Differentiation with AI - First steps

One of the challenges of teaching is ensuring that your lessons are designed in a way that supports the learning of the all the students in your class. In the average classroom you might differentiate for high potential students, lower ability students, and EAL/D students. (Adjustments for students with specific diagnoses or disabilities will be addressed in another post). 

What role can AI play in supporting differentiation?
Let's assume you already have a lesson planned for students of general ability on a topic. Either post it online somewhere publicly so that you can just direct the AI tool to the website, or summarise your lesson plan so that it can be easily copy and pasted (ensure the formatting is super simple).

Some prompts you could use in a tool like ChatGPT are:

• Examine this lesson on XYZ <insert website or copy and paste the lesson>. Create a differentiated version of this lesson suitable for a student aged 12 (or whatever age) who has a low literacy and numeracy proficiency. Refer to this website for guidance https://education.nsw.gov.au/teaching-and-learning/professional-learning/teacher-quality-and-accreditation/strong-start-great-teachers/refining-practice/differentiating-learning/what-to-differentiate
• Examine this lesson on XYZ <insert website or copy and paste the lesson>. Create a differentiated version of this lesson suitable for high potential/gifted students aged 12 (or whatever age).
• Examine this lesson on XYZ <insert website or copy and paste the lesson>. Create a differentiated version of this lesson suitable for a student aged 12 (or whatever age) who has an EAL/D background (you may choose to specify the language background).

A variation on this is:

• Use the lesson found on this website <insert link> . Create a choice board in a table with different learning activities for students with a range of abilities (alternative you could select a specific characteristic or level of ability).

As a trial, of this process I ran the following prompt:

• Examine the lesson found at this website: http://www.hsieteachers.com/blog/writing-task-factors-affecting-consumer-decisions . Create a differentiated version of this lesson suitable for a high potential or gifted student aged 13. Refer to this website for guidance: https://education.nsw.gov.au/teaching-and-learning/professional-learning/teacher-quality-and-accreditation/strong-start-great-teachers/refining-practice/differentiating-learning/what-to-differentiate

ChatGPT produced a 7-point guide on differentiating the lesson (it was about a page and a half long) including suggestions related to content, process and product differentiation. Examples included providing advanced reading and opportunities for individual exploration (each with several sentences explaining how to do this). It provided a few options for allowing students to use different learning pathways, and also a few options of different products the students could create to demonstrate learning. Some of the advice provided was a bit generic, about differentiation strategies generally, but there were several good suggestions that were practical and could be easily used in the classroom.

Following this I tried the following prompt:

• Use the lesson found on this website http://www.hsieteachers.com/blog/writing-task-factors-affecting-consumer-decisions . Create a choice board in a table with different learning activities for students with a range of abilities.

This prompt provided seven different lesson activities which were reasonably original and fairly different to each other. This was even more successful when I choose a specific learning ability (e.g. for example a student with low literacy levels).

I'm still exploring what this can do for supporting teachers to differentiate, but in these first few tentative steps I think AI definitely has something significant to offer. Moving forward, it will be fairly simple to create multiple differentiated versions of the same lesson very quickly to best cater for our students. The key is going to be knowing how to ask for what you want. My hint: keep asking more questions...