Differentiation by Questioning

Differentiation by Questioning

Prior to teaching a lesson, best practice shows us that taking the time to predict where students will struggle and plan ahead for how we will handle those situations will result in more effective instruction. While we're at it, why not plan ahead for how we can push the thinking of students who find success early on with a problem, activity or task?

When we're planning an activity or task we often have 3 main groups to consider:
A. Students who will struggle and need assistance.
B. Students for which this task will be "just right" and will provide the perfect amount of challenge.
C. Students who are higher level thinkers and will need more challenge. 

One way to do this is by planning 2 sets of prompts that will either guide student thinking and help them overcome a challenge, or push student thinking about the concept to a deeper level. 

Assessing Prompts (aka "Unstucking" Prompts) 

These prompts serve two goals:

1. Assess student understanding (Assessing)

2. Help guide student thinking without providing an answer or teaching the concept.  ("Unstucking")

Either way, our goal in using one of these prompts is to avoid teaching students and providing students with the answer. We want to ask thought provoking questions, help the student recall important information that they already know, and help them move in the right direction in order to find success with the task. As we're doing this, it is a great opportunity to subtly gather data as to student strengths and weaknesses regarding the skill and perhaps identify future areas of needed intervention or instruction.

Advancing Prompts

The purpose for these prompts is exactly what it sounds like - advancing student thinking!  These are a bit more difficult to come up with, but when we do, we can easily take an average level activity, and seamlessly challenge our students without having to create something new entirely new.

Let's Try!

Alex Says that when you multiply two fractions the product always gets smaller. Is he correct or incorrect? Why or why not?

Assessing/"Unstucking" Prompts:

• What do you know about multiplying fractions?
• Show me how to multiply two fractions?
• Can you think of a situation where that wouldn't be true?
• What kinds of fractions do you know about?

Advancing Prompts

• What would the relationship have to be between the numerator and denominator to make Alex's statement ALWAYS true?
• What situation would make Alex's statement false?
• How could you reword Alex's statement to make it true?

The time spent planning here was not on creating 3 different tasks, our time was spent taking something that may be a grade level expectation and making it suitable for students at various levels. This is one way to easily differentiate an assignment, task, or problem! Give it a try!