The Dangers of Differentiation

Abstract

This article reports part of a piece of research carried out with teachers during professional development days. It looks at four of the commonest approaches to differentiation. It suggests that teachers have too little guidance from official sources about differentiation for more able, and other students, and that advice is often lacking in context. We suggest that, in practice, teachers contribute professional wisdom to illuminate their application of differentiation to classroom tasks, and that they are more subtle in their approach to methods of differentiation than is suggested in the literature.