Differentiation

One reading lesson, ten levels

A single English class routinely spans four years of reading ability. The lesson is planned for the middle, and it is genuinely useful to about a third of the room.

8 min read

Short answer

Give every student the same text at their own reading level, with the same questions and the same discussion. Keep the subject, the task and the outcome identical; change only the language of the passage. Then the whole class can talk to each other about what they read, which is the part that stops working when you hand out different worksheets.

The spread is wider than the plan assumes

Take a typical secondary English class. Some students read comfortably above grade level. Some are two years behind. Most sit somewhere in between, but not in a tight cluster — the distribution is flatter than teachers expect until they measure it.

Plan a lesson for the median and you produce a text that bores the top of the class and defeats the bottom. Both groups disengage, for opposite reasons, and both look like behaviour problems.

4 yearsTypical spread of reading ability in one class

~⅓Roughly the share a single-level text genuinely suits

3 tiersWhat most differentiation manages — still coarse

Why three tiers isn't quite enough

The standard advice is to prepare high, medium and low versions. It is a real improvement on one version, and it is what most teachers can sustain — one text becomes three, which is an evening's work rather than a week's.

But three bands across four years of ability means each band is still fifteen months wide. The student at the bottom of the middle tier and the student at the top of it are not reading the same text usefully. And in practice the three versions get written once, in September, for the topics you had time for.

Three hand-made tiers

Each band spans over a year of ability
Written for the topics you had time to prepare
Students can tell which tier they got
Questions often differ too, so discussion fragments

A version per level

Each student reads at their own level, not their band's
Available for whatever topic the lesson needs
Nothing on the page signals which version it is
Same questions, so the class discussion still works

New activity

Topic

VolcanoesReading Routine

10 levelsWriting ten levels…

A1A2B1B2C1C2

One topic, written across the full range of levels — the class reads the same thing at its own level.

What has to stay the same

This is where differentiation usually goes wrong. Change too much and you no longer have one lesson — you have four small ones running in parallel, and you cannot teach all of them at once.

Keep identicalThe topic and the content of the passage.

VarySentence length, vocabulary and structure of the prose.

Keep identicalThe comprehension questions, so answers are comparable.

VaryHow much support is given to reach them.

Keep identicalThe discussion the class has afterwards.

VaryNothing — this is the point of the whole exercise.

If the whole class can't discuss the reading together afterwards, the differentiation cost more than it bought.

What it looks like in practice

1Set the topic once. Volcanoes, say, because it is what the scheme of work reached this week.
2Everyone reads their version. Same content, language pitched where each student is. Nobody's paper is visibly the easy one.
3Same questions for everyone. Answers are comparable, so you can see who understood rather than who got the readable version.
4Discuss as one class. Everyone read about volcanoes. The conversation works because the subject was never split.

In Dily this is what a Reading Routine does: you pick a topic and the passage is written across the full range of levels at once, with matched vocabulary support, comprehension questions and a writing prompt at every level. You assign it to the class and each student opens the version for their own level.

Get started

Bring Dily to your classrooms

Tell us about your school and we'll set up a demo tailored to how your teachers work. Pilot programs available.