By Kim Rensch
After 11 years spent teaching middle school ELA, I became a middle school language arts facilitator to support teachers in adopting new content standards.
Because the role was combined with a position on our district’s gifted education team, I earned an endorsement in gifted and talented education and set out to help teachers meet the specialized needs of gifted and advanced learners in their classrooms.
In the years since, I have picked up a few tips and tricks for differentiating for advanced learners in the language arts classroom that I intend to share here. Stick around for a few lesson examples and a bonus tip on how AI can be an overloaded teacher’s friend in this work.
Why do we need differentiation?
Differentiated instruction assumes that students will come to our classrooms with a variety of learning needs and readiness. Differentiated activities are assessment-driven, based on diagnostic and formative assessments. They are the means for students to access and engage with material in a way that meets them where they are so we can take them to the next level of learning.
As with all learners, advanced students deserve learning experiences that support them in making at least one year’s growth. Differentiation is necessary for providing alternative pathways toward learning, and allowing our advanced learners differentiated opportunities is a way to deepen critical thinking skills that might not happen with learning experiences created for most students in the regular classroom.
When creating lessons for a variety of learners and readiness levels, consider the Big 3 of differentiation: process, product, and content.
Process considers how students learn content. A language arts teacher who allows students to learn how to write a claim by studying mentor texts, while other students learn through direct instruction, is differentiating her lessons through process.
When a language arts teacher allows students to show their learning with choice in a final project, he is differentiating by product.
If one student learns about theme through reading folktales while another learns about theme through viewing poetry slam performances, their teacher is differentiating their content.
Differentiation is not easy, and teachers may never feel we do it quite right, but with a few tips, practice, and some help, it can be done effectively.
Guidelines and Tips
Before sharing differentiation tips gathered over the years, I need to drive home the most important guideline:
Differentiation for an advanced learner is not about doing a bunch of busy work. Instead, it is about doing more rigorous work.
A common trait in gifted learners is the ability to process learning quickly. When they fly through grade-level assignments long before most other students are done, it is tempting to assign them even more work to do. But when this work is at grade level, it does nothing to stretch their thinking in a way that helps them make intellectual growth. It is akin to expecting one’s biceps to grow stronger by curling a straw more times, rather than steadily increasing the weight. A brain that is stuck doing work already mastered will not become stronger.
The good news is that differentiating for this population does not have to be daunting. Gather up some thinking partners – other teachers in your department, a few good books, or some AI tools – and follow these next tips.
Tip #1: Choices, Choices
Choice boards and menus offer an opportunity to differentiate content, process, and product while empowering students to make decisions about their learning and how they show what they know. Picture a 3X3, 4X4, or 5X5 grid filled with an array of offerings. This grid can be organized in a myriad of ways. Each row could increase in the depth of knowledge or thinking skill required. Here is a sample of one from page 122 of Differentiating Instruction With Menus, Language Arts (Grades 6-8) by Laurie Westphal (Routledge, 2017):
Notice how the depth of thinking skill increases as point values increase with each descending row. Listing and defining parts of speech is at a lower order of thinking on Bloom’s Taxonomy (Understanding) than evaluating the impact of adverbs on a story’s meaning.
When working with advanced learners, teachers need to encourage students to work at these higher levels of thinking. This can be done in a few ways. One is to simply narrow down the rows from which a student can choose items. Another is to assign point values to each row, as was done in the above example, and require students to earn a certain number of points, with point values increasing as the activities move up the thinking taxonomy.
Students who wish to do fewer items will lean toward choosing items of higher point value. Why do five 10-point activities when the points can be earned by doing two 25-point activities?
There are lots of variations of a choice board at a teacher’s disposal. The board could be a BINGO card where students are required to complete boxes in a row, with a “free space” in the middle for students who wish to create their own project. It could be set up like a menu, where students choose from a list of “appetizer” activities, “main course” activities, and “dessert.” See the science fiction BINGO card example below from page 69 of Westphal’s book.
For more ideas about differentiation menus, I highly recommend Kelly Owens’s Middleweb article about choice boards. Another good resource: The complete set of Routledge Publishing’s Differentiating Instruction With Menus (Grades 6-8) , compiled in a single volume, offers many ideas about choice boards across the content areas.
Tip #2: Think Big
A big idea, or inquiry, question is an investigative question drawn from a theme that helps students think about a real-world problem. Because it doesn’t have one right answer, focusing one’s instruction around one central question is a helpful launching point for differentiated learning opportunities.
Asking a “big idea” question and offering students learning opportunities to explore answers will naturally open up multiple learning pathways toward finding answers, while building skills of communication, critical thinking, and analyzing evidence.
To find the answers to big idea questions, students will need to read and discuss a variety of texts, from articles to advertisements to infographics and videos, all of which can be leveled to meet reading readiness levels of all students in the classroom. Students search their various texts for evidence and discuss their findings in small-group or whole-class discussions, allowing all students, regardless of reading ability, to participate in discussions together.
This concept also works well in novel studies. Students can be matched with books at their appropriate reading levels, but all the books can focus on the same central theme, allowing students to explore big ideas while reading novels that challenge them where they are.
In a similar vein, all students can share the experience of reading the same novel but explore differentiated questions on a theme. For example, advanced students reading Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None will grapple with the question, “What is justice? Does perfect justice exist?” while struggling readers will address whether or not the actions of the killer were justified.
Grappling with big ideas nurtures a student’s ability to develop claims, backed by evidence.
Tip #3: The Four Hallmarks
ThinkCERCA, an educational company dedicated to developing curriculum and software materials based on best practices in literacy instruction, shares four hallmarks of advanced literacy instruction (read the discussion here):
- Engaging Texts
- Rich Discussion
- Daily Writing
- High-Utility Vocabulary Words
These sound like tall orders, but they can easily be wrapped together into one engrossing unit. Perhaps the most popular unit I have ever taught centers around an unlikely read: Anthem by Ayn Rand (student edition). The book offers a glimpse into a dystopian future that triggers readers’ curiosity, leading them to think deeply about complex issues and draw parallels between Rand’s world and ours.
Tip #4: Partner with AI
When differentiating learning experiences, start with the standards and know what outcomes you wish for student learning. Then head to ChatGPT or Magic School AI for differentiation help. Take a look at the example below from Magic School’s choice board option, where I plugged in a 7th grade language arts standard and Magic School gave me a list of differentiated products based on UDL principles:
Standard: Learners will comprehend, analyze, and evaluate literary and informational texts in various formats, genres, and levels of complexity.
7th Grade Choice Board:
Comprehending, Analyzing, and Evaluating Texts
Pasting the same standard into ChatGPT and asking it to create leveled assignments – below, at, and above grade level – yielded all these ideas:
Standard: Learners will comprehend, analyze, and evaluate literary and informational texts in various formats, genres, and levels of complexity.
🌱 Below Grade Level
Focus: Building comprehension skills with scaffolds and accessible texts.
Text Types: Short stories, news articles written at a 5th–6th grade level, illustrated excerpts.
Assignment:
- Read an illustrated version of a short story or a news article (e.g., Newsela or Storyworks at Level 3–4).
- Comprehension Check: Fill in a graphic organizer (e.g., story map or main idea/details chart).
- Analysis: Answer guided questions (e.g., “What problem does the main character face?” “What is the main idea of this article?”).
- Evaluation: Write 3–5 sentences giving your opinion of the text, using sentence starters (e.g., “I liked/disliked this because…” or “This story made me think about…”).
Supports: Sentence stems, vocabulary glossaries, audio versions of text, peer or small group work.
📘 On Grade Level
Focus: Analyzing and evaluating grade-appropriate texts across genres.
Text Types: Realistic fiction, argumentative articles, poems, and personal narratives (grade 7 level).
Assignment:
- Read a literary text (e.g., a short story like “Seventh Grade” by Gary Soto) and an informational article (e.g., opinion piece on screen time).
- Comprehension: Write a summary of each.
- Analysis: Answer open-ended questions:
- What theme does the author convey?
- How does the author’s use of language affect tone?
- How do text features (headings, photos) support the author’s message?
- Evaluation: Write a paragraph comparing how both authors express their main ideas and which was more effective—and why.
Supports: Anchor charts, sentence frames for analysis, small group discussions before writing.
🚀 Above Grade Level
Focus: Deep evaluation and synthesis of multiple complex texts.
Text Types: Excerpts from classic literature, essays, historical speeches, and editorials.
Assignment:
- Read two texts on a similar theme but from different genres (e.g., a Langston Hughes poem and a nonfiction article on civil rights).
- Comprehension: Annotate key ideas and unfamiliar vocabulary.
- Analysis: Write a multi-paragraph literary analysis that:
- Identifies tone, diction, and rhetorical devices
- Compares perspectives and authorial intent
- Evaluation: Compose a brief essay evaluating which text more effectively communicates its message, supported with textual evidence.
Extensions:
- Create a podcast or short video evaluating the texts
- Lead a Socratic seminar using prepared analysis questions
Final Tip: Just Do Something!
Differentiating for any learner is a heavy lift for teachers, and it can be easy to push it down our long to-do list. But we can’t call our most advanced students “learners” if they are not actually learning in our class.
Even just a little bit of differentiation is better than no differentiation for a child who needs the extra challenge to achieve real growth. Pick your next standard, ask an AI tool for help, and take those first steps toward meeting the needs of your most advanced students.
Kim Rensch is a National Board Certified Teacher and former middle school language arts teacher and lead facilitator of the Gifted Services team for Fargo (ND) Public Schools. Kim is President and Board Chair of the North Dakota Association for Gifted Children and is currently an adjunct professor at North Dakota State University. When she’s not advocating for gifted children, she can be found developing her new business, the Reliable Rensch Pet and Home Care Services. See her many MiddleWeb book reviews here.
