As a teacher, you already know that no two children are exactly alike. Each student comes to you with different abilities, interests, learning needs, and learning styles. Differentiating instruction allows you to meet the needs of a classroom of students with a variety of needs and abilities. Effective differentiation must begin with assessment of student strengths and needs. Florida Standards address range, quality and complexity of student text. The standards address three factors in measuring text complexity: qualitative evaluation of text, quantitative evaluation of text and matching readers to text and task.

Objective

Differentiation is based on student assessment.  In order for all students to make adequate progress in reading, lessons must be appropriately differentiated. In this section, you will learn more about the guidelines for differentiating instruction to improve student progress.