For Teachers

How to Stop Writing a Separate Plan for Every Kid

On the exhausting maths of writing twenty different lesson plans for one afternoon.

The maths that never worked

Early in my two years working across childcare centres in Melbourne’s east, I decided proper differentiation meant genuinely individualised planning, a separate version of every activity, tuned to where each child actually was. It sounded right. It matched everything I’d read during my Diploma about meeting each child where they are.

It also meant, in a room of twenty children, writing something close to twenty separate small plans for a single afternoon, on top of documentation, on top of everything else the job already asked of a casual educator moving between centres. I tried it for perhaps two weeks before the exhaustion made the whole approach unsustainable. I wasn’t sleeping properly, I was arriving at each placement already depleted, and the actual quality of what I was delivering was, if I’m honest, getting worse, not better, under the weight of trying to individualise everything.

I remember feeling like this proved something uncomfortable about myself, that I simply wasn’t organised enough, or dedicated enough, to do the job properly the way the more experienced educators around me seemed to manage. It took a while to realise the problem wasn’t my organisation. It was the underlying assumption that supporting every child properly required a different task for each one.

Where the actual shift came from

The change came from watching one particular activity work unusually well across a room with a huge developmental spread, some children barely counting, others confidently adding small numbers together. Rather than three separate maths activities pitched at three different levels, the educator running the room had set out a single open task, build the tallest tower you can, then work out how many blocks it took.

Every child in the room could genuinely start. A child who could only count to five counted their own tower, slowly, with support. A child further along counted, then compared their total with a friend’s, then started predicting how many more blocks would make theirs taller. Same task, same materials, no separate plans written the night before, and every single child was working at a level that actually stretched them.

That was the whole discovery, and it’s embarrassing how long it took me to see it clearly. I’d been assuming differentiation meant different tasks for different children. It could just as easily mean the same task, open enough at both ends that every child found their own genuine level inside it.

Why it took a while to actually trust this

Knowing that one well-designed open task could replace several individualised ones didn’t make the shift simple, and the real obstacles are worth naming honestly.

My own instinct toward individualising didn’t disappear overnight. Coming out of a PhD, I’d been trained for years to treat rigour as meaning more specific, more tailored, more separately accounted for. An open task that let multiple children work at wildly different levels simultaneously felt, for a while, like it must be less rigorous than a carefully tuned individual plan, even once I could see with my own eyes that it was producing better engagement.

Designing a genuinely open task turned out to be its own skill, and not an easy one. My early attempts either had a floor too high, some children simply couldn’t start at all, or a ceiling too low, the strongest children finished in ninety seconds and had nothing left to do. Getting the balance right took real trial and error, watching where children actually got stuck or bored, and adjusting the task rather than assuming I’d got it right the first time.

One early failure taught me more than most of my successes. I set out a “build the tallest tower” task almost identical to the one that had first shown me this idea, except I’d added a printed instruction sheet with three suggested target heights written on it. Within minutes, most children were simply trying to hit whichever number felt achievable to them, rather than actually exploring how tall a tower could genuinely go. I’d accidentally turned an open task back into three closed ones, just disguised as one activity. Removing the printed numbers entirely, and replacing them with nothing more than the open question itself, fixed it immediately.

There was scepticism from colleagues too, similar to what I’d met around narrative assessment and reduced formal meetings. A couple of more traditional educators genuinely believed that one shared task for a whole room, however open-ended, was inherently a lesser, less attentive form of teaching than separate individualised plans, regardless of what the actual engagement in the room showed.

And there was a real risk, which I fell into more than once, of mistaking “open” for “unplanned.” An open task still needs real intentional design, the right materials, the right starting prompt, a genuine range of directions a child could take it. A poorly designed open task doesn’t magically differentiate itself just because it lacks separate versions. It just becomes vague, and vague tasks tend to serve nobody particularly well.

Moving between age groups added another layer to this too. A task that worked as a genuine low floor, high ceiling activity for a preschool room sometimes needed real reworking to function the same way in a toddler room, where the floor itself had to sit much lower, and the ceiling didn’t need to stretch nearly as far to still feel meaningful. I had to relearn the calibration every time I moved rooms, rather than assuming one well-designed task would automatically transfer.

What actually worked, once it clicked

A small set of principles ended up doing most of the work, once I’d had enough practice designing tasks this way.

The second version needed no separate preparation for different children, and produced a genuinely wider range of thinking than the three-tier worksheet approach ever managed, since it didn’t cap anyone’s thinking at a pre-decided level.

How to tell whether a task is genuinely open

A few checks I learned to run before trusting a new task in front of a whole room. Could the least confident child in the room genuinely begin, without needing an adapted version handed to them separately? Could the most advanced child keep finding something new to do with it for a full ten minutes, without hitting an obvious ceiling and asking what’s next? And, watching the room in action, was I seeing a genuine spread of approaches, or had most children converged on doing the same narrow thing, which usually meant the task was closed than it looked on paper.

That last check caught more of my early mistakes than anything else. A task that looks open on paper but produces near-identical results across the whole room almost always has a hidden ceiling or a hidden expected answer buried somewhere in how it was introduced.

Where this idea comes from

What I’d stumbled into sits close to two related, well-established ideas in education research. The first is Carol Ann Tomlinson’s framework for differentiated instruction, developed over decades at the University of Virginia. Tomlinson is explicit on a point I badly needed to hear early on, differentiating is not the same as individualising. Her framework centres on flexible grouping and responsive task design, not a separate plan for every single child.

ISTE and ASCD’s overview of differentiated instruction, the professional body most closely associated with Tomlinson’s work, describes the approach as being about connecting learning to individual kids through responsive, flexible design, not through a separately authored plan for each child.

The second, more specific idea is what mathematics education researcher Jo Boaler, at Stanford, calls low floor, high ceiling tasks, activities simple enough for every kid to genuinely begin, but with enough depth that stronger kids can take them much further. Boaler has spoken directly about preferring this approach over handing different children different pre-assigned tasks, precisely because open tasks let children choose their own level rather than being sorted into one by an adult in advance.

This interview with Boaler covers her reasoning directly, including her specific caution against handing struggling and advanced kids visibly different tasks, since that approach can create its own status problems inside a room, something a genuinely shared open task avoids entirely.

Between the two, the underlying message was the same one that block tower activity had already shown me in practice. Meeting every child’s actual level doesn’t require multiplying your workload by the number of children in the room. It requires designing fewer, better tasks with enough built-in flexibility to meet a wide range of learners inside the same activity.

Boaler makes a further point worth sitting with, one that reframed how I thought about the three-tier worksheets I’d started with. Handing different children visibly different, pre-sorted versions of a task doesn’t just cost an educator extra preparation time, it can quietly create its own social hierarchy inside a room, children noticing who got the “easy” sheet and who got the “hard” one. A genuinely shared open task sidesteps that entirely, since nobody’s version announces where the adult in charge has decided they sit.

Where this connects to the worksheets

This shaped the tracing bundle more directly than almost anything else from those two years. Every letter page uses the same basic structure, story, dashed letter, practice lines, but a child who’s just starting out can trace slowly and simply, while a child further along can write the letter independently underneath, or extend the story themselves. One page, no separate versions needed, built with the same low floor, high ceiling thinking behind it.

If you want to see that in practice, the alphabet tracing template is one real page from the bundle, built on exactly this principle.

What I’d tell myself during those exhausted first two weeks

I don’t write twenty individual lesson plans a night any more, and looking back, I don’t think I ever should have believed that was the standard I was failing to meet. The best educators I eventually learned from weren’t working harder than me. They were designing smarter, fewer, more open tasks, and trusting those tasks to do the differentiating on their own.

There’s a broader lesson in this too, one that took me well past those two years to fully appreciate. A lot of teacher burnout, in early childhood and beyond, comes from a genuine misunderstanding about what good practice actually requires, mistaking more individual effort for better individual outcomes, when the research consistently points the other way, toward better-designed shared tasks rather than a separately authored plan for every single child. I wasted a lot of energy in those first weeks proving a point about my own dedication that the evidence never actually supported.

If I could go back to those two exhausted weeks, convinced I simply wasn’t organised enough for this job, I’d tell myself plainly: stop trying to write twenty plans. Design one good one instead, open enough that all twenty children can actually use it. That’s what supporting every kid was always going to look like, not more hours, just better design.