knew the material, he shared that they could always pick up one or two new ideas in class that they hadn’t considered before.
However, after this teacher made a commitment to extend learning for question 4 students, the classroom looked very different. When the students entered the room, this teacher asked them to complete a short preassessment that gave students three leveled options for responding to a question on the topic the class would be exploring. Students could read over the three choices and complete the task they felt most comfortable answering. The teacher jokingly called it “a poor man’s adaptive test.” Based on students’ level choice and the accuracy of their responses, the teacher could identify the question 4 students for the upcoming learning target and extend their learning. The teacher would meet with these students and have a collaborative discussion about the extended tasks that the students could do around the topic. Then, after whole-group instruction each day, the students worked on the project they decided on as a group.
What we love most about this activity is the willingness of the teacher to be vulnerable—to take a risk to engage students so they might own their learning. This teacher will tell you that the mood, environment, and energy levels far outweighed those when teaching the same standards just one year prior for both the students who already knew it and the students who did not. Students who already knew it owned their learning, wanted to learn, and were more confident while working at their own pace. Students who didn’t know it yet had more teacher attention and could shine while answering the questions and leading the small-group activities. Classroom duties and leadership roles were redistributed.
Reframing Collaborative Conversations
When we think about the ways that we have known teachers to approach teaching question 4 learners, we consider their various options for strategies on a type of continuum ranging from the least amount of energy for the classroom teacher on one end to the most amount of energy that exceeds the normal routine of a typical classroom on the other.
The strategy that has the least effect on the classroom teacher is, of course, to do nothing additional. Teachers stick to the course guides and scope and sequence and vertical alignment documents they have developed for the entire class and apply these with all students. We do not promote the idea of plan, instruct, assess, and move on to the next unit and allow the student who already knows it to be a part of the regular class. The research we share in this book suggests that this method can actually have adverse effects on students (Long, 2013).
The next options on the continuum involve pull-out services provided by trained gifted education teachers. During this pull-out, these teachers stretch students’ learning in ways that engage and challenge students. Slightly further along on the continuum, we find similar strategies to the pull-out strategies, but with the gifted staff coming into the existing classroom during scheduled times.
Moving along on the continuum, the next options involve more energy and planning on the part of teachers. They consider those students who have been identified as gifted using approved district measures throughout the course of a given unit. In this arrangement, for example, all students receive an assignment to work on after the whole-class instruction. The few gifted students might be asked to meet the teacher at the front of the room and are then challenged to take the assignment further or do more in the time that other students are engaged in the original activity.
Finally, options toward the far right of the continuum, which include using data, are less common but are the ones we most advocate using. To begin moving further along on the continuum and implementing more robust options for responding to question 4 students, teams will need to reconsider what they discuss during collaborative conversations. Teams should also consider what “already proficient” means to them. Does it refer to students who show proficiency after a common formative assessment? Or does it refer to students who already know the material before you begin instruction? To us, these two topics have major differences and need to be considered by all teams.
How teams define proficiency will require additional adjustments to collaborative conversations that they may not be accustomed to. For example, if a team identifies students as proficient based on performance on a common formative assessment, the collaborative team really needs to make certain that its learning plans and pacing guides include flexibility to respond to these students. The team would need to have conversations around developing specific, additional lessons that meet the needs of students at regular intervals that would take place after each common formative assessment. Realize, however, the drawback with this approach is that the students who knew the material when they walked in the door would have still been involved in the same instruction as all of the students in the room up until this formative assessment occurred, even if they already knew the information. In addition, based on the most typical concern we hear from teachers, we know time is of the essence. It can be difficult to identify a time in the school day to allow for this type of teaching following a common formative assessment but before beginning teaching the next set of content. These are issues a collaborative team will need to discuss and decide how to respond to.
If teams identify students as proficient before beginning instruction, they’ll need to decide what criteria to use to determine this proficiency. Without some sort of preassessment, question 4 students would still be a part of the traditional instruction of every student in the room at least until a teacher gives and reviews a formative assessment to determine who does and does not know the material. If teams define already knowing it in the context of before the lesson, they need to have conversations to create measures and procedures to learn what understandings and abilities students have before instruction occurs.
In our personal experiences and in reading the work of the experts in gifted education, there are various ways to go about this task. This includes using information that you have learned about the students from work in the class in a previous unit or assessment, offering an opportunity to complete a project, and, probably the most common, providing a preassessment (as we described in the example of the fifth-grade teacher in the preceding section, Reframing the Teacher’s Role [page 20]). The preassessment doesn’t have to be long or look exactly like the final test that students will be completing at the end of the unit; it needs to be something that informs the teacher about how this student will have his or her time best utilized over the course of the unit.
A shift to offering a preassessment and then thinking about the various options for differentiating the instructional activities may pose a need for some teams to reframe their processes, procedures, and the way they think when they have conversations about how to logistically use and respond to preassessments within their workflow. Regardless of where your team falls on the continuum, you need to know what you are going to do with question 4 students before you begin instruction, so you must reframe your collaborative conversations to address this.
For teams who have not previously considered preassessments, this will likely create a wrinkle in what you are used to your agendas and team meetings looking like. To help make a smoother transition to this shift in the way team conversations are framed, we offer some questions for teams to discuss: How do we make sure that the needs of all students are met, which means determining who already knows the material? How do we, as a team, want to preassess students? As a result of this preassessment, how do we plan to personalize learning? While incorporating these instructional strategies, how will grading be impacted? Collectively answering these questions prior to the start of a given unit will provide teams with an intentional and deliberate approach to addressing question 4 with a small reframing of their collaborative team time.
We suggest teams also consider deciding to change their typical agendas to discuss question 4 along with question 2. Many teams we have worked with assume they must follow the four questions in chronological order in their collaborative meetings, which is likely one reason question 4 is often omitted. By the time many teams get to question 4, it is too late. By reframing their conversation structures to discuss these two questions concurrently, teams will be equipped to address
