Differentiation is an educational term that really means to teach each student. Every student arrives with her or his own background, talents, and knowledge base.

To effectively support and challenge students, teachers need to find the best path into a student's mind, to scaffold on their previous knowledge, and to build bridges of understanding to new material and skills. We quite purposefully designed our elementary program in this way.

We have two full time, qualified teachers in every classroom of Pre-Kindergarten through Grade 3 children. This allows each teacher to lead a group of learners, or support and challenge individual learners. It's a very expensive instructional practice to be sure, but we believe it is worth it to build the foundation and the springboard to academic success in our youngest learners.

Differentiation is easy with smaller groups, but it is also part of our teachers' repertoire of skills, because teaching is both an art and a science, and our teachers are skilled in both. That's the TASIS Portugal difference.