While You Were Paying Attention to the Strugglers. . .

When we dive deeply into our student data, we learn so much about the kids we teach. It’s fascinating to put together the clues of a student’s assessment history. We notice trends in performance, uncover weaknesses, and make plans to rescue those who are struggling the most. We develop remediation plans. We target specific standards to emphasize and reteach. We identify the objectives most missed by our students and redesign entire lessons to make sure our kids learn what they don’t know. We become that guy from the sappy little parable, walking along the shoreline and frantically flinging starfish from the beach back into the water, determined to save as many as we can.

Meanwhile, the gifted kids in our classrooms often go unacknowledged, ignored, and unchallenged.

Helping struggling students grow is one of the most important things teachers do, but every student deserves to make at least one year’s progress during one year of school. While we are scrambling help our neediest, what are we doing to meet the needs of the kids who already get it?

Education has no finish line where kids get to stop and rest, satisfied that they know all there is to know and have learned everything. When we cap off instruction, putting a ceiling over our students, growth is stifled. Bright students become disengaged, bored, and apathetic. Some of them turn their attention to mischief-making and become your worst classroom management problems because gifted kids who want to cause trouble are often very skilled at doing so.

Gifted education guru Carol Ann Tomlinson says that differentiation, ultimately, is an act of empathy. Educators put themselves in the position of each student in the classroom and figure out what everyone needs. Then, they try their hardest to take care of each one, not because they are told to do so but because they know it's the right thing to do. 

It’s not easy to meet the needs of every student in a mixed-ability classroom, and secondary educators tend to be much less accommodating to diverse learners than our friends in elementary. Traditionally, secondary classrooms are a one-size-fits-all model, where every student receives the same instruction and does identical assignments. One popular solution to this—though not one I think very highly of—is to always have some extension work for students who finish early. This solves the problem of keeping every kids occupied, but the extra work seems more like a punishment than a blessing to the high school gifted student who soon figures out the way to keep from having to do more is to work more slowly. When the extension work is a meaningless diversion unconnected to the curriculum (puzzle pages, logic problems, crosswords, etc.), the purpose is clearly babysitting rather than growing learners. Elementary teachers understand that good teaching sometimes looks like a three-ring circus, with the teacher checking in on everyone and providing appropriate attention at just the right time to keep everyone progressing.

One of the ways I prefer to think about providing appropriate experiences for gifted learners is to consider depth and complexity:  How can this content, skill, or subject be viewed more deeply and in more complex ways?

Depth and complexity can appear in many guises, some of which can be uncovered by asking yourself questions like these:

• What does this look like when the experts do it?
• What’s the next step or the next level in producing a more advanced product or thinking about the topic?
• What do people who study this professionally argue or discuss?
• What moral or ethical issues are associated with this topic?
• What is ambiguous about this subject?
• What words do experts use to talk about this topic? 
• Are there exceptions to the rule, plausible non-examples, or variations you didn’t teach to the entire class but that are worth exploring?
• Who are some of the important thinkers, doers, or innovators in this field?
• What are some articles, books, or primary sources that would provide interesting additional understanding of the topic?
• What do your students wonder about this topic that could be explored more deeply?
• What does this topic look like in another locale, in a later time period, in a different situation, of from a different perspective?
• What influenced this? What did this influence?
• What’s the counter-argument, point of disagreement, or opposite viewpoint?
• How does this topic connect to other topics you’ve studied, to other subjects, or to the wider world?

Sometimes, differentiation for gifted learners is as simple as offering some choices that intrigue the students and pointing them in the direction of the right resources. The option to explore at a level that provides a worthwhile challenge—not more work but different work—might hook some of your gifted learners. Who knows? Some of your struggling learners might take up the challenge, too.

By all means, take care of your special ed kids, your English language learners, your at-risk students, and your underserved populations. Just don’t forget to also take care of your gifted and talented students. As much as anyone in your classroom, they need you to push them and motivate them to keep growing as learners.