabulary and asks students to make sense of the text—perhaps by explaining what motivated a character or how the text speaks to a larger essential question.
In this example, more advanced students still get worthwhile work. Students who are less advanced also get worthwhile, grade-level work and critical content—but with the support they need, just in time, to engage successfully with it.
Meeting students where they are should shape the tools and preparation we provide, not the bar we ask them to reach.
Resources like the work of my pal Dan Reynolds and his colleagues, among others, help us see what this can look like in practice: making complex texts and critical content manageable for every student without stripping away the rigor that makes the learning worthwhile. This is also key to Tim Shanahan’s recent work, which argues for using challenging text paired with appropriate instructional support. Similarly, research and guidance on what it takes to actually catch students up—often described as acceleration—argues for keeping students in grade-level content while addressing the most important unfinished learning just in time, rather than sending students backward through remediation before they are allowed to participate in the work of their current grade.
Scaffolds Aren’t Forever
Here’s an example from my own life—not as a literacy coach, but as a youth soccer coach.
At a recent practice, I was coaching several experienced fifth-grade players, along with two girls who are brand new to soccer. One of my favorite moments came when we introduced a skill we had not spent much time on before: give-and-go passing. The drill was simple in concept but demanding in practice—make the pass, accelerate into space, and be ready to receive the return ball instead of standing and watching.
Rather than designing a separate “beginner drill,” my co-coach and I started everyone with a quick review of proper passing and receiving form. The girls worked in pairs so everyone got lots of touches on the ball, while I circulated and gave the newer players more direct instruction and feedback. The more experienced players benefited from the review; the novices got the support they needed to understand the first step.
Then everyone moved into the same give-and-go drill.
The new players were not as successful as the veterans. They missed passes, came up short, and kicked the ball (sometimes wildly) off-course. And that was okay! As a coach, I intentionally build team cultures where mistakes are not only expected, they are understood to be useful. In this drill, the novice players were doing something challenging, but appropriately challenging. They were supported to stay with their age-group peers, with no shame in struggling to execute the skill perfectly. Meanwhile, the more advanced girls got their practice in, modeled the skill for their teammates, and offered encouragement as everyone tried something hard. And they set a strong foundation for next time, when everyone would be a little bit better at the same hard thing.
It was one of those small coaching moments that was genuinely beautiful. It is still giving me energy as I sit here reading and writing today. And because it was a manageable move that fit my volunteer-coach bandwidth, I didn’t leave practice exhausted or dreading the next complicated set of drills I’d have to plan.
Because there is the practical reality: I did not have time to design three separate practice drills. Nor would that be realistic to sustain. The same was true of the way I taught in my 20s. Yet that is essentially what we ask teachers to do when we train them to “differentiate.”
And guess what comes after teachers and coaches provide three separate practice drills today? Three separate practice drills next time.
I learned this lesson the hard way. After a few years of teaching the way I described earlier—trying to create different work for different students—I realized it simply was not sustainable. With the help of skillful coaches and fellow teachers, I began planning strong, common content for everyone, utilizing my district’s curriculum and varying the amount of scaffolding students received along the way.
That’s when I learned the most important thing about scaffolds: they are temporary. Like the physical structures they are named for, they are meant to come down. As students gain knowledge, skill, and confidence, we remove support.
None of this is easy. It requires a culture where students are willing to do ambitious work together even when they know they are not all starting from the same place. But when you get that culture right, it is a beautiful thing to be part of: students encourage one another, struggle without shame, and get better, together.
