Differentiation Is Darn Difficult

Meditations from a mere mortal, merely teaching

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Three Sounds, 1926 by Tulip Hysteria

Managing Being Mortal

If something needs saying, Robert Pondiscio often says it best: Have We Made Teaching Too Hard for Mere Mortals?

Yes, we have. When my older son started kindergarten nearly three decades ago, I was concerned that as a teacher myself, I would be an unpleasant parent: dogged and demanding. The reality was different. I was enthralled by the whole setup: an intricately impressive network of classroom supplies and bulletin boards that I never had to fuss with at the high school level. Here he was in a whole-language classroom (a term that meant nothing to me at the time), having arrived primed to read—and when he dutifully set about doing so, no one wondered how. After all, I left my own whole-word classroom and my friends Dick and Jane as a fluent reader—just as remarkably. As a high school English teacher, I knew nothing about beginning reading instruction, and looking back now through the lens of a reading specialist, I see that my son’s kindergarten teacher didn’t either. Fortunately, in his case, she didn’t need to.

As it turned out, my two sons were on opposite ends of the reading continuum—the older one reading at five and the younger one, a summer child, becoming a reader in the middle of first grade when he was over seven years old. We know that children learning to read an opaque language like English with its complex spelling patterns can take up to two years longer to become proficient than those faced with a transparent language like Greek, which I learned to read and write after school as a first grader. But my own facility with language learning provides a skewed picture. It is a minority of children like me and my older son who learn to read regardless of instruction. Far more common are the experiences of my younger son who greatly benefited from his first grade teacher’s systematic phonics instruction.

In light of these experiences with my two sons, it was quite interesting to see one father on social media fret over when he could expect academics to appear in kindergarten, even though we could see from his posts how his child had already nailed knowledge of some key kindergarten skills and was reading and writing well-above grade level. I wondered which academics this determined dad had in mind.

Of course we need to address the needs of all of our students—which is not just a cliché that we robotically recite but a goal we actually value. However, the question of how to effectively differentiate instruction when the range of abilities in a class is not just vast but often vastly unmanageable, is a question more easily pondered than responded to.

For the most part, when it came to literacy, my own children didn’t start receiving academics until the fifth grade. Prior to that they spent a lot of time drawing coffins around words (Lyn Stone’s comic, but apt, description of that useless activity) with the hope, presumably, that outlining the shape of a word would somehow relate to reading by igniting recognition of the visual form in text; sitting in literature circles discussing books without the teacher present to guide the discussion; and making mangled macaroni projects at home.

So it’s been a bit jarring to witness the push for academics in kindergarten from parents whose children already arrive reading, writing, and articulating with sophisticated vocabulary the wide-ranging experiences they’ve been fortunate enough to have been exposed to.

The truth is that I didn’t need to be hard on their teachers. They didn’t know better (and, for that matter, neither did I), so they did what they thought was best, even if it was a far cry from what many of their students needed. They were hardworking and dedicated, meticulously managing the minutiae of the elementary school classroom: reading stories, romping around to music, and attending to classroom culture—leaving no wall uncovered and no holiday uncelebrated. My children loved them! But make no mistake about it: With the notable exception of my younger son’s remarkable first grade teacher, these beloved educators weren’t teaching reading to anyone, not even to the students who needed that instruction the most—a situation, thankfully, that we are now on a nationwide crusade to remedy.

Therefore, when I, a mere mortal, moved from high school to elementary school—from Lady Macbeth to Mary and her little lamb—and, like my colleagues, ran myself ragged assembling centers for students to work at when they weren’t being guided by me in small group instruction, I decided that instead of getting a multiple subject credential to continue teaching elementary school, I would opt for a reading specialist credential and work with intervention students. The following year I entered a credential program, discovered the books by Diane McGuinness, and started my professional journey toward the science of reading.

Welcome to Hawaii

On his way to becoming a math guy, my older son made it perfectly clear that he wasn’t interested in either writing or art. In his kindergarten class, the students were encouraged to read once a week from their writing journals, and he chose the same entry every week for an entire year: Yesterday I got my hair cut. That was it—and his refusal to elaborate with any detail whatsoever hamstrung his peers who did their best to comment under those limiting circumstances. To their credit, they never called him out about the timing and frequency of his haircuts. As for art, we still haven’t found the perfect place to display his ceramic masterpiece, a 3-D depiction of Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

Though math was not my favorite subject to teach, I had a blast celebrating the 100th day of school with my kindergartners. The kids made the ubiquitous Froot Loop necklace, stringing together 100 (plus or minus 25) loops—not so simple when fine motor control is still developing. The liberties my students took with the number 100 reminded me of Tom Leher’s message from his song New Math: the important thing is to understand what you're doing, rather than to get the right answer.

When I tied the ends together and adorned their necks with their finery, I said: Welcome to Hawaii. Every single student laughed even though not one actually got the reference. It was that kind of a joie de vivre day, and we all reveled in it.

The Devil Is in the Details

But then there were those other days—most of the days—spent off the islands on the mainland with a less friendly climate and oftentimes quite hostile terrain. We were back, as one relative used to say after her vacation, to oatmeal and old clothes. I still did my best to make the learning fun, but there were other factors to contend with.

And this leads me back to the topic at hand: teaching academics in kindergarten. It was after becoming a reading specialist that I was offered my one and only opportunity to teach kindergarten, and it was during this teaching stint where I learned most of what I needed to know about teaching reading—how what we do at that level for the students who really depend on our instruction must take precedence over any other academic needs. I don’t say this with pride; I say it with a predictable nod to reality. I know my obligation is to all children; I know I must differentiate instruction; I know what needs to be done in an inclusive classroom. But I also know that my high expectations for myself often go unrealized, which is why I always prioritize those students who need me most, while simultaneously attempting to accommodate the rest of the class to the best of my ability. If I don’t prioritize the needs of my most vulnerable students, they run the risk of falling behind and never catching up. That’s the reality.

Let me clarify. I was teaching academics to my kindergartners: letter-embedded picture mnemonics (thank you Linnea Ehri); a focus on the brain’s hookup with letter sounds rather than names (thank you Stanislas Dehaene); encoding before decoding (thank you Diane McGuinness); phonemic awareness with letters through word chains (thank you Isabel Beck); and independent writing to practice segmenting skills and promote phonemic awareness (thank you Gene Ouellette).

But these foundational skills, though essential for the vast majority of my students, weren’t needed by all of them—not by my word wizard who was reading chapter books, nor by my budding Hemingway who was writing short stories. None of these practices, instructional necessities for the majority of my students, was of any use to my high achievers, who arrived in my classroom having aced their kindergarten academics at home.

One student, a Black boy whose after-school pick-up was complicated, often sat next to me while I ate my lunch (politely refusing to share it) and practiced reading his decodable book, practice that he really needed. I mention his race and gender because in I faked reading in third grade. Too many Black kids still have to, Triston Ezidore explains:

Research consistently shows that students who are not reading proficiently by third grade are four times more likely to drop out of high school. For Black boys, this risk is compounded by systemic barriers — including disproportionate disciplinary actions, limited access to qualified teachers, and underfunded schools — that further narrow their academic trajectories. In California, the data is alarming: 30% of Black children reach grade-level reading proficiency by the end of third grade, and in some districts, that figure plummets to single digits.

If we could, we would differentiate instruction through the kind of individualized attention I was able to provide by happenstance, but we know this simply isn’t realistic within the structure of our teaching day in most of our public school classrooms, so we make do with the time we have and the opportunities we can snatch from the jaws of the timetable.

Another student always arrived late, sometimes as much as a whole hour (this, in half-day kindergarten!). With a father behind bars and a mother battling drug addiction, just making it to school at all was an accomplishment. She had a ritual: wrestling with the heavy door, stepping over the threshold, stopping to assess the lay of the land, and then racing over to collapse into my outstretched arms, always flashing a wide grin that announced: I made it! Once again, I made it. I will never forget those precious, perilous moments.

Because she arrived late, there wasn’t much time for her to access academics. Fortunately, like my older son, she fell within the 5-10% of children on Nancy Young’s Ladder of Reading and Writing who readily advance through literacy skills with minimal guidance, which was fortunate since she wasn’t in class long enough to get much. By the spring, her father had been released from prison, her mother was in treatment, and she was experiencing a sense of normality and stability, on target with establishing her foundational skills as well as her social-emotional well-being.

Give Teachers a Break

Here’s what I’ve been trying to say: We do need to do a better job training our teachers to address the full range of literacy skills, especially related to beginning reading instruction. We do need to promote a classroom environment that reinforces and rewards attention to student skill as well as the will to learn. But if you find that your high achiever’s kindergarten teacher lingers a bit too long on the rug at the beginning of the school year chanting Higgledy Piggledy Bumblebee Can You Say Your Name for Me before whipping out the high-frequency words, please cut them some slack.

Please, parents, understand that not all kids are alright—not by a long way—but chances are your high-achievers will be. And maybe an extra song or two at the beginning of the school year is just what’s needed to gain buy-in from the troubled or the timid—and to also buy some time for a teacher who has been plunged into a sea of skill levels and is frantically treading water to figure out exactly how to manage them, how to summon superhuman acumen to accommodate the needs of all of the students making demands on this mere mortal they’ve been saddled with for an entire school year.

Differentiation matters. But as we take stock of the students in our care as well as the state of our profession, acting on that differentiation may not be so straightforward. All we can do is extend grace when our grandiose expectations fall flat for both. Forgiveness means giving up all hope for a better past (who can we credit for that great line?), so let’s just work on a better future within the realm of what’s pedagogically possible—yes—but also humanly possible.

The Cambridge Dictionary recently added the word delulu, which means having unrealistic expectations. Let’s stop being delulu when it comes to differentiating instruction.

Always striving to make sense—please let me know when I fail.