As experienced teachers know and as research has confirmed, students are most likely to engage with learning
when tasks are of moderate difficulty, neither too easy nor too hard and therefore neither boring nor frustrating
(Britt, 2005). Finding the right level of difficulty, however, can sometimes be a challenge if you have little
experience in teaching a particular grade level or curriculum, or even if a class is simply new to you and in this
sense “unknown”. Whether familiar to you or not, members of any class are likely to have diverse abilities and readiness, and this fact alone makes it harder to determine what level of difficulty is appropriate. A common
strategy for dealing with these ambiguities is to begin units, lessons, or projects with tasks or content that is
relatively easy and familiar, and then gradually introduce more difficult material or tasks until students seem
challenged, but not overwhelmed. Using this strategy gives the teacher a chance to observe and diagnose students’
learning needs before adjusting content, and gives students a chance to orient themselves to the teacher’s
expectations and the topic of study without becoming stressed or frustrated prematurely. Later in a unit, lesson, or
project, students are then in a better position to deal with more difficult tasks or content (Van Merrionboer, 2003).
The principle seems to help even with “authentic” learning projects—ones that resemble real-world activities of
students (such as learning to drive an automobile), and that present a variety of complex tasks simultaneously.
Even in those cases it helps for the teacher to isolate and focus on the simplest subtasks first (such as “put the key in
the ignition”) and only move to harder tasks later (such as parallel parking).
Sequencing instruction is only a partial solution to finding the best “level” of instruction, because it still does not
deal with lasting differences among students as individuals. The core challenge to teachers is to fully individualize
or differentiate instruction: to tailor instruction or activities not only to the class as a group, but to the differences
among members of the class? One way to approach this problem is to plan different content or activities for
different students or groups of students. While one group works on Task A, another group works on Task B; one
group works on relatively easy math problems, for example, while another works on harder ones. Taken very far,
managing multiple activities or tasks obviously complicates a teacher’s job, but it can and has been done by many
teachers (and it also can make teaching more interesting!). In the next chapter, we describe some classroom
management strategies that can help with the multi-tasking that differentiated instruction requires.