Fifteen Ways to Vary Instruction

Invigorating lessons for your middle-school students

By Jim Burke

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Letting students problem-solve in small groups is an effective way to differentiate classroom

instruction.

(Photo: Scholastic Inc)

When it comes to everyday instruction and learning activities, everybody that includes you and
your students benefits from a little variety. If your students don't seem to be interested in a
lesson one day, try coming at it from a different direction the next day. That's what differentiated
instruction is all about finding ways to make lessons appeal to students with different interests,
experiences, abilities, and learning styles. Here are some ways you can vary instruction and
connect with your students:

1. Demonstrate Show students what a successful performance looks like.

2. Read to Think Read excerpts or short texts aloud as a means of introducing a subject or
getting students to think about it from different perspectives.

3. Write to Learn Have students write formally or informally to discover what they know
about a subject or to synthesize learning.

4. Investigation Design an inquiry for your students in the library, classroom, or computer
lab that asks them to find and make sense of information.

5. Simulation Provide a range of roles students can play in reader's theater, mock trial, or
role-playing sessions.

6. Construct Provide materials and ask students to design and create an original project
a model, a poster, or a poem.
 7. Discussion Create a structured, purposeful discussion of material after dividing the class
into different configurations pairs, trios, or large groups.

8. Reciprocal Teaching Ask students to teach what they have learned to others in a group
or the class as a whole.

9. Problem-Solving Place students in the middle of a problem they must solve using their
understanding of the material.

10. Generate Require students to be thinkers who come up with their own questions and
problems, answers and solutions.

11. Use group configurations, such as lab teams, which allow students to assume different
roles, some of which make greater cognitive demands than others.

12. Provide a range of problems, texts, or projects to choose from, each one representing
different levels of difficulty, but all based on the same subject or text you are trying to
teach. For example, in a middle-school social studies class, you might allow students to
choose from an article in Time, a local paper, or a primary source document on World War
II, each one more difficult than the last.

13. Assign support materials, such as word lists or graphic organizers, which students can use
at different levels of ability.

14. Give students a variety of topics to choose from when writing, some of which make
greater demands and allow for a greater range of responses than others. Depending on the
grade level and writing skills being taught, writing topics could range from summarizing to
comparing and contrasting to analyzing cause and effect.

15. Provide alternative routes, such as audio books, so that students with special needs can
complete your class assignments.

This article was adapted from The Teacher's Essential Guide Series: Effective Instruction by
Jim Burke, 2008, published by Scholastic.

This book is also available in the Scholastic Teacher