Tiering Defined: WHAT IS TIERING?

Tiering is an instructional and management strategy by which teachers differentiate to meet students at their readiness level, interest level, or by their learning profile.

Tiered activities are very important when a teacher wants to ensure that students with different learning needs work with the same essential ideas and use the same key skills.

Teachers use tiered activities so all students focus on essential understandings and skills but at different levels of complexity, abstractness, and open-endedness. By keeping the focus of the activity the same, but providing routes of access at varying degrees of difficulty, the teacher maximizes the likelihood that:

       1. Each student comes away with pivotal skills and understandings.
       2. Each student is appropriately challenged.

Tasks are matched to each student based on student need and task requirements. The goal is to match the task's degree of difficulty and its pacing to student readiness.
(Tomlinson, C. (1995). The Differentiated Classroom)

The product of this differentiated activity will be a PowerPoint presentation addressing second grade students; yet tiered to meet students at their level of readiness. Students at the lowest tier should move up to the next tier level following mastery of the lowest level entry point. This might be accomplished using the subsequent tier levels as an achor activity (view the anchor tab for a definition).

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