Differentiating questions

There is a myth going around that there is such a thing as an average student to which all lessons must be aimed.  There are students who are stronger and others who are weaker, but they're just aberrations.

If you believe this, then you probably have a lot of problems with the faster students who finish quickly and get bored.  You've probably tried giving them extra activities, which they naturally resent because they don't see why they should have more work.

However, if we go in assuming that different students have different abilities, which change depending on their moods, and we designed lessons that catered to these strengths, maybe we wouldn't have to worry.

The secret is in differentiating the questions. 

Let's focus on Reading and Listening lessons.  Differentiated questions would look like this:

• For the slower students, the questions would be focussed on making sure they've understood the text.  The response type would avoid asking for too much language, so for example they would underline or draw the answer which they would find directly from the text.
• For the higher level students, the questions would slowly climb up Bloom's Taxonomy which means that you could start with the assumption that they've understood the basic information and ask them to analyse, evaluate and create based on what they've heard or read.

If you do this right, the higher ones won't see this as an imposition.  On the contrary, they won't want to answer the "easier" questions because they'll be boring.  In fact, you might have the opposite problem: the slower ones will be anxious to try the "tougher" questions.  They might not do them very well, but that's ok because they'll be failing on their own terms and willing to improve.

On the negative side, this sounds like a lot of extra work for the teacher, but again, it depends on how it's done.  I see teachers routinely asking their students to answer 12-15 questions.  What if you only ask each student to answer 6 but have 12 choices ranging from easier to more difficult?  It's not the quantity of questions, after all, but the quality.