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When it comes down to it, I think it is unfettered teacher skill with adequate professional development that can make it happen.
Totally agree with this.
We are not in a gifted school, but in a public with very limited pull-outs. Despite this, we have had some very successful differentiation. The district does a lot of professional development and support in this area, and some of the teachers have been wonderful. (We have also had a few who are not "on board" with differentiation- with the expected results).
The most successful things for our kids have been spelling- a program called words their way, which uses a pre-test and sorts kids into leveled groups. What made it work for us, though, was the teacher recognizing that DS and 2 others were beyond the program and offering them lists with Greek and Latin roots, and vocabulary instead.
We have had pretty good success with reading/writing as well- kids read their own choices and writing is often related to what they are reading. (Example- one year DS's class had to write a weekly book letter to the teacher where they had to answer at least 3 questions or prompts from a list; the teacher would then answer each letter with appropriate responses, including questions for the kid to discuss in the next letter).
The times when the class reads one book all together have been the least successful- the format doesn't lend itself well to differentiation in my opinion, and things always seem to move at a snail' space.
Some of my kids classes have used an online site called Teenbiz- it's a non-fiction reading/writing support site. The kids take a pretest and are assigned via lexile level various articles each week; they complete activities such as answering comprehension or vocabulary questions or writing response questions which are evaluated by their teacher. My DD hated it, but this was because it was the first time she encountered anything close to "hard" in school.
Math is tougher- the best differentiation we had here was a teacher who grouped and re-grouped kids constantly, in small groups working together on variations of the same general idea (one group could be practicing finding area of a quadrilateral, while DD would be trying to derive the formula for area of a parallellogram, for instance). The nightly homework was basic, the same for everyone, but there was frequently a long-term challenge problem they were assigned with multiple parts, requiring some writing, they were expected to participate in an ongoing class blog about the challenge and give hints or advice to each other, etc. They also had to complete written "portfolios" at the end of each unit which involved fairly in-depth discussion questions, sections where they had to analyze any mistakes they made on the test and discuss, etc. Obviously these were done with varying levels of depth and thoroughness- my DD knew the teacher expected more from her and she worked hard at it.
All of this is greatly helped by what ZenScanner observes- the classes are not too big and the teachers are fantastic. Also, our school has lots and lots of support for struggling kids- there is an "extra help" period every day after school, and kids who need more intensive help are assigned to math and/or reading lab periods instead of some electives or study halls. In a few of our classrooms, there is an assigned special ed teacher in addition to the main teacher, to help facilitate everyone's needs. It requires a lot of flexibility and patience, and a tremendous amount of work from the teachers.
