Each year, our classrooms are full of diverse learners with unique needs, and no two years are ever alike –  this is part of what I love so much about this career! However, it is important to acknowledge that this dynamic can leave even experienced teachers wondering how to differentiate instruction and meet every student where they are without burning out from all the extra planning. This is where implementing smart strategies for differentiated instruction can make all the difference. With the right strategies, planning tips, resources, and mindset, differentiated instruction doesn’t have to be overwhelming. 

Now, I’ll be straight with you. I KNOW it’s more work to differentiate. But I also know that when students receive appropriate, differentiated instruction, their academic achievement truly blossoms. I hope I can make this mission just a little bit easier!

What is Differentiated Instruction?

At its core, differentiated instruction is about recognizing that every student in your classroom learns differently, needs a different level of instruction and practice, and then adjusting your instruction to meet those unique needs. The keyword here is different. Not harder. Not easier. Not more. Different.

Most curriculum have been developed to teach “on level” students who perform at or around the 50th percentile. Depending on the makeup of your classroom, this almost certainly won’t meet the needs of a good portion of your students. Instead of teaching to the “middle” like most curriculum provides, differentiated instruction is all about tailoring your teaching to meet each student’s specific needs and providing an intentional, purposeful plan for every student. If we teach every student as if they were scoring in the middle, they will not have the opportunity to show one year’s growth…. And as teachers, our job is to give students the tools and opportunities they need to show at least one year’s growth, no matter what that looks like.

When done right, differentiated instruction leads to higher student engagement, greater equity, and improved outcomes for all learners.  

What’s the Difference Between Scaffolding and Differentiation?

Scaffolding and differentiation are related but distinct teaching strategies that are often confused (so many buzzwords in education!). Scaffolding is about the temporary supports teachers put in place to help students reach a learning goal. This includes strategies like modeling, breaking tasks into smaller steps, or providing sentence starters. Then, teachers gradually remove those supports as students gain independence. Differentiation, on the other hand, is about adapting instruction to meet the diverse needs of learners by adjusting content, process, product, or learning environment so that all students can access the curriculum at their level. In short, scaffolding is how you support students toward mastery, while differentiation is how you adjust instruction to fit different learners.

Think of it this way: differentiation makes sure every student has an entry point that fits them, and scaffolding helps all students climb higher once they’re on the ladder. Even gifted students who have differentiated content that is above level may still need scaffolding supports in place.

What Does Differentiated Instruction Look Like on a Day-to-Day Basis?

As teachers, we do this work of differentiation through carefully planning our content (what students learn), the process (how students learn), and/or the product (how students show what they’ve learned). 

Differentiation Snapshot: Let’s imagine for a moment that you are beginning a unit of fractions. You know some students already have a good conceptual understanding of fractions, while others are still early in their understanding of the concept. Their content, process, and product are all going to look different in a differentiated classroom. 

Content: You’re meeting students where they are, whether that’s giving them the hands-on tools and visual models they need to access the content or extending the learning for those who already have the basics down. Students who need extra support may need conceptual work with fraction tiles to build a concrete understanding of halves, fourths, and eighths, while others who are ready for more might be challenged to apply fractions on a number line to solve multi-step word problems. 

Process: The process by which you deliver the content and build conceptual understanding can also be differentiated: one group might be in a teacher-led small group using manipulatives, another could be working collaboratively at a center, and advanced students might explore fractions through independent practice with digital tools. 

Product: When it comes to the product, you might differentiate by the level of complexity students take on to show mastery. Some could complete a graphic organizer matching models to fraction names, others might solve and explain word problems in writing, while advanced students could design their own fraction word problems or apply fractions to a real-world scenario like sports, cooking, or building.

Important Note: As our school’s gifted facilitator, one thing I see often is that teachers will give above-level students harder worksheets or tests and call it differentiation. But here’s the truth … if we’re not intentionally teaching different content, using different strategies, or asking students to think in more complex ways, simply assigning more difficult work isn’t effective differentiation. True differentiation for advanced students means engaging them with new content, encouraging depth and complexity, or giving them opportunities to apply their learning in creative, real-world ways.

Strategies for Differentiating Instruction

Differentiating instruction can be overwhelming at first (and even for seasoned veterans), but these strategies are designed to provide practical ways to meet your students’ needs without burning out. Whether you’re looking for better ways to support struggling learners or resources that provide extra challenges for gifted learners, your planning approach will follow the same sequence.

First Things First: Analyze Data!

Data isn’t just a bunch of numbers on your reports… It’s one of your most powerful teacher tools! Both individual data and classwide data can help you pinpoint strengths as well as areas for growth, allowing you to tailor your instruction, form groups, and determine what content your students need. 

This How to Use Student Assessment Data post will help you turn data into action and effectively use your student assessment data to improve student growth and achievement. You’ll learn how to break down and interpret scores, use data to flexibly group students based on their needs, and plan differentiated lessons that meet learners exactly where they are. Let’s make data work for you!

Preassess and Create Flexible Groups

Flexible grouping is important because it organizes students based on their specific needs in each area, ultimately helping all students reach their growth targets. We give adaptive, formal benchmark assessments three times a year, which provides valuable data. But pre-assessing each unit can give you even more information for differentiation. After all, if a student has already mastered all of your curriculum’s content, is teaching them the same content over the next four weeks going to result in academic gains? Nope. If you have students who don’t even have prerequisite skills for learning a unit, will teaching them advanced content be worth their time? Not yet. 

After analyzing your student assessment data and preassessment results, you’ll likely need to create 4 to 5 groups of students. These groups will vary based on the subject, and students will move through different groups as they show mastery. If your assessment data is like mine, it gives me a treasure trove of standards and skills that students still need to master! These suggestions really help guide my instruction. 

Use Tiered Activities

Tiered activities are designed to accommodate a wide range of abilities around a single skill. This approach allows all learners to explore the same concept with different levels of complexity.

Here’s what that might look like in a perimeter and area lesson:

• Group 1 (Foundational Readiness): These students don’t yet have all the prerequisite skills for the unit. They need targeted practice calculating simple perimeter and area so they can build a strong foundation before moving into more complex applications.
  
• Group 2 (On-Level Readiness): These students are ready for grade-level work. With a little bit of review, they can calculate perimeter and area and are challenged to apply these skills to a meaningful, real-world project, like designing a garden where they must plan dimensions and calculate space in a variety of ways.
  
• Group 3 (Advanced Readiness): These students have already demonstrated mastery of the grade-level expectations. Instead of reteaching the same skills, they move on to more advanced, vertically aligned standards—like calculating the perimeter and area of irregular shapes or beginning to explore surface area.

This way, every student is still engaged in the same big concept, but their work is matched to their readiness level, helping all learners move forward and make meaningful growth.

This post explores High-Ceiling Math Tasks in more detail. Unlike traditional “one size fits all” methods, these tasks allow students to explore math concepts within their own understanding. High-ceiling math tasks are especially beneficial for gifted students, offering them the chance to consistently grow their math understanding.

Partner with Intervention Staff

Partnering with intervention teachers is also a great strategy for differentiation. If your school has a dedicated intervention teacher or gifted facilitator, they can help by:

• Pushing in for small groups during literacy or math blocks.
• Providing targeted interventions for advanced or struggling students in a pull-out method across different classes.
• Co-planning lessons or providing additional resources that align with IEP or gifted education goals.

The Best Resources for Differentiation

In addition to having the right differentiation strategies in place, the right resources can also help streamline planning to prevent burnout. Here are some of my favorite resources I regularly use to differentiate the PRODUCT side of differentiation! 

Enrichment Binders

As a gifted facilitator, I provide each of my pullout students with an enrichment binder that they use in their general education classroom. This is a perfect resource for gifted students to use as an early finisher task or anytime their general education teacher needs ideas for meeting their unique needs. Their classroom teacher can also use some of these tasks in small groups for ready-to-use differentiated activities. Even if you don’t have an interventionist to help create binders, this is a task you could easily complete yourself at the beginning of the year. Read more about enrichment binders in this post!

Differentiated Math Resources

When I’m looking for rigorous practice that meets a variety of abilities, I turn to math projects! These projects hold so much learning power with their real-world connections, differentiation options, collaborative learning opportunities, and numerous avenues for cross-curricular learning, too.

Error analysis is also a great tool to use when working with a wide variety of students who need extra help or extra enrichment and extensions. 

Differentiated Reading Resources

Just like their math counterparts, reading projects are engaging ways to differentiate key skills like context clues, point of view, text structures, and more. I love to incorporate these themed, skill-based reading projects into our independent work time. Sometimes I’m able to make this a whole-class activity and do a mini room transformation, but other times I just transform one table to make it extra fun during individual rotations!

The depth and complexity of reading standards in upper elementary can be daunting. It’s a lot of material to cover, and most pre-packaged programs lack direct, systematic instruction on these concepts! That’s why I created a series of reading lessons and slides to help your students become confident readers and thinkers and to help you easily plan your lessons.

The reading slides are perfect for tier I/whole group to introduce each skill throughout the year, but that’s not the only way you can use them. 

The reading slides are also perfect for tier II instruction and interventions. You can work through the slides and slide guides together in small groups for more support. 

Finally, a novel study is the perfect way to differentiate content, process, and products. I almost always have novel study going on, where most groups are reading different books that relate to our current unit of study. Sometimes I have two rotations that focus on the novel study — one for reading aloud to practice fluency, and one for completing comprehension tasks, projects, or discussions associated with it. These novel study journals make differentiation a breeze!

More Differentiated Resources

I use logic puzzles to enrich and extend specific standards as well as critical thinking. The math set includes introductory and advanced versions. Although they contain the same content, they differ in difficulty levels and numbers used. This helps you make sure each student’s work is personalized to their needs!

The reading logic puzzles help students practice reading comprehension and critical thinking. All puzzle sets follow a similar format. Teach your students how to complete the first puzzle from the first set, and they’ll know what to do on the rest!

I’ve started to use flipbooks as an alternative to interactive notebooks. The fun flip book format is engaging, a little faster (and less messy without the glue!), and the perfect size to tuck into folders for future reference. PLUS, they come in different versions to make differentiation even easier!

Planning Tips to Avoid Burnout

These final tips can help you streamline your planning time to help prevent burnout while still delivering tailored, high-quality instruction to all students.

Prep in Advance

The more that you can prep in advance, the better! I spend time at the beginning of each year during professional work days to prep journals and binders I know we’ll use each year. This saves me from scrambling week to week! When students are ready for the next challenge, I already have it ready!

Prioritize High-Impact Subjects and Skills

I also focus on the key standards that will have the greatest impact on student success. Our school calls these “power standards,” and we focus on those same strands across all grade levels.

Collaborate with Other Teachers

Differentiation is also much easier when you collaborate with other teachers at your grade level. Our planning team meets once a week to brainstorm and collaborate. We take turns planning for each group and then trade materials. This way, each teacher receives lesson plans for below, on, and above-level learners while only having to plan for one group. 

You can also collaborate with teachers in the grades directly above and below you. When I taught third grade, I often visited the K-2 book club library to grab book sets to use with my below-level small groups. At the end of the year, I reached out to the fourth-grade team to get a copy of their math textbook for my gifted learners. 

Related Posts with More Strategies for Differentiated Instruction and Support

If you’re new to differentiated instruction, I promise it does get easier! Visit these posts for additional support:

• Differentiating and Meeting the Needs of Gifted Learners
• Gifted Tips for the General Education Classroom
• Meaningful Early Finisher Activities