Differentiation: Making Curriculum Work for All Students Through Responsive Planning & Instruction

Any group of students arriving in any classroom will be characterized by significant diversity, arising from the innumerable interactions between unique biological and environmental influences that have shaped each individual across a lifetime. Differentiation provides a framework for responding to differences in students’ current and developing levels of readiness, their learning profiles, and their interests, to optimize the match between students and learning opportunities. Differentiation entails proactively planning to achieve optimal fit between curriculum and instruction and students’ readiness, interest, and learning profile. A fundamental tenet of differentiation is that any attempt to tailor learning opportunities to student differences must be grounded in high quality curriculum. There are multiple interacting factors that contribute to each individual's learning profile, which is a combination of strengths, vulnerabilities, and preferences that determines how a person operates most efficiently as a learner.