SIX STRATEGIES FOR TIERING TO DIFFERENTIATE FOR SUCCESSFUL KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION IN AN INQUIRY LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate six strategies (including matching, exemplifying, ordering, extending, redacting, and diagramming) that teachers can use to help students acquire new knowledge in an inquiry context where each student’s ability to access text may vary in sophistication. Since each strategy is dependent on accessing text forms, they may be most suitable for students in later primary to high school ages, where students’ ability to read for meaning is becoming more refined. Action research approaches have been used to structure the “refreezing” of the key ideas presented in this paper to encourage the adoption of new ways of approaching these strategies. When learning a new skill, modelling the skill, extracting the procedure used to acquire the skill, then following that procedure to reuse the skill and practise it in new contexts is a well used approach in education, with differentiation largely consisting of either providing additional support for students or simplifying the content to which the skill is applied while the student focuses on skill acquisition. However, when acquiring new knowledge is the learning goal, teachers require several strategies to help them differentiate on-the-fly as they diagnose the source of each student’s learning challenge and plan new ways to support the student’s acquisition of the knowledge. This paper outlines and demonstrates 6 strategies that have been used in classrooms to help teacher candidates understand a range of approaches they could use when they choose to apply on-the-fly differentiation for knowledge acquisition.