If they're both about responding to students,
why does the distinction matter?
When a teacher believes they are doing agile teaching because they already differentiate, they miss the specific contribution that each practice makes. Differentiation improves learning by anticipating diversity and designing for it. Agile teaching improves learning by discovering what actually happened and responding to it. One is prospective. The other is retrospective. Both are necessary. Neither replaces the other.
The confusion is understandable: both involve adapting instruction to students, both require professional judgment about student needs, and both are described using similar language (‘being responsive’, ‘meeting students where they are’). The difference is in when and how.
Differentiation is before the lesson.
Agile teaching is after it.
Differentiation happens in the planning phase — before students have seen the lesson. The teacher uses knowledge of students' prior attainment, learning profiles, or diagnostic assessment to design learning activities that serve different starting points. The differentiation is built into the lesson before delivery.
Agile teaching happens after the lesson — in response to what was observed and measured during it. The teacher uses exit ticket data, observation notes, or in-lesson signals to modify the next lesson. The adaptation is built in response to evidence, not anticipation.
Both are needed.
Neither replaces the other.
The strongest argument for treating differentiation and agile teaching as distinct — rather than merging them into a single practice — is that they address different failure modes.
Differentiation addresses the failure mode of ignoring known diversity. If a teacher knows that 5 students in the class have significant gaps in prerequisite knowledge, and designs a lesson that assumes all students are at the same starting point, those 5 students will be left behind regardless of how well the lesson is observed and iterated. Differentiation prevents this.
Agile teaching addresses the failure mode of false confidence. If a teacher designs a well-differentiated lesson and then delivers it without checking what actually happened, they will not discover the systematic misconception that affected 18 of the 25 students — including students in both the foundation and core groups. Agile teaching prevents this.
Where student-centred learning fits in
— and how all three relate.
Student-centred learning is sometimes added to this comparison. Like differentiation, it is a different practice from agile teaching — but it is often confused with both.
Student-centred learning is about who drives the learning — giving students more ownership of direction, pace, and expression. It operates at the level of learning design: does the learning happen in response to student questions and interests, or in response to a curriculum prescribed entirely by the teacher? This is a different question from both differentiation (which is about design for diversity) and agile teaching (which is about iteration based on evidence).
All three can coexist in the same classroom: a teacher who differentiates for known starting points, gives students meaningful choice in how they demonstrate understanding, and iterates the lesson design based on what the exit tickets revealed is deploying all three practices simultaneously. They are not competing frameworks — they are practices that address different aspects of the same challenge: making teaching genuinely responsive to actual students.