Extending+gifted+students,+best+practice

Which method of differentiation fits for languages?
On my last teaching experience, I differentiated for the gifted in a year 10 class, and had to consider what my philosophy was on the matter.

I was reluctant to push the gifted students ahead and teach them structures and vocabulary from higher levels in the curriculum, because I thought that many of them would want to continue with French. If I pushed them forward at this stage, the gap between them and their peers would increase, resulting in further boredom and perhaps a total loss of passion for the language.

I found that gifted and talented students picked up on new language and its use significantly faster than other students but, as they were at an early stage of their language learning, and lacked the grammatical and syntactical knowledge manipulate the language and formulate new sentences, it was difficult for them to be creative with the language, or to use it as a vehicle for evaluation or other higher order thinking skills.

Consequently, I decided to use ** enrichment **.

What's enrichment?
McInerney and McInerney (2006, p.332) describe enrichment as ** “a process of adaptation of the curriculum to enable gifted and talented students to pursue study of a particular topic at greater depth and breadth” **. They suggest methods such as:


 * “special tasks,
 * projects,
 * freely selected activities ...
 * independent study”.

Therefore, gifted students could be extended 'sideways' instead of being accelerated. This could mean that they learn extra vocabulary associated with topics which the class is studying, therefore giving them more flexibility in what they are able to say. They could read more widely on topics of interest about the target culture. If they have particular areas of interest (eg soccer, music...) which are not directly addressed in the curriculum, they could look at target language material about these.

During my last teaching experience, I decided to create “special tasks” (McInerney & McInerney, 2006, p.332) to challenge the gifted students and to broaden their knowledge of French and France. Sometimes these were related to the topic which the class was studying but, on other occasions, they were designed to encourage students to use thinking skills such as analysis (by drawing from their native language to understand new words in the target languge).

Winebrenner (1992, p.37) says that differentiation in subjects which do not lend themselves to pretesting, such as French, "means that gifted students work on different activities than the rest of the class - ** alternative activities which allow them to explore topics in greater depth ** ". These can be completed during the downtime which the gifted students have in class, while other students are still completing the basic activities. Winebrenner (1992, p.123) also recommends that gifted students are placed together to work on a higher level task when the rest of the class is doing “drill-and-practise” style tasks.

An example of this method of differentiation is described by an English gifted and talented programme coordinator: "I went into a class to observe Year sevens and there were some girls who are clearly head and shoulders, streaming ahead, and so what they were working on while the rest of the others were catching up, was devising a set of questions to be used at the end of the session for a little oral test." (Radnor, Koshy & Taylor, 2007, p.292).

After further consideration...
I decided that ** Gardner's multiple intelligences ** (1983, as cited in McInerney & McInerney, 2006, p.71) and **Bloom's Taxonomy** were the most readily usable methods of differentiation for gifted and talented students.

The combination of these two models requires students to use a range of skill areas and levels of thinking, meaning that gifted students can be challenged either to improve their weaker intelligences, or use higher order thinking skills.