📚 HQIM + Diffit Toolkit

Make complex, high-quality instructional materials (HQIM) accessible to every student—without lowering the bar. With Diffit, you can adapt and scaffold texts in minutes, helping students enter rigorous materials with confidence and stay engaged in grade-level learning.

You don’t have to rewrite your curriculum to make HQIM work for all learners. Diffit provides leveled passages, vocabulary supports, and evidence-based activities that let every student access the same core ideas. This toolkit highlights ways to use Diffit to open doors into challenging texts, deepen comprehension, and give students the tools to show what they know.

How to Use This Toolkit

Start small: select one or two Diffit activities to integrate into your HQIM lessons. These structures can be repeated across new units so students grow comfortable with the routine while tackling increasingly complex content. Whether you’re working 1:1, in small groups, or with the whole class, Diffit helps you focus class time on thinking, not rewriting materials.

🔍 Access & Comprehension

Help students enter challenging texts and make meaning while staying connected to the grade-level task.

  • Reading Passage: Provide leveled versions of a core selection so all students work with the same content.
  • Read and Annotate: Teach students to highlight and comment on key ideas to stay engaged while reading.
  • Key Vocabulary with Images: Pre-teach or reinforce essential terms to build background knowledge.
  • Cloze Reading: Strengthen decoding and comprehension by filling in missing words with context clues.

🧠 Deep Thinking

Encourage students to analyze, connect, and reason with the text—going beyond surface understanding.

  • Main Idea (By Paragraph): Break down dense sections into manageable steps.
  • Making Inferences: Combine text evidence with prior knowledge to build meaning.
  • Causes and Effects: Trace how events or ideas influence each other in the passage.
  • Flow Chart Map: Help students visually organize information and sequence ideas clearly.

🗣️ Collaboration & Communication

Give students structured opportunities to process their thinking and share ideas with others before moving to writing or assessment.

  • Think Pair Share: Rehearse ideas out loud to strengthen understanding before composing a response.
  • Group Discussion: Use Diffit’s guiding questions to frame peer-to-peer dialogue.
  • Answer and Explain: Encourage students to justify their answers with text evidence.
  • Social Media Summary: Summarize the core message of a passage in a concise, creative way.

💡 Tips for Differentiating HQIM with Diffit

  • Preview leveled Reading Passages before returning to the grade-level text to build confidence.
  • Introduce Key Vocabulary with Images to give students multiple entry points into new material.
  • Pair Read and Annotate with Main Idea (By Paragraph) to scaffold complex reading into digestible steps.
  • Use Answer and Explain or Multiple Choice Questions for quick checks, then extend into ACE or CER Open Ended Question.
  • Offer choice in final products (RACE, CER, or Social Media Summary) to match different learners’ strengths.