Tools to Differentiate Instruction: Differentiated Project Design

The importance of differentiation in a mixed ability classroom cannot be understated. Here’s some good readings on the topic. Not to provide advanced material for the quicker students to devour as well the time, energy, and practice for the slower students is to bias your teaching towards one group or the other. If you want to reach each kid, and keep both sides of the performance spectrum engaged, you have to have material that is engaging for each group.

I’ve added a few new tools to my differentiation tool-belt lately. I’ve been a big fan of adding tiers to the grading rubric for my projects. Tier one is the easiest to complete. To pass students need only show competency with the most basic skills. To earn a 95 (tier 2), students need to show they are making higher level connections, and conveying that understanding. And to earn higher than a 95%, if they reallllly want that extra “+” on that A, then they have to take on a very challenging extra piece. For example, my students recently completed a roller coaster design project. To earn a 65 (the lowest passing score at my school), the students had to design the roller coaster itself, and answer some basic questions along the way. To earn up to a 95, the students had to complete a proposal, where they explain how they designed it and provide evidence as to how it is the best design. And then, to get a 100, they had to do an entirely different design, of a “Turkish Twist” style ride, where the cylindrical ride spins, you get pinned to the wall, and the floor drops out. Completing this extra design involved calculus or good graphing calculator skills; it wasn’t for the feint of heart.

Making passing the project about showing the basic skills helped students who struggle with organizing large multi-faceted assignments from being too afraid to actually do it. Making an A worth more than the basic skills helped the middle of the road students to do some advanced thinking and to demonstrate it. Making the 100 a very difficult problem helped keep the super-fast students working for a long time, while I was able to provide assistance to the struggling students who needed it most.

Here’s a link to the project, for which I use mail merging to make the project’s numbers individualized for each student.