Component 2: Differentiation in Instruction - Two Students, Real Evidence
What the entry asks for
Component 2 is a portfolio entry built around two students you teach. You submit knowledge-of-student profiles, work samples or artifacts, your instructional plans and modifications, and an analysis of each student's growth. The scorers want to see a defensible line from what you knew about the students to what you did to what changed.
Concepts to command
Knowledge of students spans academic, linguistic, cultural, social-emotional, and interest dimensions - not test scores alone. Know the distinction between differentiation (same standard, varied route, scaffolding, grouping, pacing, product), modification (changed standard or expectation, usually tied to IEP/504), and accommodation (access without changing the target). Be fluent in formative assessment, descriptive feedback, scaffold fading, and student self-assessment.
Traps
Choosing two students with identical profiles, which leaves nothing to differentiate between. Submitting artifacts that are unannotated worksheets - the reader cannot see the reasoning. Describing activities instead of explaining decisions. Claiming growth with no baseline evidence, or over-reading a single work sample as proof of mastery. Confusing a busy lesson with a differentiated one.
Worked rule of thumb
Annotate every artifact with a three-part chain: need → decision → evidence. Example: a student decodes accurately but cannot infer; the need is inference, so the decision is a two-column text-evidence organizer plus sentence frames; the evidence is the before/after written response showing the student citing text to support a claim. If any link in that chain is missing from your entry, the scorer cannot award the level.
Reflection quality
Analyze what you would change next time. Reflection that only celebrates success reads as shallow; reflection that names a limit and a next step reads as professional judgment.