A Better Way to Teach the Gifted - and Everyone Else
by Siri Fiske
Wall Street Journal
Appeared in the January 17, 2018, print edition.
Originally Posted by article
For many gifted students, the school day is a snooze-fest. Seven in 10 public school teachers agree that “too often, the brightest students are bored and under-challenged in school,” according to a 2008 study from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
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Gifted students complete their assignments easily and wait for additional stimulation that never comes.
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Some schools have found a solution: “mastery-based education,” which lets kids move on to new material once they’ve mastered particular content, rather than when they’ve sat at a certain desk for a certain number of days.
The comments following this opinion piece are also worth reading. I especially enjoyed:
- the reference to Harrison Bergeron
- the mention of learning to be lazy, after years of lacking appropriate challenge (also discussed in the forum, here)
- ability grouping (also discussed in the forum, here and here)

This old thread on Competency Based Education (June 2015) also discusses pros and cons of the concept of mastery-based education.