Teaching involves consistently looking for new ways to challenge each of your learners, to foster a beneficial learning environment for the whole class. In this article, Cecilia Fernández, explores the most important things to remember when teaching a differentiated lesson. Through sharing a personal example of discovering the power of differentiation, Cecilia provides real insight from inside an English as a second language (ESL) classroom.
Cecilia has been teaching ESL for nearly 20 years and specialises in bilingual education at primary level.
Teaching a differentiated lesson
Some years ago, I was inspired by a talk delivered by Carol Ann Tomlinson. She explained the benefits of differentiated instruction and showed some videos where differentiating maths activities looked easy! I had the feeling that differentiating the instruction in the ESL classroom required a further step, because you need to differentiate how to teach the language itself, as well as the content.
It is so rewarding to complete a lesson and think, “that was a really good lesson and my students benefitted from it.” This is what makes me love what I do and always reminds me the effort is worth it.
You might plan a set of classroom activities, carefully taking variety and different learning stages into consideration. You think about how to deliver the learning content, perhaps using technology in the classroom or visual aids. However, the students’ reaction is not the expected one; some look puzzled, while others feel unchallenged. What is the recipe for success?
Our students have the answer
When teaching throughout lockdown, my students sometimes needed a break from the academic work on Zoom. I thought it was a good idea to teach my 11-year old learners some origami, which I found easy and entertaining when I was a child. To my surprise, several of my students were really engaged and knew how to make origami animals.
One of my students said to me, “I love these origami animals you are making, but I can´t fold the papers so neatly. Could I make a video instead?”
I hesitated because my intention was to get them away from technology for a while but in the end, I agreed. She worked with a friend to produce a tutorial on how to make origami. It is a great video that other learners (not to mention myself, of course!) did not know how to make. We shared it with other classes in the school and soon, everyone wanted to try doing some origami.
This experience helped me realise the effectiveness of this particular teaching and learning approach, which also helped me with planning. It is a good idea to set a goal for your students and ask them how they would like to approach the learning.
For example, “We have to learn about food chains. How would you like to learn about this? You could write a script or an essay. You could make a video. Would you like to make an infographic? Or deliver a presentation? Perhaps you could write a rap.”
Top tip: Provide a checklist to ensure learners are covering the key learning objectives through their activities. Rubrics are great tools to assess their learning too and you may decide to create them together.
Important things to remember
There are three important aspects to take into consideration when teaching a differentiated lesson:
1. Do not expect learners to work in silence
Group work encourages active learning, interaction and the exchange of ideas. Setting up working stations is great for this. It is important to ensure that learners are staying focused and not getting off the topic. In an ESL class, the challenge is to encourage them not to switch back to their first language.
2. Practice makes perfect
Once your students work like this, once their creativity is encouraged in lessons and they have more freedom to become independent learners, they will be keen to use this approach more often. They will give you an incredibly wide range of ideas for how to acquire the knowledge and skills established in the learning objectives. You will find yourself learning a lot from them.
3. Teachers are activators
As teachers, we activate learners’ willingness and eagerness to learn. Rapport, trust, variety, creativity and co-working are important in the ESL classroom.
A differentiated lesson could be a challenge at the beginning in terms of planning and implementation, but once you and your students feel comfortable working like this, you will not want to go back to any other approach.
You will find videos from Cecilia demonstrating how to apply key teaching skills in practice in our Cambridge Teaching Skills Roadmap.
