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Talk about access, not differentiation
In meetings there were always inspiring stories from individual teachers showing how high expectations, and ranges of task types and learning modes, could be managed to ensure all students had the opportunity to grasp key ideas.
While some teachers talked of 'tasks going anywhere' and 'students working at their own level' at the start of the project, we noticed a change part-way through in all three schools towards having a range of possible objectives which were likely to arise in a lesson. This was discussed in terms of access to the main mathematical ideas rather than having different outcomes in mind for different individuals. For example, one teacher said: "I turn everything into shape for one student". In a discussion one teacher said she was producing multiple worksheets for a class, but another said that he offers images, resources and questions electronically and asks questions which can be accessed and worked with in a variety of ways. One teacher said she saw differentiation "as marriage between the teacher's objectives and what the students think of".
One teacher believed that whether, and the way in which, students saw patterns and relationships led naturally to differentiated outcomes. Another talked of providing extension sheets with harder questions, but the majority of her colleagues talked instead of developing better questions which prompted extension of ideas.
