Why Differentiated Instruction Matters in Structured Literacy

Not every struggling reader struggles the same way. Grade-at-intervention and learner profile are two of the strongest predictors of how a student will respond to a given approach — yet many programs still apply a single method uniformly.

This piece walks through three practical lenses interventionists can use before selecting an approach: the student’s decoding-vs-comprehension gap, their exposure to prior instruction, and their language background — each of which changes what ‘differentiated’ should actually mean in practice.