What is the difference in compacting, differentiation, and old-fashioned (evil) ability grouping? I have not seen differentiation work, but how did teachers ability group back in the day.
Well, back in the Dark Age day (when I was in 6th grade) our math class was divided into ability groups and it worked really well, for me, an uber-achiever who is great at math - I got to be the farthest ahead in the highest ability group so it fed my uber-achieving ego, plus I got to learn a lot of math that year. The way it worked in my class way back then was the kids in our class worked in groups of anywhere from 2-4 kids on the same general set of material, but the assignments for that section were given out at the start so we could all work at our own pace, and the teacher just floated around between groups helping and teaching concepts as needed. I don't honestly recall ever needing to see too much of the teacher. After we'd finished the required set of assignments for each unit and taken the unit test on our own, we moved on. I loved it! And it didn't matter that I didn't have a peer working at the same level either. Kids did get moved around between groups depending on where they were at as they worked their way through everything.
One caveat - it was already a one-year accelerated honors class, so we didn't have struggling students who weren't mathy in the class which probably made it easier to let everyone work semi-independently.
polarbear
