Differentiated Instruction

Posted by Douglas Parker Sep 16, 2007

Gifted children like to work out answers. They like to discover how things work. They will take on new challenges that others might not simply because they enjoy challenges.

Gifted children do not like to be bored, and as many teachers and parents can attest, when bright kids are uninterested or tired of something, watch out! In schools that understand the needs of gifted children, their education differs from the traditional curriculum via differentiated instruction or enriched learning.

What concerns everyone in education is that it is almost impossible to prepare three or fours levels of instruction to meet the needs of all of the children in a given classroom. The key is not to have four lesson plans, but rather to engage every child in the same classroom activity that is presented at different stages of difficulty addressing higher levels of thinking and different learning styles, and allows different ways for the students to understand and apply their learning.

This isn’t a process that comes easily to anyone, but schools that are dedicated to meeting the needs of gifted children should dedicate some inservice time to this course of action. There are any number of classroom activities and resources that can work for differentiating instruction. Teachers can differentiate instruction by requiring that similar assignments be completed in different ways based on each student’s abilities, or by using specially designed cooperative learning groups, or by basing lessons on skills rather than on disciplines, or even by selecting differentiated texts. There are numerous academic resources available in the marketplace that offer thousands of ideas and strategies to make differentiated instruction work in your classroom, along with materials, activities, reproducibles, texts, workbook assignments and more.