Beyond Choice Menus: How to Tier Tasks Without More Work

[excited] Welcome to the show, everybody! I'm Renata Salas, here with Colin Whitfield. And Colin, I want you to picture a Tuesday in my old Chicago middle school classroom. I hand out a beautifully designed "choice menu" -- nine different activities in a grid. I'm feeling like a GENIUS of differentiation. [pauses] But by 3 PM, I realize that out of 120 eighth graders, about 110 of them have chosen the word search, the drawing activity, and the fill-in-the-blank worksheet. [chuckles] The word search. Of course. [scoffs] You haven't differentiated the learning, you've just gamified the path of least resistance. [enthusiastically] Exactly! I gave them choices, and they actively chose NOT to do the heavy cognitive lifting. Which is why [deliberate] today we are talking about one teaching method you can use tomorrow morning to fix this: shifting from those choice menus to tiered tasks. Specifically, using yesterday's exit ticket to assign the exact level of challenge a kid needs today. [matter-of-fact] Right, which brings us straight to the Jennifer Gonzalez framework. In her Cult of Pedagogy series, specifically "EduTip 6," she lays out this brilliant, simple rule for tiered tasks: keep one singular learning goal for the entire class, but build three versions of the exact same task. No one is left behind, and crucially, [pauses] no one is coasting. [realizing] Wait—"EduTip 6"—so it's ONE goal, three versions. Which means the kid struggling to decode the text and the kid reading three grade levels ahead are actually aiming at the exact same target. [nodding] Precisely. And this is actually rooted in Carol Ann Tomlinson's foundational research. In her book, *How to Differentiate Instruction in Academically Diverse Classrooms*, Tomlinson makes a critical distinction. She argues that true differentiation is a PROACTIVE adjustment of your materials. [seriously] It is not a reactive fix when a lesson fails midway through. [reflective] Proactive adjustment versus reactive fix. That hits hard. Because how often do we teach the middle, watch three kids start crying in frustration, and then frantically run over to scaffold the assignment on the fly? [sighs] That's reactive. And it's exhausting. But there's another trap here, especially for the high achievers. In a February 2025 piece for *Edutopia*, Matt Griesinger wrote about something he calls the "Equal Volume" rule. [warningly] He found that when we try to challenge high-achieving students, we often just give them MORE work. If the class does five problems, they do ten. Griesinger points out that this just feels like a punishment for being smart. [gasps] A punishment for being smart! [scoffs] YES! The Equal Volume rule. If the standard task is one paragraph, the advanced task is still one paragraph -- it's just a paragraph that requires a deeper synthesis. I love that. [curious] So how does that one-paragraph rule actually look in your ELA classroom? If you're building these three tiers, what are the mechanics of it? [analytical] Okay, so let's take a standard 8th-grade prompt about character change. The singular goal is: explain how the protagonist evolves. For Tier 1, the support tier, the task is a graphic organizer. It has sentence starters and specific page numbers where they can find the quotes. Tier 2, the standard tier, is just a standard paragraph response with a basic rubric. [excitedly] But Tier 3 -- this is where Griesinger's Equal Volume rule comes in. They still only write ONE paragraph, but the constraint is that they must integrate two pieces of evidence and include a complex sentence using a subordinating conjunction. [impressed] Two pieces of evidence and a subordinating conjunction. So the physical output -- the amount of ink on the page -- is exactly the same as Tier 2, but the cognitive load is significantly higher. Exactly. [urgently] But here is the MASSIVE warning label on all of this: the "Fluidity Trap." You cannot use these three tiers to permanently track kids. You have to use fresh formative data for every single task. A kid might be Tier 1 on Monday because they don't understand how to gather evidence, but by Thursday, when we're focusing on narrative voice, that same kid might be Tier 3. [nodding] Right, because if you don't use fresh data -- if you're just looking at their test score from October -- you've just reinvented the bottom reading group. [sighs] You've built a permanent "low group" under a different name. [matter-of-fact] Exactly. You need fresh signals. Which sounds like a ton of prep work, but this is where you can actually use AI as a shortcut. I use what I call the "Curriculum Designer" prompt. [curious] The Curriculum Designer prompt? [short pause] Go on. [enthusiastically] It's a specific four-part prompt! You feed your standard lesson into the AI, and you say: "Act as an expert curriculum designer. Take this lesson and output a three-column table. Column A is Tier 1, Column B is Tier 2, Column C is Tier 3. Map specific tasks to the formative signals I might see in yesterday's exit ticket." [proudly] It builds the scaffolds for you in about ten seconds. [laughs] A three-column table mapped to formative signals. That is incredibly precise. You're not asking it to invent a lesson, you're asking it to engineer the accessibility points for a lesson you already wrote. [warmly] Yes! Because that's the whole point. And it brings us right back to Matt Griesinger's piece in *Edutopia*. He calls this the "path to access." He argues that giving a kid a separate, easier lesson doesn't close the achievement gap. [emphatically] It WIDENS it. The only thing that closes the gap is giving them the exact same target skill, just with a different path to access it. [thoughtful] The same target skill, just a different path. You don't lower the bar, you just build a different staircase. [warmly] Exactly. So, ditch the choice menu. Try using a tiered task based on yesterday's exit ticket tomorrow morning, [mischievously] and tell us how it goes.