Standards-Based Activities and Assessments for the Differentiated Classroom by Carolyn Coil provides another means of differentiation. She calls these individual lesson plans because the students are actually creating their own plan of learning based on choices. Each lesson has three required activities and eight choice activities. The lessons are designed based on learning styles, learning modalities, or Bloom’s Taxonomy – something for everybody!
Looking at the sample individual lesson plan on Ancient Egypt created using the Coil format, you see the required activities in the upper right hand section, and the student choices in the four blocks on the left. The four choices connected to Bloom’s Taxonomy are labeled: application, synthesis, analysis, and evaluation – the higher levels of thinking. To help you better understand the taxonomy of thinking, take some time to review this chart.
In this next example, you can see how the student activities incorporate four of the multiple intelligences. Students indicate their choices in the student choices box. Ideally, it is best to allow only one choice from each category and then decide how many you want them to complete. When starting out, two may be the best. This way they can select one in their comfort zone, and hopefully, be encouraged to step out of the box and select one that might be a stretch or challenge. As you can see, the student also has a due date so your procrastinators or perfectionists know there is an end point. What is really great about this strategy/format is that there is also a student-parent cooperative activity that allows parents to assist their child with the project.