Pirl Experimental Education & Consulting
Professional learning · Instructional design
Meeting ALL Needs
Differentiation that responds to the learner.
I approach professional development a little like a stand-up comedian working an audience. I have material prepared, but I am watching the room closely. A question tells me where an example needs more explanation. A look of recognition tells me I have found a classroom problem worth staying with. I come in with a plan, then adjust the conversation to the people in front of me.
That approach fits the subject of Meeting the Needs of ALL Learners, a professional development session for K–12 educators. Differentiation requires close attention to what a learner is actually experiencing. The materials make that attention concrete through examples of writing supports, adapted readings, and several versions of the same assessment.
Find the barrier inside the task
A science question can require much more than science knowledge. A student may need to read a dense prompt, hold several directions in memory, organize evidence, and produce an extended written response. When the answer falls short, I want to know which part of that process broke down. That decision determines what support will help.
The workshop uses WORMS as a memorable way to look for those demands: Writing, Organization, Reading, Memory/Motor, and Social/Emotional. Each category points toward a design decision. A word bank can support vocabulary retrieval. A checklist can make a complicated task easier to organize. A read-aloud or a revised text can provide access to an explanation. Typing or an oral response can offer another way to show understanding. A small-group conversation can give someone a lower-risk place to begin.
The original workshop mnemonic gives teachers a quick way to examine a task. The explanation and discussion supply the detail behind each category.
Those categories work best as questions about a particular task. The same learner may need help organizing an explanation while handling the science confidently. Choosing a support starts with that specific need.
The writing-support slide names concrete options: vocabulary supports, sentence frames, graphic organizers, outlines, and checklists. Each addresses a different demand within a writing task.
One phenomenon with several ways in
The Brown Bear Hibernation Task makes these choices visible. Students use information about bears before, during, and after hibernation to explain how a bear survives for months without eating. They need to connect evidence with ideas about stored food and energy use. The workshop file contains seven versions of the explanation task, ranging from an extended response to formats with much more guidance.
One version presents the expectations as a checklist. Another breaks the reasoning into smaller questions and supplies a word bank. Further versions use sentence frames, fill-in-the-blank statements, dropdown choices, or multiple-choice questions. Comparing the versions makes it possible to discuss exactly what each support does.
A small excerpt from the checklist version. Making the requirements visible can help a learner organize an answer while leaving the explanation to the learner.
These three sentence starters organize an explanation around evidence from before, during, and after hibernation. They supply a sequence; the learner supplies the observations and reasoning.
The distinction matters when I interpret the result. A student who selects a correct explanation has shown something different from a student who constructs one independently. Both responses can be useful. I need to know which capability I am assessing and how much of the thinking the support has supplied. Otherwise, a completed page can hide the very difficulty I was trying to understand.
Make the thinking easier to see
The skin-healing sample offers another useful comparison. One version asks learners to label a sequence of models and write captions. A second version supplies incomplete captions to guide the explanation. A teacher version provides completed models and captions for reference.
Excerpt from the scaffolded skin-healing task. The image sequence and sentence structure provide support, while the learner still has decisions to make about the process being represented.
This is a useful place to ask teachers what they want to see in student work. Is the target a coherent explanation, recognition of vocabulary, or the ability to connect a model to a process? The answer helps determine how much structure to provide and what evidence to look for next.
The room is part of the design
The stand-up comparison is about responsiveness. I want teachers to recognize their own classrooms in the examples and bring their questions into the conversation. Humor can create an opening, but the substance has to hold their attention. If someone raises a practical objection, I can work with it: which part of this approach would be difficult with their students, and what would need to change?
The workshop includes a See–Think–Wonder capture sheet. That simple structure gives participants somewhere to record what they notice, what they infer, and what they still need to understand. It also gives a facilitator something useful to respond to. A comment about a sentence frame might open a discussion about writing. A concern about providing too much help might lead us back to the learning goal.
This is the part a slide deck cannot fully capture. I am making decisions about pacing, which example to develop, and when to ask another question. For adult learners, those choices matter because the material has to connect with work they are already doing. I want a teacher to leave able to revise an actual task.
Use AI to produce options worth examining
The original materials include examples from ChatGPT and MagicSchool for adapting writing assignments, generating supports, and adjusting reading demands. These examples show how a teacher can obtain several possible approaches to a problem and then decide which ones deserve further work.
My responsibility is to inspect those options. I need to check the content, preserve the intended reasoning, and decide whether the scaffold helps the learner do the work. A shorter reading can lose a necessary connection. A sentence frame can reveal too much of an answer. Speed is useful when it leaves more time for those instructional decisions.
Plan for growing independence
Near the end of the workshop, two prompts return the focus to independence: track and wean. I read those as an invitation to watch what a support enables over time. Can the learner begin with fewer reminders? Can they use a checklist independently? Can they explain a relationship without the same sentence frame? Those observations can guide the next version of a task.
The original slide pairs “track” and “wean” with a reminder to keep moving forward. The design question is which supports should remain for access and which can change as independence develops.
Some supports provide continuing access. Others are temporary scaffolds that can change as skill develops. I want to make that distinction deliberately, using what the learner can do as evidence.
That is the larger design principle behind Meeting ALL Needs. Notice where the experience breaks down, make a purposeful adjustment, and look again. The same habit matters in professional learning: prepare carefully, pay attention to the audience, and keep working until the idea becomes something people can use.