Key Ideas:
- Michael Washington, a 22-year classroom veteran now at TCI, sees differentiation as how a lesson itself, built through active learning strategies, can reach every student in the room at once.
- A single, well-designed entry point, such as an open-ended question, can hold space for both the highest- and lowest-performing students in the same room, without a separate lesson for each level.
- Built-in scaffolds, leveled and multilingual readings, translation tools, and instructional guidance give teachers back the time they used to spend building supports from scratch.
- AI plays a narrow role in this picture: expanding reading levels across the K-12 range, while the human judgment behind each lesson stays with the teacher.
- For districts, the more useful move is to look closely at how students learn and express what they know, rather than simply adding new categories of support.
What Differentiated Instruction Looks Like in a K-12 Classroom
Michael Washington spent 22 years in the classroom. He is passionate about lessons designed to reach all learners.
Michael Washington spent 22 years teaching social studies before joining TCI (Teachers’ Curriculum Institute). For much of his early career, differentiation was unnamed, something teachers did instinctively without talking about it as its own practice.
This shifted when he began working with students who were building English proficiency alongside the content itself, adjusting his teaching word by word so they could follow along. The experience became the foundation for how he thinks about differentiation today: a question of how the lesson itself is designed, through active learning strategies that put students inside the material rather than in front of it, to determine who in the room gets to fully participate.
Washington’s question about participation shapes everything that follows: what differentiation requires, and who it ultimately serves. One of his clearest examples is a student who sat outside every category differentiation conversations usually cover (language support, an IEP, advanced coursework), yet found her way into the material once active learning gave the lesson itself a way to reach her.
What Differentiation Means, Beyond the Usual Labels
Ask most teachers what differentiation means, and the answer usually starts with three groups: English learners, students with an IEP, and advanced students. Those groups matter to Washington, and he sees differentiation reaching well beyond them, too.
For him, differentiation often comes down to something simpler than a formal label. “Sometimes it’s just the style of learning, how students actually express what they know,” he says.
In a lesson about the Cold War, Washington opens with a question about the students’ own anxieties today, tapping into their own lived experiences and prior knowledge. The question can relate to social media, school, or something else entirely. He then lets that question carry them into history.
“You’re asking a question that is engaging but challenging, but students can also understand all at once,” he says. Every student can answer that honestly, at whatever depth they’re ready for, before the lesson moves into the specifics of McCarthyism and Cold War politics.
Washington’s classroom puts active learning into practice: students apply what they already know, their own worries about the world today, to the material in front of them, then build outward into the history itself, engaging with the content rather than just receiving it.
This design principle is what led one of Washington’s students find herself in the material. She was a cheerleader, a track athlete, someone with an after-school job and a wide circle of friends, but school rarely held her attention. A lesson built around a classroom game called Red Dot, which explores Cold War anxieties and the pressures of McCarthyism, gave her a way to bring the same social confidence she carried onto the track team into the classroom.
Students play the “Red Dot” game, where some are secretly given dots. Here, a student checks his paper slip to see if he is a “dot.”
The Red Dot game uses the Experiential Exercise teaching strategy, which draws on research into non-linguistic representation to create short, memorable lessons that make events and ideas meaningful for students. In the Red Dot game, a few students are secretly given “dots,” and they try to form groups without dots.
“I felt like this lesson was made for her,” Washington says. She took over the room that day, and by the end of the year, she knew McCarthyism, in his words, like the back of her hand. A student who had resisted reading assignments told him she wanted to read more because she now saw herself in the material.
A student’s strengths can show up in how they write, speak, build something, or connect a topic to their own life, often just as much as in a test score or reading level. Differentiation, in his view, has as much to do with how a lesson lets students show what they understand as it does with which accommodations are built in. This range shows up in the research on active learning too: some students engage most through presentations, others through discussion or hands-on problem-solving, and building in more than one entry point is linked to notably higher pass rates and stronger retention of the material.
The reframe shifts the goal: instead of a separate lesson for each group, teachers and districts build one lesson flexible enough to give every kind of learner, including students outside any single category, a genuine way in.
For Washington, moments like hers are what differentiation is ultimately for: building lessons flexible enough to let a student’s existing strengths become her way into new content.
How Built-In Lesson Differentiation Supports Help Teachers Save Time
Before TCI, Washington built differentiation on his own: translating text, adjusting readings, and creating separate supports for the students who needed them. It came at a real cost to the time and precision he could bring to three or four classes a day.
Research on high-quality instructional materials backs up what he found in his own classroom: a meta-analysis from Johns Hopkins University found that using well-designed curriculum resources can produce learning gains equivalent to three to four additional months of instruction per year.
What changed was having a curriculum where the supports are already built into the lesson itself, rather than something a teacher has to construct separately for every unit:
- Leveled and multilingual readings, plus translation tools
- Instructional guidance built for reaching different learners within the same lesson
- Images, charts, and maps designed to support comprehension across levels
That distinction matters for what these supports are actually doing: carrying the same active learning experience, the discussion, the hands-on tasks, the shared entry point, to every student in the room, instead of swapping in a simpler version of the lesson for the ones who need extra scaffolding.
“It’s not just the questions,” he says. “It’s also that the lesson itself is differentiating for students.”
Skepticism about built-in supports is common among teachers used to designing differentiation themselves. Washington’s answer starts with the student, then moves to the teacher: identify what the student needs first, and then look at what the teacher needs. “This support can save you time,” he says. “I think everybody in education understands the stress that teachers are under, understands the time constraints that teachers are under.” Built-in supports, in his view, meet the needs of both groups at once, rather than asking a teacher to choose between them.
This built-in support now includes AI, in a narrow, specific role: expanding reading levels across the full K-12 range and closing gaps teachers used to fill on their own. TCI frames its AI development around three recurring teacher challenges—differentiation, remediation, and time constraints—and the features require district-level approval before a teacher can turn them on. Washington is clear about where the line still sits: “A lesson needs to be created by a person,” he says. “A lesson needs to be created with students in mind.” He sees AI as a way to support access, while the judgment calls that depend on knowing a specific classroom and its students stay with the teacher.
Why This Changes How Districts Think About Differentiation
Washington would want a school leader to ask that same question at the district level: how do students learn, and how they prefer to show what they know, beyond the usual lens of language learners, IEPs, and advanced students?
This instinct traces back to his own classroom. In a class of 30 students, he estimates about eight were fully engaged at any given time, the students he was talking with throughout the lesson. Roughly sixteen more stayed quiet, going along without objecting but without really learning either. The remaining four showed their disengagement more visibly, acting out or skipping instructions altogether.
Looking back, he reads that gap as a sign of how the room was being taught rather than a discipline problem: a lecture-style lesson that works well for a handful of students can look like it’s reaching everyone, while missing most of the room. Active learning design, the kind built into TCI’s lessons, closes that gap inside one classroom. Noticing the gap in the first place and asking whether lessons are built to engage students or just talk at them is the work Washington would put on a district’s plate.
The Case for Differentiation as a Daily Practice
For Washington, the shift away from lecture-style teaching, toward the active learning strategies he now builds every lesson around, came later in his career than he wishes it had. “I wish I would have known about TCI earlier,” he says, looking back on how much of his early teaching was built for the students who already responded well to a lecture, while much of the room went along quietly or found other ways to show they’d checked out.
Differentiation sits inside the teaching itself rather than as an add-on program. It’s a question every lesson already answers, whether or not a teacher has time to ask it directly: who gets to fully engage with the content in front of them. For Washington, that answer is what makes a classroom work for every student in the room, including those who have rarely had the chance to lead it before.
