Just a few weeks back, NGPF Fellow Maureen Neuner and I had a great phone conversation (we’re always saying — “Contact us! We love to help!” Maureen can attest it’s true) about the “D” word. DIFFERENTIATION! Love it or hate it, every good teacher’s got to do it, and Maureen and I were discussing specifically how to differentiate in the fin lit classroom.

I spent 4 years teaching algebra and geometry, often to students who really struggled with math, and then I spent another 6 years as a school admin in a school with tons of challenges, so differentiation was always a priority. Here are two ideas I’ve seen work in my own classroom:

• Run 3 table groups simultaneously, with an appropriately leveled activity at each one. The key: Each activity enforces the same learning concepts
  • As the teacher, start off sitting with the most struggling group so that you can model as needed and give no one the excuse of not working at all “because I don’t understand.”
  • Move on to the middle group to make sure they’re not stuck and struggling too much, and help them with trickier aspects of the activity, or use your time with them to review what they’ve done so far to clear up misconceptions.
  • Check back in briefly with group 1 so that they haven’t lost the motivation to go on while you’re busy elsewhere.
  • Head over to your highest achievers who have hopefully enjoyed the challenge you’ve provided as a testament to their smarts and provide critical feedback or suggestions for next steps.
  • Depending on how long your class period is, you can circulate between the groups in this fashion until it’s time to debrief. Because you’ve carefully selected your activities ahead of time, everyone can debrief key takeaways together because, SURPRISE, they’ve all achieved the same learning!
• Place your students in “permanent” groups for some defined amount of time — when I used this in my math classroom, I did one six-week marking period. Warning: The students HATED THIS at the beginning, but I was strong

About the Author

Jessica Endlich

When I started working at Next Gen Personal Finance, it's as though my undergraduate degree in finance, followed by ten years as an educator in an NYC public high school, suddenly all made sense.