Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Differentiation in the classroom?

I agree that differentiation is strongly teacher dependent. Some do it incredibly well and others just don't have it. This problem doesn't go away when you have a gt classroom -- you're just starting to differentiate from a different level.

When my kids were in a regular classroom (now they are in a gt classroom), language arts seemed to be the area where differentiation was most successful. We were at a large elementary school (about 600 students, 80 -90 students per grade). They shifted kids around into ability-based reading groups across classrooms. We did not see effective differentiated instruction in math. We saw a lot of worksheets and go off in a corner to figure it out on your own with little to no teacher interaction.