You Don't Need Three Versions of Every Lesson

Let's start by admitting what differentiation has come to feel like. Somewhere along the way, "meet students where they are" turned into "produce three versions of the worksheet" — a simpler one, a middle one, a stretch one — for every lesson, every class, every day. It's an impossible amount of work, so it becomes the thing you do properly when you're observed and quietly skip when you're drowning. Then you feel guilty about skipping it. That guilt is misplaced. The workload was never realistic; the definition was wrong.

Here's the reassuring truth underneath it. Differentiation was never supposed to mean three parallel lessons. It means one good lesson with enough give in it that different students can enter and stretch at different points. The skill isn't making more material. It's building one task with room in it — and that's a fraction of the work, once you stop believing you owe every class a bronze, silver and gold.

The move that saves the most time is a single low floor and a high ceiling instead of three separate tracks. Set one task everyone starts — genuinely accessible, so no child is locked out on the first step — and make it open enough at the top that a confident student can keep going without a different sheet. "Explain why" questions do this almost for free. So does "now find another way." So does "what would change if…". One task, one set of instructions, but the ceiling is high enough that nobody hits it and the floor is low enough that everybody starts. You've differentiated by depth, not by photocopier.

Then differentiate the support, not the task. The students who need more don't usually need a different worksheet — they need a way in to this one. That's a sentence starter, a worked example left on the board, a keyword list, a quiet thirty seconds at their desk while the others begin. Same task, same expectation, different scaffold. Crucially, scaffolds are reusable: a good bank of sentence stems and worked examples serves every class you teach, where a bespoke bronze worksheet serves one lesson and then dies in a drawer.

And let the response, not your planning, tell you who needs what. You do not have to predict on Sunday night which student will struggle on Wednesday — you'll usually be wrong anyway. A two-minute task at the start of the lesson tells you more than an hour of guessing did: you see who's flying and who's stuck, and you differentiate in the room, in real time, by who you go to and what you say. That's the most accurate differentiation there is, and it costs no evenings.

This is also where it's fair to let something carry the repetitive part. Building a reusable bank of scaffolds — the stems, the worked examples, the "going further" prompts that fit your subject — is exactly the kind of groundwork that shouldn't cost you a weekend each time. Whether you build it up slowly yourself or let aime draft the first version from the lesson you're already planning, the point is the same: you assemble the scaffolds once and reuse them across every class, instead of reinventing three versions of everything, every week.

None of this is a lowering of the bar. It's the opposite. Three watered-down worksheets often ask less of the students who most need asking more. One rich task, a low floor, a high ceiling, and your attention going where the lesson shows you it's needed — that holds a high bar for everyone and hands you back the evening you were spending at the photocopier. You became a teacher to teach the class in front of you. You can do that without building it three times.