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Challenging Our Students
Adapted from a Letter from Principal Cathy Howard, Barron Park Buzz, January 16, 2004
Our goal for challenging high-performing and gifted students in the PAUSD is for them to understand the core curriculum in greater depth and with greater complexity. We seek to provide educational opportunities within the regular classroom that respond to the uniqueness of individual talents, engender enthusiasm for learning, and encourage students to develop their gifts and talents. State budget reductions have cut support that in past years enabled the District to have a part-time GATE (Gifted and Talented Education) Resource Teacher to serve elementary schools. Despite these reductions, at a school level we continue to seek to provide students with differentiated opportunities for learning commensurate with their abilities.
Through differentiated assignments matched to academic ability and needs, students explore and expand their full potential. Rather than a separate curriculum, the goal for gifted students is that they understand the core curriculum in greater depth and complexity. At Barron Park, teachers may adjust the curriculum and instruction on any of these four dimensions:
- Depth: challenging learners by enabling them to venture further, deeper, and more elaborately into an area of study. For example, the open-ended nature of project-based learning enables students to take a topic further than others might. Second-grade country projects and third-grade bird reports provide a structure for students to study the curriculum in greater depth.
- Complexity: broadening the learner’s understanding of the area under study by asking him/her to make connections, relationships, and associations between, within, and across subjects and disciplines. Fourth graders worked to varying complexity this fall as they researched and presented “suitcase” projects on family history, or biographical “riddles” of famous people. Math challenges offer students at many grade levels the opportunity to tackle more complex problems.
- Novelty: gaining a personal understanding of the area under study or constructing meaning of knowledge in an individualized manner. Kindergarten and first-grade students are challenged to gather information, organize it into a graph, and synthesize and analyze the results. In responding to literature, upper grade students may be asked to look at events from the point of view of another character.
- Acceleration: altering the pace or speed of learning and providing more sophisticated resources for learning in order to challenge students. For example, in a unit on number patterns and functions, a teacher may introduce algebraic equations to students who are ready. At all grade levels teachers provide reading materials at different levels, and challenge able students to extend and refine their writing.
These differentiated curricular activities and opportunities are accessible to all students who benefit from additional challenge. It is not necessary or possible to differentiate all lessons in every class, every day, but believing in differentiation and working toward it is the gift we give our children.
