How Spot the Difference Teaching Started
From one classroom “aha” moment to a teaching approach built around noticing what matters.
It Started With an Email
Spot the Difference Teaching started with creating the Spot the Difference Strategy which was the result of an aha-moment while founder Lea Maryanow was teaching email etiquette to her 7th graders:
"Over and over again, my students struggled paying attention to important details, such as putting the proper punctuation and formatting, when writing an email. I kept seeing the missing details right away; my students did not, even though they had a model email to refer back to. Why was that? I realized that through my years of experience details stood out to me but my students didn't see them.
What If We Applied the Game to Text?
Simultaneously, my husband and I had just played "Spot the Difference" games with our kids where you have to spot ten mistakes in two, seemingly same, images. That was it. I needed to apply this game principle to text. So, I started giving students a proper email side-by-side with an email that had mistakes in it, such as a missing salutation, or a missing punctuation. Then I asked them to spot the differences. This was the key: all of a sudden, my students were able to identify their mistakes on their own, leading to much academic growth. This was the birth of the Spot the Difference Strategy.
The Idea Kept Growing
"The Day of a Student" video illustrates the frustration students often encounter with text prompts, text passages, etc. on a daily basis as they go from class to class. If students do not know which words are the key ones that make a text effective, they struggle understanding or analyze one text, let alone comparing different texts. The Spot the Difference Strategy provides students with the tools to be (more) successful with text across all subjects and grade levels.
Same Principle. More Ways to Notice.
Throughout the next weeks and months, I realized that as a person who lives in a multilingual household we use the Spot the Difference Strategy every time we code-switch from one language to another. One sentence. Two (or more) different versions/translations of the same sentence. Depending on a person's vocabulary and connotative understanding of words, context can get lost in translation when certain key words are not understood correctly.
Spot the Difference Beyond Text
The same principle can also be experienced through visual materials—helping students look closely, notice details, and recognize meaningful differences.
