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Hello and welcome to Little Learners. In today's video I'm going to be talking about
differentiation: what it is and how we use it in teaching. Before we get started don't forget to
click that subscribe button to join the Little Learners family, as I know many of you watching
have not yet subscribed! And please do give this video a 'like' ['ding' sound effect] if you find it helpful or interesting,
as it really helps out the channel. So differentiation: what does it mean when we
differentiate learning? It really just means that we are adjusting the learning so that children of
all abilities can access that learning, so that might be through planning different activities for
different abilities, it may be that the activity is the same but the delivery of the lesson
is different for different children, it may be that the outcome we expect is different
for children of different abilities, it really does depend on the content of the lesson. It
may also mean that children get different levels of support during the lesson depending on their
ability. So a very simple way of explaining this is having activities for lower ability children,
middle ability children and higher ability children. So maybe your higher ability children
have a bit more of a challenge with their lesson or some extension work, the lower ability children
might have some extra support and some extra scaffolding with their learning, which just means
that they've got a little bit more support in terms of the resources that they get to use to be
able to do that lesson and access that learning. Now of course we can't divide a class up into
lower, middle and high ability because within each of those groups there are different abilities and
different needs, and there are also children with special educational needs and disabilities who
won't necessarily fit into one of those categories. It's really difficult to kind of,
pigeonhole children into three different ability groups, but that just gives you an idea of how you
can think about what your planning needs to look like. Now coming from an Early Years perspective,
everything is differentiated and everything is completely individual. So you have your learning
but you kind of meet every child where they are, and so in that sense you are differentiating on
an individual level. So let's think about an example of differentiated learning. We
have a lesson all about addition and our objective is for children to be able to
add two numbers together and find the total. We have one child who is very confident in addition,
they've shown in past lessons that they understand this skill and they're quite independent
when adding numbers together, and we have another child who has really struggled with a lot of
mathematical concepts in the past and addition is certainly one of them, and they need more support.
Same lesson for the children, they might have the same input, so if they're sitting on the carpet the
teacher is delivering the same input to them but probably asking different questions during that
input to target them appropriately for each child. Then when the children go off to do an activity
they might look slightly different, so we're still keeping that same objective in mind of
adding two numbers together and finding the total. The child who struggles with
this concept and needs some more support may have an adult nearby who can come and help them, they
may be working directly with an adult in a small group, they may have some resources - some physical
resources - so maybe some counters so that they can put out the counters and really see visually how
the numbers look and the quantities look. For example, if they were trying to add 4 and 3
they might put four counters out and then three counters out and then count all of the counters
to come up with the total. This helps children to understand what quantity is, what it looks
like and what it means to add 4 and 3 and come up with a total. So that child will be
adding single-digit numbers and using a range of resources and support to help them do that.
The child who is very confident in this subject and in this skill might have a slightly different
activity. They may well have resources to help them like counters, they may not need them,
and we may add more of a challenge for them because adding single-digit numbers isn't so much
of a challenge for them. So we may get them to add together two-digit numbers or a one-digit number
and a two-digit number and to find the total. We may also ask them to write out the number sentence
when they've added these two numbers together, so if they're looking at a question and it says
add 20 and 10 together, we might ask them to write 20 + 10 = 30. That just adds another
kind of level of challenge for them. It's all about meeting children where they are, allowing them both
to explore the same objective and work towards the same objective, but in a differentiated way.
So I hope that explains how children can still access the same learning but access it in a way
that challenges them and helps them improve and develop their individual skills. So as teachers we
differentiate learning all the time in pretty much every lesson there's a level of differentiation,
it really depends on the children that you have in your class, what the content is and
what subject you're teaching. So one child who might need a lot of support in Maths may not need
any support and a lot of challenge and extension work in a Literacy lesson, it really does just
depend and that's why it's so important for teachers to know their children well
and to communicate with the teachers that they had before, so that we can paint a really clear picture
of where this child is and how we can help them to develop each skill. So I hope that's given you an
idea of what differentiation is and how we use it in teaching, if you have any questions then please
do leave them in the comments below. Don't forget to give this video a 'like' ['ding' sound effect] if you found it helpful
and click that subscribe button if you haven't already to join the Little Learners family.
Thank you so much for watching and I will see you next time.
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