Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums THINKING BIG About Gifted Education Seattle Public Schools to end "tracking"

The dirty little secret about differentiation being, of course, that it is really impossible to do while actually *teaching*, ie engaging in direct instruction, such as telling kids something they dont yet know or showing them something they cant do, with the aim of having them know or be able to do it themselves. A teacher has exactly one mouth to speak with, one set of hands to show stuff with. As long as they are actually imparting instruction at one level, teaching at another level cant concurrently happen, because its physically impossible.
Unlike differentiated tasks, when students can actually each work at their level at the same time. So, that is what tends to happen. But what if you want actual *teaching* at the individual students levels?
If you look at the PISA results of a country such as Finland, widely lauded for managing to keep the achievement gap as small as possible while still getting high results, two things stand out:
One, by the time Finnish kids get to high school where course selection (vulgo: voluntary tracking) begins, fully half of them have at one time been considered special ed students, meaning their instruction was the responsibility of an extra special ed teacher, within or without the regular class room, where the regular teacher continues to teach at above average level. Not enough for gifted kids, sure, but much better than teaching to the middle or to the lowest common denominator because you need to "catch kids up" dring regular class room instruction.
And two, even within that country, with low levels of immigration and barely any child poverty, the achievement gap between the 5th and the 95th percentile students is *still * the equivalent of SEVEN academic years. Add high levels of second language learners and high levels of disadvantage, add the top and bottom 5 % into the mix and have one classroom teacher try to impart instruction at every level found in the classroom. 10? 12? 15? One after the other, within one school day, or worse, one period? Granted, the kids tested for PISA are 15, but I'm sure you would end up with at least seven levels in an elementary classroom as well. In every single subject. How many teachers do we want to put in a classroom? Talking at the same time or one after the other? And how exactly would everyone who is not currently being instructed focus on their work?

Of *course* if you have but the one teacher in the classroom as usual, every bit of time spent on a high level students will come at the expense of low level students. And there you are.

Are there any solutions?
The Montessori solution is putting three teachers in a classroom of thirty, but boiling down direct instruction to a minimum, keeping the classroom as quiet as possible and have every student work individually with the Montessori materials at their own pace in the prescribed fashion and in the prescribed sequence, often at the expense of flexibility, creativity and the stimulation that personal interaction with teachers and peers can bring.
It does work, but is not ideal for everyone.

I still think if people were honest just about how wide the spread of ability actually is even if you could factor out poverty, immigration, mainstreaming, gifted ed, all that jazz, and honest about the fact that differentiated instruction, with actual differentiation in level and content, isn't possible without grouping and temporal segregating and not affordable without clustering (after all, statistically, a gifted kid in a regular classroom would always be in a group of 0.5, similarly for kids with learning disabilities), one could take the Montessori classroom as an inspiration. There could be a home room in which you could do all the social engineering you wanted, age segregated or not, where kids would do their individual work, where projects would happen, where one could do music, drama, arts and crafts. And all academic instruction would happen in pull outs, grouped and clustered strictly for academic readiness, no ceilings, regardless of age, sex, race, SES, whatever, with constant assessment ensuring fluidity between groups (something you could put all that data collecting to a good use for).

It might reduce voluntary SES segregation and racial segregation by school. It might even reduce segregation by neighbourhood. But it's probably asking for too much honesty in the system.