Over the last 18 months I’ve been a part of the team writing a new KS3 textbook, De Romanis. When creating language exercises in the Additional Language sections for each chapter we thought carefully about how to ensure that the variety of activities catered to the needs and abilities of different students. In order to do that, we had to ask ourselves: what does differentiation mean? And why does it matter?
I think that differentiation is about enabling students of all abilities to access the same content, and, most importantly, to each have the positive experience of feeling that they’ve achieved something. For the lower end, it’s about structuring a task which fits their pace, without feeling rushed, getting behind, or feeling that they never finish an exercise. For the top end, it’s about ensuring that the core skills and content are practised thoroughly, and that this practice becomes more challenging and complex, so they don’t become bored. It’s not about encouraging them to finish first, to race ahead and onto new material.
Yet often as teachers, we tick the differentiation box just by offering extension work to the top students, allowing a gap to widen between both ends of ability in the class.
We risk ending up with some students who believe they can’t do it and never finish anything, and others who habitually make sloppy mistakes, because they think success means rushing on to the next task.
It’s a bit like children’s playgrounds (bear with me on this…). My 2 year old son loves a slide, and the higher the better. On one side the slide is accessed by a cargo net or a vertical climbing wall, which is too difficult for him at the moment, and on the other by a set of steps, which he can manage. He still wants to get to the top, be king of the castle, and enjoy whizzing down the slide, and he has a variety of options to help him get there on his own.
In this analogy, the thing which brings joy to my son is the sense of completion. So long as he reaches the top and joins in with the other children, he doesn’t mind if others have taken a more complex route. This applies to students too: we need to structure different routes through the same material, some more challenging than others, so that each can have the feeling of getting to the end, even if their routes have been different. If the steps are too easy, they should try the climbing wall or even shimmy up a fireman’s pole to the top!
This principle of different routes is what lies behind the structure of the Additional Language exercises in de Romanis.
There are broadly 3 sections:
- Vocabulary tasks help students master the most basic of the steps, such as meaning, part of speech and recognition of words in different forms (not yet parsing). There are also derivation tasks in each chapter. Accessible by all students, these are straightforward, perhaps like the steps to the slide.
- Grammar identification tasks, usually from Latin into English, practise parsing and manipulation of individual words, always broken down into each step in the process. A bit like the cargo net, they require a bit more control and dexterity.
- English to Latin exercises constitute the third section: requiring either a single word, phrase or whole sentence. With minimal scaffolding, this is perhaps like the fireman’s pole – very easy to lose one’s footing!
Crucially, all three sections relate to the core content within the chapter; this allows teachers to set different tasks while practising the same material.
Our hope is that this flexibility of route through will allow teachers to enable all their students to learn in a positive way at an appropriate pace.
De Romanis 1 & 2 will be published on the 16th April 2020. Bloomsbury will be publishing author interviews, blogs, and resources for the companion site in the coming months.
