Differentiating Writing Assignments: Providing Options and Opportunities to Increase Engagement

Our first blog posts of the semester have suggested how we can effectively engage students by providing multiple pathways and trailheads to writing in course documents and how different types of practice can help students become more effective writing practitioners in their fields. In this post, we’ll continue this theme by introducing differentiation as a strategy for engaging student writers with different backgrounds, motivations, and connections to student writing.

What is differentiation? (and two things it isn’t)

In educational contexts, differentiation refers to strategies of varying instruction and activities based on students' interests, perceived readiness, and prior experiences (sometimes called their learning profile). Tomlinson and Imbeau (2010) suggest that differentiation begins with a crucial question: “What does this student need at this moment to progress with this key content, and what do I need to do to make that happen?” When confronted with learners with different needs, interests, and abilities, how do we give every student opportunities to grow and learn?

Differentiation is not individualized instruction

In a differentiated classroom, instructors vary some instructional activities for different groups of students but might still maintain large group instruction and assessments. Differentiation doesn’t imply managing 40 individually designed tutorials in the context of a single class. While grouping and activity can vary, differentiation is more about providing choices and options and asking students to participate in their learning actively.

Differentiation is not about more or less work or greater or reduced rigor

In a differentiated classroom, all students should work with challenging material that meets and extends their current knowledge and abilities. Assigning more of the same work to an advanced learner or reducing the work for others is not an effective differentiation strategy. While activities might demand different kinds of thinking (exploration, application, extension), all students should work on writing assignments that represent a wise next step in their learning. This could mean asking novice students to spend time on activities to demonstrate mastery of skills and knowledge, while a student who can already demonstrate those skills and knowledge can address other questions or contents.

Where might differentiation be appropriate?

• Combined graduate/undergraduate courses in which students are pursuing different degree programs
• Cross-listed courses where students bring different disciplinary knowledge and experience
• Courses that serve both majors and non-majors
• Courses in so-called “flat” curricula, where early-career students and late-career students may be enrolled in the same course
• Courses that include students fulfilling a degree requirement and students opting to take the course as an elective

How can differentiation work? Three initial strategies

Instructors can choose to differentiate course materials, instructional strategies, and assignments to meet their students' needs, experiences, and motivations. Here are three examples.

Providing options for informal writing activities

When designing writing-to-learn prompts, ask students to reflect on their prior educational experiences or future academic and professional goals in response to course readings. For example, in a hydrology course, an instructor might offer two options:

• Design a demonstration to explain Darcy’s Law to a community group interested in the risk of groundwater contamination from a nearby manufacturing plant. What do residents need to know about permeability to understand possible risks?
• Design an experiment to test soil permeability in a neighborhood near a manufacturing plant that includes at least one potential intervention against contamination.

Providing options for greater scaffolding or greater independence

When designing formal assignments, give students the option to begin with an open-ended question or information-gathering task or to start from a preselected set of resources, samples, or materials. Tomlinson and McTighe (2006) recommend beginning with an assignment designed for advanced learners and then building backward to consider the support a less experienced student might need.

For example, students in a graphic design course can be offered the same design challenge (updating the aesthetic of a company website), but with different levels of support. Advanced students might select precedents through research and exploration, while less experienced students might be offered a limited set of precedents for reference.

Providing options to address varying audiences and purposes

By providing options that require different application skills related to the core content, instructors can differentiate assignments based on students' planned next steps in the curriculum. Early students can practice core skills and focus on exploration and understanding, while students closer to degree completion can focus on career skills and application.

For example, in a retail merchandising course, second-year students could brainstorm questions to ask a focus group of teenagers about their preferences for online shopping for back-to-school clothes, while fourth-year students could evaluate the quality of an online retailer’s web design from the perspective of existing market research. In each case, students engage with market research (conducting focus groups and assessing user experience) but with different audiences and goals in mind.

But is this fair? Doesn’t differentiation create a double standard?

Instructors may be concerned that varying content, instruction, and assignments could create an unfair double standard in their courses. In courses with an enforced curve where grades are assigned by rank (the top 5% earn As, the next 20% earn Bs, etc.), differentiation could introduce risks where students' choices of content could influence their scores.

However, in most classes, grades can be connected to the mastery of factual, conceptual, and procedural knowledge in ways that ensure fairness. Connecting all assignments clearly to course learning goals and all assessments to mastery of key content can afford students multiple pathways to success. Rather than boring advanced students with material they have already mastered or frustrating less experienced students with tasks they cannot perform without added support, differentiation allows all participants in the course to engage.

Please share your practices!

We know veteran instructors have already developed effective strategies to meet the needs of students with different experiences, interests, and connections to the subject matter we teach. In the comments below, we invite you to share how you offer choice and vary instruction and assignments to give students the greatest opportunities for learning through writing.