How can you help your staff differentiate effectively to support all pupils?

This course explores the principles of effective differentiation, and aims to provide participants with a strong understanding of how to help all pupils make good progress. Learners will look at a range of practical strategies focused on planning, questioning and feedback. 

Mike Gershon, our content partner, describes the key learning objectives of the course below.

This training course is suitable for all teaching and support staff. It consists of four 90 minute sessions that can be easily adapted to your timings and staff needs. 

Session 1 - Rethinking differentiation

Objectives:

• Understand what differentiation means and apply this definition to the context of day-to-day teaching
• Apply the zone of proximal development to individual pupils and understand how this sets the basis for differentiation
• Appreciate the inherent limitations of working memory and develop strategies to help pupils overcome them 

Session 2 - Differentiated lesson activities

Objectives:

• Understand what constitutes a hinge question, how to create hinge questions, and how to use them to effectively differentiate
• Apply Bloom’s Taxonomy to the context of activity planning and map different activity elements against pupils’ abilities
• Understand the scaffolding ladder and be able to apply it to a specific activity, making reference to pupils you teach 

Objectives:

• Understand how to use Bloom’s Taxonomy of the cognitive domain, as well as taxonomies of the psycho-motor domain, to effectively differentiate questions
• Explore ‘concrete to abstract’ questioning techniques and apply them to specific topics to differentiate effectively
• Evaluate the link between questioning and metacognition, and explore what this looks like in practice

Session 4 - Differentiated feedback

Objectives:

• Understand how to tailor feedback by eliciting relevant information and using this as the basis for interventions
• Explore how to use target implementation techniques to ensure pupils act on the feedback they receive
• Explore the idea of mental contrasting and plan how to introduce pupils to this technique during lessons

We've created The Key CPD Toolkit to take the time, cost and effort out of developing your own training.

Using our training is simple:

1. Download the materials, created with subject specialists, and quality assured for your peace of mind

2. Quickly adapt the resources to meet the needs of your school 

3. Deliver engaging training, with the support of comprehensive facilitator guidance

4. Evaluate the impact of your training to identify areas where staff need further support