Originally Posted by chay
I would have to assume that in Dweck's world the gifted child in suevv's example would be given appropriate work the next day and have a chance to be "Child 2" and receive praise. The problem as we all know (and stated above), is that that isn't usually the case. It all boils down to - how do you ensure that ALL kids have the appropriate work so that they are able to develop a growth mindset?

I think that until they've tried to actually differentiate for an HG+ kid in a normal classroom they honestly think that it can be done and they all drink the differentiation kool-aid. In our case they photocopy a worksheet one grade level ahead, send the kid off to the corner to teach it to themselves and then pat themselves on the back for their amazing differentiation. That isn't even close to enough for these kids. To be totally honest the huge majority of elementary teachers simple don't have the math background to be able to do much else. They simply follow the text book/curriculum and stay one lesson ahead of the kids. They lack the bigger picture or the depth themselves to be able to branch out and do something a little different. What elementary teacher has a good enough grasp of math 3, 4 or more years ahead to teach it and yet that is what some of these kids need. What elementary teacher has enough of a math background to know some things that AREN'T in the curriculum that could provide some useful tangents? Mastered addition and subtraction? Let's try that in binary, now octal, now hex, now whatever base you want to make up. That just isn't going to happen.

I agree with this. Our district is all about the "personalized learning pathway" and they even pride themselves on "cluster groups" but is it meaningful? Nope. I'm so sick of the word "differentiation". DS had a teacher in first grade who sat with him each day teaching him that "harder work" but she said it was difficult. DS was still on his own a lot, and he became frustrated when he got stuck and there was no one to help. So a question for Carol Dweck is how do you get high effort from the kids with much higher than average achievement levels when there is no way a teacher can manage to teach to 30 different levels in a classroom, for 30 different kids.