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When we differentiate, we simply offer students opportunities to think at a level appropriate to their ability - not their age nor their grade level.
I get lots of questions from overwhelmed folks who have suddenly landed in a new job in gifted ed and have had little training. "Where do I even start!?" is a very common cry. Here are three places to begin differentiating for gifted kids.
When you develop an advanced version of a task? When do you just let the student move on to the next thing?
You know you’re in trouble when you’re reading a lesson plan and it has a section called: “Differentiation”.
When writing a lesson’s objective, we have to pick specific resources so that students can do the thinking we want from them.
If you want to differentiate, you have to be ok that not every student will do every single task.
When differentiating for my most brilliant mathematicians, there are two traps I fell into: Just making it harder. (Use more numbers or more steps.) Turning it into an art project. (Design a bedroom!) On Bloom’s Taxonomy, my math tasks always maxed out at Apply or would leap away to a fluffy creative task. I think […]
How do you handle grading within a differentiated classroom? While differentiating is certainly complex, this part is pretty simple, actually!
This differentiation technique is called “Concentric Circles”. You use it to move students up and down the ladder of abstraction, applying a single idea in multiple contexts.
Even what seems like a low-level “summarize” task can become beautifully high-level when we climb Bloom’s Taxonomy.
When we jump from “this kid likes board games” straight to “I’ll have them create a new board game”, we leave out important steps in the creative process and set kids up for disappointment (and end up with a lot of unfinished projects). Here’s how to scaffold a truly creative task.
When I was a new teacher, you would have seen some pretty fancy products hanging in my room, but if you stopped to consider how my kids thought about the content… well, often my students just restated facts that I had already told them.