To Differentiate or Not to Differentiate, That Is the Question

The Marshall Memo 423

(Originally titled “Teaching to What Students Have in Common”)

In this important Educational Leadership article, Daniel Willingham (University of Virginia/Charlottesville) and David Daniel (James Madison University) address the question of how much teaching should be differentiated and how much should be the same for all students. They identify three categories:

• Characteristics that all students share – This includes common cognitive, developmental, emotional, and motivational needs.
• Characteristics that vary among students and can be classified – This includes differences in abilities, special needs, and learning styles. 
• Characteristics that vary among students and can’t be classified – These include individual personalities, background experiences, tastes, and quirks. 

Willingham and Daniel argue that for schools, the most important category is the first – the characteristics that all students share. These are the needs that educators must meet for their students – the must haves – like the vitamins, minerals, and other elements essential to a healthy diet. Then there are the could dos – the curriculum materials and classroom experiences we decide on – like the way dietary vitamins and minerals are contained in different foods and preparations. “Pointing out cognitive needs (must haves) does not dictate pedagogical methods or lesson plans (could dos),” say Willingham and Daniel, “just as listing protein as essential to maintain health, for example, does not prescribe which protein-rich foods to prepare, much less specific recipes.” 

Looking at what schools should and could teach to all students, the authors present these examples:

Must haves:

• Factual knowledge – “To think critically about science, or history, or literature, we need a lot of domain-specific knowledge,” say Willingham and Daniel. “Students can’t develop thinking skills in isolation. They need to develop those skills as they acquire domain knowledge.”

• Practice – Students need to rehearse certain knowledge and skills until they’re automatic – so they can be recalled without using valuable attention resources. “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them,” said Alfred North Whitehead.

• Feedback from a knowledgeable source – It’s impossible to develop skills without feedback, and the more authoritative the teacher and the more immediate the feedback, the better.

Could-dos:

• Distributed study – Learning Spanish vocabulary, for example, is better done in three 20-minute sessions than one 60-minute session – and the learning is even more likely to last if the material is revisited weeks or months later.

• Recalling facts – “The surprising truth is that probing one’s memory in an effort to locate a bit of knowledge is an excellent way to ensure that the knowledge becomes permanently affixed in memory,” say Willingham and Daniel. “Once something is in memory, you’re better off trying to remember the material than you are studying it again.”

• Cycling between the concrete and the abstract – Abstract concepts are the most difficult to teach – for example, adaptation in biology, variables in mathematics, and irony in literature. Research tells us that the best way to teach such concepts is to move back and forth between the abstract and the concrete, preferably with a wide variety of examples. 

Willingham and Daniel believe that these must-haves and could-dos are solid and lead to better student learning. “In contrast,” they say, “the observation that not every student can do everything the exact same way at the exact same time should not lead to the overreaction of hyper-individualizing the curriculum… [F]ocusing instruction primarily on differences may not be as effective as one might hope… [W]hen it comes to applying research to the classroom, it seems inadvisable to categorize students into more and more specialized groups on the basis of peripheral differences when education and cognitive sciences have made significant progress in describing the core competencies all students share. Teachers can make great strides in improving student achievement by leveraging this body of research and teaching to commonalities, not differences.”

“Teaching to What Students Have in Common” by Daniel Willingham and David Daniel in Educational Leadership, February 2012 (Vol. 69, #5, p. 16-21), http://www.ascd.org; the authors can be reached at Willingham@virginia.edu and danielb@jmu.edu.