Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Acceleration vs in class differentiation for math?

This.

I did see it work well once! Kindergarten year for ODS was the continuation (third year) of the primary sequence at an accredited Montessori school (private). Excellent differentiation for a PG kid (and some of his high ability classmates). Of course, it's a totally different structure than most classrooms, since students are working at their own pace.

Unfortunately, sensing a need in kindergarten and finding that need to be unmet may result in an earlier cascade of negative impacts:
- child is bored in school
- child disengages
- child learns that teachers have nothing new to share
- child generalizes this and becomes disappointed in adults
- child skates through easy work and does not learn study skills
- child experiences brain changes from lack of learning in his/her zone of proximal development (ZPD)
- child becomes an underachiever
- child has a poor self-concept and a bad attitude

Gifted kids have needs. These can often be apparent at a very young age.

Agreed!

In theory this may sound good, however... and unfortunately...
1) Many schools are reluctant to have high students in a separate classroom than low students because they believe it is unfair to the teacher.
2) Even when classes are somewhat grouped by ability and readiness, there can be a wide range of skills, talents, and/or gifts among students.
3) A gifted kid may be well above even the next brightest kid(s) in their grade level and may benefit from cluster grouping by readiness and ability in each subject, regardless of chronological age or grade level (multi-age classroom). These links provide more information on flexible cluster grouping by readiness and ability:
http://www.casenex.com/casenet/pages/virtualLibrary/gridlock/groupmyths.html,
http://www.gifted.uconn.edu/nrcgt/reports/rbdm9204/rbdm9204.pdf
4) While many "gifted programs" may consist of teaching a subject one grade level advanced, this may not be enough for a gifted student.
5) Research studies reveal that gifted kids are in such small numbers that classrooms are padded with non-gifted high achieving kids, which may then outnumber the gifted kids. In a typical classroom of 20-24, the teaching/instruction may then be targeted to this majority population and be well below the zone of proximal development (ZPD) of the gifted kid(s).

Having said that, I agree with Loy58 in that having a somewhat narrower range of student abilities within a classroom, it may become more realistic for a teacher to provide meaningful leveled instruction for groups of students in that classroom.

Many private schools pride themselves in having all gifted and/or high achieving kids, therefore they may believe that they are already providing this type of high ability level classroom experience to their enrolled pupils.

My experience the past year with in-class differentiation in early grade math (before GT kicks in) is mixed. The teacher was enthusiastic, encouraging, and rather creative with her extension work at times, and DD regained confidence and happiness. When the teacher had time and a sufficient cluster of students to work a year-above level, this was done, through rotating three ability groups. I found out though, that if DD did not get 100% on a pre-test, she still worked though the regular class material. Sometimes she was working above-level for that topic, using the standards rubric for next grade mastery as a guideline. That meant only topics that spiraled were taught at the next level, where appropriate. Recently, though, when DD got 100% on a pre-test, she was given a packet of related work to do independently and not actually instructed in higher level material, because the teacher only has so much time and DD was the sole member at that level. Next year, I'd think SSA would be a better fit, but I don't know that it'll happen.

Thank you for all the feedback. Here is some additional information, if it helps:

1) My son’s classmates are a pretty bright group. Most of their parents have advanced degrees and are scientists, engineers, doctors and lawyers. At least ⅓ of the class are gifted. Even with a VCI in the 140s and reading at a second grade level, my son isn’t in the top reading group. Also, his writing is just average so I suspect he may experience difficulty with keeping up with the written work of older kids if put into a class with them.
2 My son’s math level, however, is above any of his classmates’. I’m not sure how he compares to the kids in the other kindergarten class but from his teachers comments, I suspect he is much higher than anybody in his grade.
3) The school seems to be committed to differentiating. The kids’ reading groups are cross-class so that everybody can be appropriately matched. In older grades, the kids are tracked according to math ability and put in cross-grade classes. I understand that some fifth graders are even doing Trig.
4) The curriculum is project based, so math is integrated in all the activities and the kids aren’t given packets of work or asked to work alone. The school doesn’t use an off the shelf math curriculum but instead has a scope and sequence and a resource room where teachers can choose from a range of activities/games/lesson plans to cover each concept. According to the curriculum director, this allows teachers to tailor activities to the ability levels in a given class. Most of the math is done in small groups and consists of games and activities. Kids are also given individual, open ended activities at least once a week with the idea that kids can work at their own level. Then the kids share their work/reasoning with others. For example, when the kids were working on greater than and less than, my son wrote a series of math sentences comparing square roots of numbers. So he was able to take an open ended activity and make it more difficult/interesting. But he didn’t learn about square roots in his class, he learned about them from talking about math with his dad. Also, he is still spending most of his time playing the math games that other kids are doing.
5) While the kindergarten teachers in my son’s class are relatively inexperienced and also new to the school, the first grade teachers are veteran teachers. The lead math teacher for first grade said that math is “highly differentiated” in her classroom. She said that while kids are all working on projects together, she assigns parts of the project that provide different levels of challenge to various kids. I know a woman who co-taught with this teacher before and she reports that the teacher “bends over backwards to make sure kids are learning and challenged”. She said that some kids were doing very advanced math in the class and that all the kids were doing multiplication and division by the end of the year.
6) I suspect that while my son’s teachers call him “brilliant” or “the next Elon Musk” that they don’t really have any understanding of what he is capable of in math. I could share his IQ scores but if they don’t have much experience with gifted kids, I’m guessing that won’t really mean much to them and I’m afraid it will make me just seem obnoxious. I do believe my son has been challenged and learned so much in kindergarten, I just don’t think he’s being challenged in math.

All this is to say that I’m tempted to just see what happens BUT I’m also worried that my son will spend another year not learning anything in math. This week he told me that math is his favorite subject but it’s getting “ruined” because he never gets to learn anything new. He’s not particularly assertive so when he approached the head of the school to ask for more challenging math, I knew that he must be really unhappy with the current setup.

I feel like I want to get this right now because coming back to complain again next year will undoubtedly strain our relationship with the teachers. I am leaning towards asking the school to finish an assessment of where he is in relation to the current first grader’s math and also if there will be any kids who are similar in his class next year. I suspect that no amount of differentiation would be as good as being paired with at least a couple of other kids who are developmentally matched with my son’s math level.

You may wish to prepare yourself for the idea that he may actually need to take end-of-year math assessments for several grades, as he may far exceed end-of-first-grade math expectations.

Agreed. It is good for kids to have intellectual/academic peers, especially in a subject of particular interest. All in all, it sounds like a very workable situation with your school (which sounds wonderful) and it seems you have a solid understanding of the who-what-where-when-why-and-how of any program implementation buzzwords such as differentiation and challenge, and what they translate to in this particular context.

If your son were to take math class with students one or more grades ahead, this would typically be called single subject acceleration (SSA).

Yes, understanding his optimal curriculum placement for math now may allow the school sufficient lead time to schedule fall classes in a manner which makes it logistically feasible for him to attend a math class with students in a higher grade level (for example, leave 1st grade math class to walk to 4th grade math class).

ConnectingDots beat me to it. We started my son's schooling off with "differentiation" - he was in a 1st grade math class for K where he was way beyond all 1st graders and was blurting out answers before anybody else - and they gave him "work packets" sporadically - but, these work packets did not come with any instructions or teaching by the teacher. The teacher said that differentiation meant that they will provide challenging work, but they had no time to teach new concepts and expected the child to already know them.
We moved to a school which gave him a 1 year acceleration in math - too slow paced and boring for him.
We moved to a school that placed him in a special class (ability grouping) where kids were accelerated 2-3 years in math - he is happier now - a lot of the kids are hothoused and go to evening classes in math centers, but, he has met 5 kids who are at the same level in math as him - they are his peers and he is feeling competitive and energized in class because he enjoys the interactions with them.
This placement is not perfect, but we appreciate that DS can meet kids who have as much passion for math as him.
We are continuing to after school in his strength areas, because he has the ability to handle more than what the classroom provides, but, he learns a lot in the class as well (this year, he has been learning geometry and it is new to him, though he gets the concepts quickly, he is thrilled to learn something new at school).

Differentiation in the class room did not work. But, we have had some success with a combination of "ability based grouping" and after schooling.

One smiley face for each of the intellectual/academic math peers he has found to connect with.

This is exactly what I am seeing. Not every PG kid can learn new concepts on his/her own, especially at a young age. He/She needs instructions and some teaching before they can get started. What happens to my DS is that they expect him to know how to answer the questions already but what's the point of learning that material if he already mastered the material. What's different about these PG kids is that they learn and master a concept more quickly than non GT kids, doesn't mean they automatically know or can learn a concept on their own all the time.



This is what I am hoping for next year when my DS is grouped with similar ability kids. He does seem to be more interested in doing the packet if he's doing it with another kid (he's also doing a math packet from his room teacher besides the one from the math specialist, and another boy is doing the same packet from his room teacher). He was able to finish this packet quicker because he was doing it with his classmate.

I also do Beast Academy outside of school with him to provide more challenge at his own pace.