Campfire Session — Differentiation in Flint

Learn how to use chats, activities, and groups to scaffold support for ELL and struggling students, extend rigor for gifted learners, and customize audio, language, and moderation settings.

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Jacob Edington, Head of Customer Success at Flint

In this Differentiation in Flint Campfire Session, we focused on how teachers can use Flint to support diverse learners across the full spectrum—students who need additional scaffolding, multilingual learners, and gifted and talented students—without increasing workload or fragmenting instruction. The session emphasized practical differentiation strategies using chats, activities, groups, and moderation tools, while also surfacing real classroom challenges around AI use, student behavior, and digital citizenship.

Content covered in this session includes:

• Context-setting on differentiation and edtech priorities, drawing on a recent Business Wire survey highlighting attendance, early intervention, AI adoption, edtech consolidation, and the growing shift from family communication to meaningful connection.

• Using chats for rapid differentiation, including creating and modifying worksheets, study guides, rubrics, and translated materials in seconds without needing to build full activities. Examples included:

• Translating the same worksheet into multiple languages for ELL students.

  • Creating parallel study guides with different levels of scaffolding and detail.
  • Adjusting rubrics to increase rigor for gifted students or provide clearer expectations for students needing support.

• Discussion of translation quality, noting strong performance across many languages (Spanish, Arabic, Romance languages), with acknowledgment that accuracy can vary and teacher review remains important.

• Pedagogical reflection on differentiation, addressing when it makes sense to give all students the same material versus intentionally providing varied scaffolds—and how Flint supports both approaches.

• Groups and subgroups as the backbone of differentiation, showing how teachers can:

  • Create a main class group with shared learning goals and background.
  • Create private subgroups (e.g., “Group A,” “Group B”) for ELL or gifted students without labeling students publicly.
  • Embed subgroup-specific context that Sparky uses automatically when generating and running activities.

• Learning Goals & Background as persistent context, highlighting how Sparky prioritizes:

  1. School Mission & Background (admin-level),
  2. Group Learning Goals & Background,
  3. Activity-level prompts—reducing repetitive setup and improving consistency.

• Live demo: Differentiated writing activity, showing how the same core activity can be duplicated and adjusted to:

  • Add sentence starters, reduced word counts, speech-to-text, or native-language support for ELL students.
  • Increase word count, sentence structure requirements, and analytical rigor for gifted students.

• Clarification of “baked-in” differentiation, explaining current-state behavior:

  • Sparky understands that differentiation exists at the class level.
  • Teachers assign differentiated experiences by duplicating activities into subgroups.
  • Automatic, per-student differentiation based on a unified student profile is in development and planned for future iterations.

• Scaffolding vs. subgrouping strategies, including a MAP testing example where teachers improved student growth by breaking instruction into smaller, sequenced activities rather than separating students by performance bands.

• Support for accessibility and comprehension, including:

  • Enabling Sparky to read content aloud to students.
  • Adjusting speaking speed, autoplay settings, and communication modes.
  • Using whiteboard zoom and tool thickness for visual accessibility.

• Honest discussion of math limitations, acknowledging current challenges with geometry and visual figures, recent improvements to image handling, and ongoing development informed by teacher feedback.

• Moderation, safety, and digital citizenship, including:

  • How Sparky responds to harmful, abusive, or inappropriate language.
  • Admin alerts for flagged content.
  • Customizable moderation guidelines that schools can tailor to their policies, handbooks, and support systems.
  • Real teacher observations about increased emotional expression toward AI and the importance of explicitly teaching AI literacy and digital citizenship.

• AI literacy as a foundation for differentiation, emphasizing that responsible AI use must be taught alongside academic content, and highlighting Flint’s customizable student AI literacy resources.

• Future-facing discussion of student profiles, exploring how Flint is moving toward deeper cross-class context so Sparky can eventually connect learning across subjects (e.g., linking history knowledge to English analysis or math to physics).

• Community-driven iteration, encouraging teachers to share successes and challenges through the Flint Community and Public Library, ensuring product development reflects real classroom needs.

Slides from the presentation can be found here.