Comprehensive Guide to Differentiating Product Assignments
Distinguishing Mechanisms for Student Learning and Demonstration
Before differentiating student products, it is essential to distinguish between three distinct but related mechanisms through which students demonstrate what they are learning:
Sense-Making Activities: These activities require students to make, do, or write something providing evidence of learning resulting from a brief work segment, typically spanning or class periods. They are formative in nature and occur during practice spans. Ideally, they are not graded but serve as opportunities to provide feedback to move students forward from their current levels of knowledge, understanding, and skill. They may require students to demonstrate content mastery or application.
Performance Tasks (Performance Assessments): These tasks ask students to demonstrate proficiency over more extended segments of learning compared to sense-making activities. They occur at the midpoint of a marking period, ends of chapters, units, or key components of a unit. They are designed to assess the application and transfer of learning and are generally completed in class within a specific time. Being summative, they are typically graded.
Products: Similar to performance tasks, products are completed at the end of significant learning spans such as units, marking periods, or semesters. They require students to demonstrate proficiency in essential knowledge, understanding, and skills (KUDs) and to apply learning to contexts beyond the classroom. Products differ from performance tasks as they are more open-ended, allow for greater student interest and voice, require more time, and involve deeper work both in and out of class. They are summative and graded.
The Significance and Motivation of Product Assignments
Product assignments are critical elements of the curriculum because they allow students to fully "own" their learning. They offer students the chance to experience how school-based skills and ideas have utility in the broader world, transcending classroom walls, worksheets, and standardized tests. Key attributes include:
Real-World Application: Products often feel significant because they have ties to real life and are shared with a meaningful audience.
Motivation: Well-designed assignments allow students to apply learning to personal interest areas and preferred work approaches.
Comprehensive Assessment: In a differentiated classroom, rich product assignments can replace some summative tests or be used alongside them to give the broadest range of students the maximum opportunity to demonstrate learning.
Differentiation Factors: Product assignments invite attention to student readiness, interest, and approaches to learning. They can be completed individually, in pairs, or in teams. If done in pairs or teams, the assignment must include provisions for both individual and group accountability for all essential KUDs.
Steps in Designing a High-Quality Product Assignment
Developing powerful product assignments requires starting with high-quality curriculum and instruction. The following steps guide the design process:
Identify Essential KUDs: A teacher must explicitly reference the Knowledge (facts), Understandings (big ideas), and Skills (basic, disciplinary, production, or thinking skills) that the product will incorporate. The product must cause students to think about, transform, and expand on these goals.
Decide on Formats: Formats may be curriculum-required (e.g., persuasive essays, experiments) or chosen to hook student interest (e.g., using interior design for geometry or photography for poetry). Product formats are best when they align with student enthusiasms, such as a grader with musical talent writing a musical about westward movement.
Determine Baseline Expectations for Quality: Teachers specify upfront the essential KUDs students must demonstrate, fundamental expectations for quality, and essential working conditions (resource use, revision evidence, timelines). Students can later contribute to or extend these expectations.
Determine Support Structures: Because products should be challenging, teachers must provide scaffolding. This includes brainstorming sessions, research workshops, personal goal-setting, peer consultation, and product design time.
Present the Assignment: Assignments can be presented in writing, orally, via video, or using icons and models. This stage involves sharing KUDs, baseline quality expectations, and the freedom students have to explore interests and modes of working.
Differentiate the Assignment: Teachers adapt baseline requirements according to readiness, interest, and learning profile. This may include a "let's make a deal" option where students propose alternative designs that still address essential KUDs.
Analyze and Propose Alternatives: Students should be encouraged to propose alternative formats, personalized criteria for success, collaboration with mentors, or alternative timelines and audiences, subject to teacher approval.
Coach for Quality: Teachers should coach students throughout the development span, discussing progress, solving glitches, clarifying quality, and building a sense of ownership.
Essential Components summarized in Figure
The elements of high-quality product design are outlined as follows:
Identifying KUDs: Knowledge, Understandings, and various Skills (thinking, production, etc.).
Format Options: Required by curriculum, Hook, Exploratory, or Talent/Passion-Driven.
Fundamental Expectations: Quality in Content (KUDs), Process (planning, timelines, resources, feedback), and Product (size, durability, evidence of quality).
Scaffolding: Includes rubrics, planning templates, storyboards, timelines, data-gathering organizers, and formative critiques.
Assignment Presentation: Clearly stating what a student must know, understand, do, and identify the required standards for quality.
Guidelines for Differentiating by Student Needs
Differentiation should address three primary areas as summarized in the design steps:
Readiness Considerations: This includes adjusting the complexity of resources, providing materials in a student's first language, offering auditory formats, providing models of work at a challenge level, and varying the complexity of language or fonts in directions. It also includes using templates for note-taking and varying the amount of white space in instructions.
Interest Considerations: Students can choose topics for investigation, work with experts, generate their own criteria for success, or design products that call on multiple interest areas to encourage peer collaboration.
Learning Profile Considerations: This involves giving choices for modes of expression, options to work alone or with partners, providing whole-to-part explanations, allowing for think-time, and offering choices between competition and collaboration.
Additional Guidelines for Product Success
Critical and Creative Thinking: Regularly discuss the need for both thinking types and help students develop passion for their ideas.
Synthesizing Information: Require students to use and blend multiple sources of information.
Planning and Timelines: Use check-in dates and timelines to prevent procrastination and ensure students use the entire allotted time block.
Production Skills: Ensure students receive guidance on necessary skills like debating, teaching a class, or website development so they know what quality looks like in those formats.
Parent Communication: Inform parents about timelines, requirements, and the rationale for the product. Advise them to listen and ask questions but avoid doing the work or "rescuing" the student from procrastination.
Variety of Formats: Move beyond the "poster/report rut." Options for expression are varied as noted in Figure .
Evaluation: Use both formative (during the project) and summative (after the project) peer and self-evaluation.
Real Audiences: Arrange for products to be viewed by someone other than the teacher whenever possible.
Presentation Alternatives: Avoid time-consuming whole-class presentations by using exhibits, sharing groups of , or individual presentations to mentors.
Case Studies in Product Differentiation
Mrs. Appleton’s Kindergarten Neighborhood Project
Mrs. Appleton’s students research and build a model of a portion of their town. The project involves various levels of differentiation:
Common Tasks: The whole class decides on the basic contents of the model and builds "blank buildings."
Interest Differentiation: Students select a community member to interview, choose specific signs to make, and select the neighborhood they wish to work on.
Readiness Differentiation: Students skilled with measuring draw building dimensions; those with strong fine-motor skills cut complex pieces; those with lower fine-motor skills assemble large pieces. Students who are already reading share information with the class, and those who are writing help create signs.
Mr. Garcia’s Spanish Language and Culture Project
Students explore Spanish-speaking cultures through travel guides, videos, documentaries, or wikis. They investigate elements like history, religion, economics, and geography.
General Options: Students choose whether to work alone or in groups, their mode of expression, and which cultural elements to focus on.
Advanced Student Differentiation: For advanced students (including native speakers), Mr. Garcia requires cross-cultural comparisons across at least non-Romance language groups (e.g., Swahili, Farsi, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, or Russian). These students have more freedom in designing their final products and processes.
Differentiating for Struggling Learners
Strategies to support struggling learners include:
Core Goals: Ensure they apply all essential KUDs and integrate IEP goals into the products.
Expression: Use formats beyond written language.
Chunking: Deliver the assignment in smaller increments.
Instructions: Use audio or video directions so students can revisit them.
Scaffolding: Provide timelines, bookmarked Internet sites, readable book boxes, recorded summaries, and research organizers.
Direct Support: Use minilessons on skills like taking notes or interviewing. Meet with students in ad hoc advisory capacities.
Models: Analyze models from prior years that are aspirational but within reach.
In-School Support: Provide materials and time before/after school or during lunch for students who lack out-of-school resources.
ESL Support: Provide access to information in the student's first language and allow them to express ideas in their primary language before translating them.
Differentiating for Advanced Learners
For highly able students, focus on moving sliders on the Equalizer (reference Figure , page ) toward the right:
Learning Continuums: Stretch students toward complexity, independence, transformation, abstractness, and multifaceted solutions.
Breadth: Study issues across time periods, disciplines, or cultures.
Advanced Research: Use multiple media, primary sources, and original documents.
Time Management: Allow them to start earlier or work during "ragged time" if they have already mastered standard practicing materials.
Mentorships: Connect students with professionals or experts in their field of study.
Expert Standards: Help students develop criteria that reflect expert-level content and production. Expert assessment is useful at both formative and summative stages.