Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Is differentiated instruction a hollow promise?

Yes, it's hollow. "Differentiated instruction" is a supplement to ability grouping, not a replacement for it. Even if you divide 60 children in a grade into 3 ability groups, there will still be differences in knowledge and aptitude within the classes that teachers need to deal with. But why make the job harder by maximizing the spread within each class?

http://www.edexcellence.net/comment...ferentiated-instruction-a-hollow-promise
Is differentiated instruction a hollow promise?
Chester E. Finn, Jr.
Fordham Institute
May 01, 2014

It looks to me as if one of the most acclaimed reforms of today’s education profession—not just in the U.S. but also all over the planet—is one of the least examined in terms of actual implementation and effectiveness. How often and how well do instructors, whose administrators and gurus revere the concept of differentiated instruction, actually carry it out? How well does it work and for which kids under what circumstances? So far as I can tell, nobody really knows.

I’ve been roaming the globe in search of effective strategies for educating high-ability youngsters, particularly kids from disadvantaged circumstances who rarely have parents with the knowledge and means to steer them through the education maze and obtain the kind of schooling (and/or supplementation or acceleration) that will make the most of their above-average capacity to learn.

As expected, I’ve found a wide array of programs and policies intended for “gifted education,” “talent development,” and so forth, each with pluses and minuses.

But almost everywhere, I’ve also encountered some version of this assertion: “We don’t really need to provide special programs, classrooms, or schools for gifted children because we expect every school and teacher to differentiate their instruction so as to meet the unique educational needs of all children within an inclusive, heterogeneous classroom.”

A thoroughly laudable goal, say I, but how realistic is it? How well is it being done? And does it really meet their needs, or is it ultimately a politically acceptable excuse for not doing anything special for high-ability children?

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My kid's school doesn't get that the root of differentiation is DIFFERENT. GRRRRRR, I've grown to hate the word.

ETA - I should print a copy of the article for our next meeting.

I printed this article last night!

I hate to say it, chay, but I think this is part of a larger provincial initiative to ensure all enrichment and differentiation is still at grade level. It's utterly perverse.

Preaching to the choir.

DS has Wonder Woman for a teacher and somehow she manages to give him work at the right level. She seems to put in a ton of hours doing prep work that other teachers do not necessarily do. And since the school has a very open layout, I think she gets the help of paras, at times. She also uses the computer with DS....for instance puts him on the computer when she is teaching to the 60 percent so that he doesn't have to sit through that. Not an ideal situation, and it would be better for him to be in a class learning with kids of similar ability (i.e. a higher grade for math), but there are all kinds of logistical problems with that as well, for instance the class schedules not matching up.

I am grateful that our district has a magnet for highly gifted upper elementary kids, but it only has room for about 25-30 kids per grade (coming from many elementary schools all over the district), and so few kids qualify. My fear is that at some point someone is going to decide that this is no longer "politically correct" and scatter the kids back into the neighborhood schools. Teachers/principals are already griping & making noise about how they lose the best scoring kids to the magnet, dropping the averages for their schools.

What grade are your kids, aquinas? I think non-accelerated enrichment has loads more options once they're in 4th and up. In first it's just painful.

School districts like giving so many tests like MAP. I don't know why they then ignore the results. DS's teacher gives him work based on that. The test report shows what he has mastered and what he answered wrong, so she goes online and prints out appropriate level worksheets. She spends about 5 minutes with him one-on-one each day to teach the concepts, like how do you find an angle measurement on a protractor or how do you compare fractions. Then sets him loose to do the worksheets, sometimes with a para helping.

I think it boils down to teachers spending just a little bit of extra time to get themselves organized. DS's teacher probably took the assessment results and then immediately took an hour to print everything out all at once, and put it in a binder. She gave me a list of everything that she wants to cover with him, so it was planned ahead of time.

I can see how if you have 30 kids in your class this would be difficult. But most of those kids are in the middle and the normal curriculum works for them. The kids on the bottom (in our district at least) are pulled out by interventionists. So that leaves just a few kids at the top who need special lesson plans made up.

Between my two kids, they've had 12 general education teachers in gen ed classes. We've seen exactly one example of consistent and appropriate differentiated instruction and curriculum (DS's 2nd grade teacher.)

She had to hand write DS' math homework. She had to pull him aside individually a few times a week to teach him. And, she only did a decent job on the math, not in other areas. He did not make nearly as much progress as he could have with daily instruction exceeding 5 minutes. Much of that instruction happened after school.

Teachers must be able to (1) identify the need and magnitude, (2) know more than the child in that area, (3) have material and time resources to provide both curriculum and instruction, and (4) be sufficiently motivated to take the time to plan and carry out the differentiation. They also have to be able to establish a classroom atmosphere where the child does not feel singled out or other kids feel left out.

It's not that hard to plan what work an accelerated child gets; but it is very hard to plan the actual delivery of instruction and feedback mechanisms. Who will instruct the accelerated child? When? What will that child be doing while the rest of the class gets their instruction? Who will give the accelerated child on-the-spot feedback about his unique work?

Ultimately, you need staff to do this properly. It costs money. I think it should be creatively solveable, but it's hard to do well.

I do think the open layout helps in that paras can easily circulate between multiple different classrooms. The school seems to spend money on these in-class paras rather than spending money on intervention teachers who pull kids with special needs with math/reading (the other end of the spectrum). So the paras can help with whatever it is the teacher needs rather than being on a rigid pull-out schedule.

Honestly I don't know exactly how DS's teacher makes it work or finds any extra time to work with him and grade the numerous individualized papers she has him do (including giving him his own individualized spelling tests!) but it's working out fairly well. Sometimes I ask him "Who helped you with this?" and he names someone that I don't know.

Blackcat, pardon me, but could we please stop calling kids who need intervention "the other end" of anything?

Giftedness is a special educational need that requires intervention. Many kids need specially planned interventions at various times during their education, and there are many kinds of intervention, but there is not a "top" or a "bottom" or a "better" or a "worse" here.

I don't think she said anything wrong. A big reason educators and policymakers are unwilling to acknowledge that there are children with high IQs is that this immediately raises the possibility that there are children with low IQs, a fact that they would like to ignore. On this forum we should be able to speak honestly and clearly but not disrespectfully about differences in intelligence.

Well...yes, there is.

People who are gifted at anything are generally better at learning it or doing what they're gifted at than most other people. This is the definition of giftedness. A major problem in education is that schools are more likely to claim that cognitive giftedness doesn't exist than any other kind of gift.

IMO, differentiation doesn't work because our education system has made a decision not to address the needs of gifted kids. NCLB is all about students who fall behind. There are exceptions, but IEPs are generally designed for the special ed. population or for students with disabilities. Etc.

Teachers can reasonably claim that they have too many students to be able to provide extra teaching on new topics to one or two gifted kids. Fair enough. But they could send these kids to another grade for subject acceleration or whole-grade accelerate them, but many schools flatly refuse to do this.

Many educators don't understand levels of giftedness or gifted learners, but all they have to do is read a book or visit a few websites to get all the answers they need.

Again, it's a decision they've made, whether they'll phrase it in those terms or not.

My own kid is at the "other end of the spectrum" in terms of his special need areas (like motor skills). He is 2e and gets pulled out of class for being "on the other side of the spectrum." It is what it is. There are far more negative ways of putting it. I'm talking about it like the bell curve, in terms of specific academic skills. Some kids are on the right side for skills like math and reading, other kids are on the left side. The other side. The kids who are in the bottom percentiles are the ones pulled out for interventions. The kids on the "right side" of the spectrum have special needs as well, but those aren't the ones being pulled out for interventions (although maybe they should be). That's why I clarified what I meant by putting in parentheses that I was referring to the kids with special needs on the other end of the spectrum. I'm sorry if I offended you but I don't really don't see why you are. My own kids have special needs so I'm really the last person you need to preach to.

Exactly. Administrators in the district claim that teachers differentiate and it's a value in the district. But teachers don't differentiate and claim it's impossible. Meanwhile the administrators make it extremely difficult or outright ban acceleration, saying it's not needed because there is differentiation in the classroom. They are deluding themselves. If a kid is lucky enough to have a gifted teacher who is able and willing, then there may be some degree of differentiation. But otherwise, tough luck.

OK, then, if we have to have a flat spectrum with two ends, today mine looks more like this:

Kids who need nothing extra in school ---- Kids who need the most extra support in school

IME a divisive approach where one complains about what some are getting, or tries to set the gifted and the disabled off as opposites, doesn't get the job done. Seeing the commonalities does.

If you're looking for the teachers with skills in differentiated instruction, the special ed staff is trained to have those skills; perhaps our tactic should be to persuade the school to use those skilled intervention teachers for all kids (including the gifted) when they are needed. Again, IME.

Bostonian: whoever said that all children who receive intervention services for reading or math necessarily have low intelligence? The 2Es are many, as are other children who have mixed profiles of abilities.

I think this is a good idea and is sort of happening with the paras in DS's school. A para comes in daily and helps with the reading stations, working with kids of all different abilities. They are not assigned to any particular kid. One of the schools in this district was very big into personalized learning. So each teacher had a class of about 40 kids, but also had 3 paras. The paras worked with small groups. So many parents loved this model because kids could work at their own pace. But the district did away with it and is forcing the school to become "traditional" because it cost just a few thousand dollars extra than what other schools in the district were spending.

Our special ed staff is mandated to help with gifted and if you talk to anyone in the school board office they talk a great talk. In our school however, gifted kids get zero time with the special ed teachers. My DS is 2e and has an IEP that has 2 pages of accommodations for his probable LD (and that is only with a PROBABLE label). We've pushed for something to be done on the confirmed gifted side and they say it is all covered by differentiation (which they then don't even attempt to do).

aquinas - for your comment much earlier - I don't think it matters what the province mandates at all. Our school doesn't follow what their own school board mandates, why would they listen to anyone even further up the chain

When you have to wear a ball and chain, getting a longer chain doesn't help you move faster.

Oh, that's a shame! What a frustrating situation.

Oh, but it matters-- because while the school board mandates have little enforcement power (unless you can move the board or superintendent to take action), the state's or province's mandates are likely more enforceable with real consequences. One can lodge complaints or sue, and the results can be significant. In our district, some parents made a (very justified) formal complaint to the State Dept. of Ed and got some really sweeping changes.

WOW - how "differentiation" is practiced really differs! From what I've seen with my DC, a single teacher attempting to differentiate child by child within a single class, SELDOM works (blackcat - we NEED Wonderwoman!). "Whole class differentiation" is MUCH more effective (and I'll admit, you probably need decent class size to do this). That is, I've seen my DC make progress where an entire say, math or reading class of higher-achievers has its own teacher and its own separate class (and there are other levels with their own teachers during the same time, so the entire grade is broken up into groups).

DS8's teacher this year does try to give him work at his level, and I am certainly thankful for it. However, differentiated instruction implies that children will be instructed at their level, not simply given different worksheets to do than the other kids.

That's why I instruct DS after school and on weekends (we used to homeschool) and having patiently waited until standardized testing was over, got his teacher to agree to using our Beast Academy math curriculum in school. I also sent his teacher a list of books on/above his level so he could begin reading/writing about them at school. (He is having a blast reading The Hobbit, for example, which isn't a stretch read but still closer than anything else he's read in school this year). I've had to get over worrying whether I will be seen as a pushy tiger mom or not. My son does have a GIEP which is worth very little unless you push the school to follow it. I had him skip 1st grade, but since the district readily admits to not knowing what to do for a kid like him, I happily rush in to fill the void. And I like to think that as a fellow teacher, my suggestions carry some weight.

From that perspective... I am a middle school math teacher (grades 6-8) and it is not easy or practical to differentiate instruction when some kids are at grade level, some barely remember basic math -- think adding and subtracting single digit numbers -- and when you turn your attention to one student or group, many others in class will get off task.

I do have paras in my room throughout the week to help students with IEPS and 504s. It's not daily, however, and they are hard pressed to help only "their" students when others see the assistance those kids get and clamor for extra attention as well. So, in my experience thus far, as a parent and teacher, at least in our FL district, it is certainly wishful thinking that any real differentiation can take place under existing class structures.

My older son has been in some successful differentiation situations because 4th -8 th grade the two schools clustered all the gifted students into one class....then they fill in the remaining seats with high achieving probably just not identified students (my son started out in 4th grade as a filling in the class student and was tested the next year). The teachers taught to the gifted kids and the other kids kept up. The teachers were either endorsed gifted or working on it...most of the time they were flexible, sometimes not. Some were more gifted as teachers than others. I think the clustering/ability grouping or even multiage grouping is the key.

My younger son has had random differentiation, some that was terrific and some that was okay and then none at all. Luckily he is one of those easy going kids that just thrives anywhere and you can't keep him from learning. He had one of the most talented 2nd grade teachers who was a pro at differentiating. This year other than being in the highest reading group and getting computer time when he was done with work...not much but he just skipped a grade so maybe he didn't need as much. The computer time was above level work. He isn't clustered because he is in a different elementary school from my older son and we will probably home school him for middle school.

I agree with what you've written here. IMO, two ways to help solve this problem are to:

1) group children by ability/skill level, starting in kindergarten or first grade;

2) not move them to the next subject until they're proficient at the second one.

Unfortunately, many schools have policies against these approaches, which creates these problems.

Ability/skill level grouping would definitely help. This was done in the elementary school I attended (also freely across grades), and it was terrific.

Unless you have groups that are each scheduled for instruction time, not everyone gets instruction at their level. This requires that there be a plan to instruct each group. It shouldn't be as hard as it is.

I think the single biggest error in in-school differentiation is the assumption that a gifted child should be able to sit alone with a workbook and instruct himself or herself.

If in-class differentiation really worked, then every school could consist of just one big classroom.