Differentiation to accomodate for varying student needs can be incredibly exhausting and time consuming for teachers. It can often feel like you have to plan three separate lessons to target support, core and extension students. Therefore, we often teach to the core students and then spend one on one time helping support students. But in the process forget to extend gifted students.
Gifted students progress through learning activities rapidly and then are often given more work to do, asked to read a book or run an errand for the teacher. This is not a fair academic accomodation for gifted students. Gifted students do not need more work or jobs to keep them busy. Rather they need to be challenged and stretched in their learning. So here are seven strategies to differentiate for gifted students without feeling like you’ve got to spend hours planning another lesson.
- Shorter Plenary: Many teachers begin a lesson with a plenary session giving direct instruction or generating class discussion. Gifted students usually understand a concept the first time it is explained. They don’t need multiple examples to achieve mastery. Therefore, after your first explanation of a concept do a quick pop quiz to see if the gifted students understand. If they do, send them straight back to their desk to do some independent work while you continue to teach the class. Listening to the concept being re-explained will only generate boredom and misbehaviour for gifted students.
- Less Questions: After direct instruction, students often spend time independently or in small groups answering questions to practise a new skill. Gifted students do not necessarily need to practise new skills repeatedly to achieve mastery. Therefore cut down the number of questions and focus on more complex activities. For example in a Maths activity with 20 questions on fractions, a gifted student could just do one question from each row but then do all the final complex problems.
- Pre-Test: It is really important to pre-test your gifted students before starting a new topic. It is all to easy for a gifted student to sit through an entire unit of work and learn nothing new. Be clever in your choice of assessment so that it isn’t too laborious. For example for example source pre-made assessments using Mathletics or SpellingCity. Or ask your gifted student to create a mind map about a Science or Geography topic to reveal what they know. If you find they are already knowledgeable on a topic then consider a passion project (see strategy number 8).
- Flexible Apps: Choose apps with flexibility and a high ceiling. A good example is screen casting using apps like ShowMe and Explain Everything. This enables students to create videos that display their thinking and understanding. Therefore a gifted student can create a screen cast on a complex concept whilst working alongside a support student creating a screen cast on a more basic concept. Many apps also have the ability to change settings to make the activity easier or harder. For example Penguin Jump Multiplication allows you to change the number range and type of question. Or A+ Spelling Test allows students to create personalised spelling lists at their ability level.
- Grouping: We often fall into the trap of thinking that it is helpful for gifted students to work with support students. We believe that it will keep the gifted student occupied if they are helping others and that the support student will be ‘pulled up’ by the gifted student. These misconceptions are contrary to educational research. Ability grouping allows gifted students to progress through learning alongside peers with similar aptitude and capability. So the rate of learning is in alignment with student ability. Furthermore, Kennedy’s (1989) research revealed that students of low or average ability flourish when gifted learners are withdrawn because it gives them the opportunity to succeed and stand out.
- Accelerate: Chronological age does not directly correlate with ability or academic development. Studies have shown that gifted students provided with accelerated and enriched learning material progress at twice the rate of gifted students in heterogeneous classes (Kulik, 1992). A simple way to accelerate students is to align classes such as Maths, Spelling and Reading Groups so that students can join an older class for that lesson. This means the teachers doesn’t have to plan additional work and the gifted student is learning in their zone of proximal development.
- Problem Solving: Have problem solving resources ready for gifted students to go on with after they have finished an activity. For example you could have a box full of puzzles, brain teasers, rubik’s cube and riddles. When I taught Year 5 my extension students I used Go Maths Think Tank problem solving. As soon as they had finished the core exercises they knew to go straight to the problem solving activities.
- Project Work: Set up a passion project for your gifted student where they explore a topic of interest. Provide a rubric of activities that provide scaffold learning. This ensures the project isn’t just research on a topic, but rather encourages deep and creative thinking. Have the project published online to a global audience using a blog or website. I have taught students in Year 1 who have published online using Blogger as well as students as young as Year 3 creating websites using Weebly, Wix and Google Sites. A blog or website also allows for family, friends and industry professionals to post comments and provide feedback on their learning.
Question for you: What strategies do you use to differentiate for your gifted students?
