Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments article on ability grouping

Until this year with the adoption of common core, DS/DD were in stand-alone GT classroms so more akin to tracking than ability grouping per say. This year the school split up the GT students into three of the six 5th grade classrooms for the reading/language arts block. I visited the classroom during American Education Week and saw first-hand how the new curriculum works. The teacher teaches some of the basic ideas to the class as a whole with some responses from the students, then the students break up into three groups by ability. Each ability group has different level reading materials and the teacher meets with each group for 5 to 15 minutes depending on what is being covered and the students work independently the rest of the time. It looks to me like the teacher has to work much harder than when she just have one curriculum to teach.