The biggest concern I have heard from teachers about teaching math is that the abilities of their students are widely varied. Teachers are concerned that they aren’t reaching ALL learners. They have students that need additional time to build their confidence in a specific skill. At the same time, they have students ready to move on and be challenged. In a classroom where student abilities vary as greatly as their interests and personality, how can you reach ALL learners? One answer is differentiating math instruction with word problems.
Differentiating Math Instruction – What is it?
I am a Peloton rider. I love the workouts and community that Peloton has created through a bike that goes nowhere. One of my favorite programs is the Power Zone training program.
To take advantage of this program, you take a pre-assessment. It’s a 10 minute warm up ride followed by a 20 minute full threshold power (FTP) test. The goal is to work to your full potential during that 20 minute time frame at a rate that doesn’t burn you out too fast. Your average output is a number generated from your cadence (how fast the pedals are spinning) and the resistance (how hard it is to pedal).
Once you have taken the test, you get your FTP average and you can activate a power bar on the bike. This allows you to work within zones below your current fitness level, at your current fitness level, or above it.
What is truly amazing about this is that the instructor is teaching one class, but because all participants know their zones, an instructor can design a workout to improve ALL riders’ fitness levels at the same time. Not by teaching 7 different classes, all at ONCE. It’s inspiring!
This is differentiation, or at least one way you can differentiate based on ability. Differentiation allows you to reach ALL learners on a given skill or task while meeting their unique needs simultaneously.
Why is differentiation so hard in the classroom?
Many teachers have told me that they don’t have the time to reach ALL students. Unlike the Power Zone classes, teachers feel that they need to teach many different classes to meet the needs of ALL their students.
Differentiating Instruction For Math:
There are many ways to create differentiated math lesson plans for your classroom. Some examples include differentiating by skill/level, interest, learning style, or product created. For the purpose of this post, we will focus on differentiated math instruction based on student abilities.
Why Word Problems?
Differentiated learning in math often times mean that our stuggling students miss out on experience with word problems.
Why?
Word problems are challenging. If a student is struggling with multiplication with multi-digit numbers in isolation, how are they going to be successful at word problems?
The result is we spend MORE time working on helping struggling students develop the understanding necessary to multiply larger numbers together. Those students are denied access to word problems as a result. Without exposure, how will these students learn to identify the different types of word problems?
How Can Your Use Word Problems for Differentiating Math Instruction?
Word problems are a great discussion point to help your students understand both word problem types and patterns in their structure.
Rather than focusing on HOW to solve a specific problem, have your students focus on understanding why or how they would solve it, but don’t necessarily focus on the process of solving. That can be done in SMALL groups where instructional time needs to be tailored at an individual level.
Try these three simple tricks:
1) Teach your students how to understand the context of the problem. Research has shown that students who focus on the situation and stories of the problem rather than how to identify key words are more successful at solving them. Read more about that here.
2.) Focus on the structure of the word problem and how it would be solved. Teaching ALL students to identify patterns in word problems helps them feel more confident in solving them. This, coupled with helping students cite evidence from the problem will increase their understanding of word problem types.
3.) Encourage discussion and invite students to prove that their explanation to solve a problem works for any level. Even if you teach a combo class like myself, inviting your students to talk about the SAME problem with different levels is possible. For example, my third graders may be discussing multiplication with single digits while my fourth graders are doing two digit by one digit. Can the same strategy to solve work for problems where the numbers are changed?
In summary, word problems are a great tool for differentiated instruction in math. They offer flexibility in teaching to a variety of levels by altering the numbers within them; they allow you to focus on teaching reading comprehension skills which are applicable to learners at ALL levels; differentiating math instruction with word problems also allows you to focus on problem structure. All students, above and below level need access to work problem practice.
Want to Know More?
Need specifics? You can grab 3 specific ways to use word problems for differentiating math instruction in this quick guide.
You will get three actionable ways to get started today (or tomorrow) with word problem differentiated math instruction in your classroom completely FREE. Click here to learn more.
