(Editor’s note: Today’s post is the latest of a few excerpts from our new book, The Better Teacher’s Toolbox, that I’ll be publishing here over the next two months. You can order the book here, and access more free resources from it here).
Jigsaw
Jigsaw is a strategy with multiple variations but basically involves dividing a broader concept (e.g. biography of a historical figure, the concept of heliocentrism, any lengthy article) into smaller sections. Then, individual students or small groups become “experts” on those smaller sections which they then teach to their classmates. The teaching part is key here, otherwise you run the risk of students not actually engaging with the content.
Differentiation comes into play by assigning more complex smaller sections to advanced learners and lesser complex ones to those students who might need more support. For example, if learning about a historical feature, some students might prepare a presentation on the challenges faced by the person and how they overcame them or what might be the most important elements of their legacy. Others might study the figure’s family or their biggest successes.
All students are involved in learning the same content. But all of them are involved in teaching something different.
Audio Support for Text
Giving students the option of listening to text supports students who might have reading disabilities, like dyslexia, as well as English Language Learners who might have decoding or pronunciation challenges. In addition, just offering the option can enhance students’ sense of autonomy and increase motivation.
For online text, it’s easy for students to use headphones or ear buds with a screen reader. When it’s a hard copy text, they can take screenshots with their laptop or phone and, from there, use a screen reader. If they’re working with a peer tutor, their tutor can read the text aloud to them.
Multilingual Support
If it’s a fairly simple text, and you have Intermediate or Advanced English Language Learners in the class, pre-teaching a list of essential vocabulary words with multilingual definitions (easily created through a generative AI tool or Google Translate) can provide adequate multilingual support.
However, if it’s a fairly simple English text, and you have ELL Newcomers in class, or it’s fairly complex, and you have Newcomers and/or Intermediate ELLs, we’d recommend offering students the option of either taking a screenshot and translating it on their phone or using an online tool on their laptop to do the same thing. Machine translation accuracy for many languages has reached extraordinary levels.
Another option is to encourage students to use one of the tools that will translate text into “parallel text,” with English on one side of the screen and their home language on the other.
It doesn’t appear to us that researchers agree on an exact percentage of vocabulary knowledge needed to fully understand a text, but it does seem to be pretty high (over ninety percent). We think teachers should bear that in mind when evaluating what kind of multilingual support their English Language Learner students might need.
Extra Credit
We know some teachers are not fans of extra credit, but we think creating extension activities for students who have a greater appetite for learning works as an excellent differentiation strategy.
Whether it’s doing peer tutoring if their work is done early , having multiple articles related to the topic being studied available for students to read and respond to, offering online sites that utilize online adaptive learning technology , or in student-run literature circles , there is no shortage of potential advanced learning opportunities.
One advanced activity we often offer to students uses a big poster of Bloom’s Taxonomy sentence starters that we hang on our classroom wall. We invite students to use them to create their own prompts or assignments using the starters under the higher-level thinking skills categories and complete them.
We also often offer students the opportunity to do this extra credit with a partner, which enhances engagement and motivation.
Easier Text or Videos to Acquire Needed Prior Knowledge
As we mentioned earlier, effective differentiation is about making high-level content accessible to all—we want students to be able to access more complex text or other assignments, not make them simpler. But in order to access that work, some students might not have the prior knowledge required to understand that content.
In those situations, providing leveled reading passages covering the same topic but having different Lexile levels is an activity we often use. We don’t assign specific students specific levels—each student can decide on their own which they want to use. The same holds true with different kinds of videos.
There are many sources of these kinds of leveled reading passages. Of course, teachers can also put a text into a generative AI chatbot and ask it to create multiple versions for different grade levels. Remember to carefully review any product it creates before you share it with students!
