Origins of Spot the Difference
The Spot the Difference Strategy 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.
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.
Read more about the specific steps of the strategy here.
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.
Check out real-life classroom examples or spot the difference looking at published authors' messy first drafts.