Teaching Gifted Kids: A New Facebook Group for Elementary Teachers

Ok, friends. I'm taking a quick break from posting about vocabulary to let you know about something really great I've been working on behind the scenes with a few super talented friends of mine.

I'm going to start with a quick story about myself. If you've followed along with me on this blog (or if you know me IRL <---see how 'with it' I am? 😉 ha!), you know that I've taken a break from teaching for the past couple of years. You can read more about my journey here.

Anywayyyyy, when I was teaching, I used social media to post adorable pictures of my children and dog, connect with my current friends and family, catch up with old classmates, and keep an eye on the latest celebrity gossip.  Really, my social media use was limited to personal use for a large part of my teaching career because it wasn't really a *thing* until later on.

{Believe it or not, I got married and had my first child before I could make it "Facebook Official." Now I'm left wondering--did those things even happen?! Don't even get me started on how Pinterest didn't exist when I was planning my wedding. How did I even DO THAT? Sigh. I digress...}

I didn't join Facebook until 2009 (GASP!) and by that time, I had been teaching for about seven years. My first post on Instagram was in 2012, judging by how tiny and adorable my children were. 😊

So, while I'm not sure how many of you currently use social media in some form, I'm going to go ahead and assume that MOST of you use it to some degree, and you probably use it on a regular or semi-regular basis.

And I don't know about you, but when I was using social media during my time in the classroom, I was almost completely unaware of this growing population of teachers who were using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other platforms to give people glimpses into their classrooms, offer tips about how they do things at school, and support each other on the wonderful, crazy, harrowing, stressful, amazing journey that is teaching.

But, let me tell you. I was missing OUT!

I've found out since having the ability to stay home and work on blogging and creating teaching resources, that there is this HUGE, WONDERFUL, INSPIRING community of teachers on many
of these social media platforms.

Teachers all over the world are taking time out of their busy days to share great bulletin boards they've created, collections of multicultural picture books they've amassed, inspiring professional books they've read, solutions to problems they've encountered, peeks into awesome professional development opportunities, and so much more. They've even created support groups on Facebook that are specific to grade level, subject area, and teaching specialty.

I've since joined several of these groups, in my quest to stay fresh and up to date with current issues facing teachers, and in part, to still feel connected to the people in the field of work that I love so much. I've been able to read about the success teachers have experienced in connecting with their students, offer advice when teachers face challenges I've encountered myself, and join in the laughter when teachers share their daily bloopers and mishaps. #beenthere

These groups, I realized, would have been SO helpful to me when I first started teaching. Or when I was the only gifted intervention specialist in the entire district. I might have felt a little less isolated, a little more normal, a lot more connected.

So here's the thing. Once I discovered these groups, I wanted to try and connect with some other teachers in gifted education because that's truly my passion in the teaching field. I started searching for groups of gifted intervention specialists, gifted teachers, teachers of gifted... But no matter how many different keywords or combinations of teacher + gifted + talented I entered, I was unable to locate a group.

I thought, surely, I must be doing something wrong, looking in the wrong places. I HAD to be missing something.

Naturally, I started reaching out to some friends and colleagues to see if they were ever able to find any groups. Everyone came back with the same answer: a resounding NOPE.

Well, shoot. That's not good. Teaching gifted kids is such a rewarding, rich experience, but it is also quite challenging, with some difficulties that are truly unique to this special group of children. The fact that I couldn't find a place where these teachers were connecting, sharing and building relationships was kiiiiind of a huge bummer.

So, guess what? For the past few months, I've been working diligently with two friends, Michael Sivert, from Mikey D Teach, and Susan Morrow from Keep 'em Thinking with Susan Morrow to create a group to fill this need we identified. All three of us have degrees or endorsements in gifted education, and we collectively have more than SIXTY years of experience in teaching and education! We've just officially launched the group recently and we're so excited to finally be able to spread the word that we are officially live and growing!

Our vision for the group is to be able to provide those awesome things happening in groups that I mentioned in the paragraphs above. We want it to be a judgment-free place where teachers of gifted children can come to talk about the challenges we face, ways to meet the needs of this special population of thinkers, curriculum series or other resources that work for gifted children, PD that grows us, the joy that gifted children bring us, and so much more. We want teachers of gifted children to feel supported, encouraged, and recognized for the important work they do each day with our high-potential kids and armed with the tools and knowledge they need to do it!

The group is mostly geared toward elementary (K-6) teachers who teach gifted students in the regular classroom, but ANYONE who teaches, supports, or interacts with gifted children in the educational setting is welcome and encouraged to join.

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Meaningful Word Work and Purposeful Practice--Six Ideas for Fun and Effective Vocabulary Instruction

Welcome (or welcome back) to another installment of my series on teaching vocabulary to gifted students. In previous posts, I wrote about steps to take before staring vocabulary instruction, including assessing what students already know using a quick and easy self-ratings scale. Next, I wrote about strategies for introducing new words and putting a gifted twist on vocabulary instruction.

The whole reason I started researching best practices in vocabulary started when I realized a few things.

• One, I had gifted students to teach and it was obvious that the regular, run-of-the-mill vocabulary materials handed to me by the district would not be sufficient. 
• Two, had the curriculum been challenging enough for my students, I found it dreadfully boring. If I found it boring, my students would have positively died. And I'm not into creating that kind of emergency in my classroom. 
• And three, I knew the importance of vocabulary instruction and it's far-reaching effects, so it was something I felt I couldn't afford to get wrong. Thus began my own journey into deeper learning so that I could really make an impact in our classroom, while also injecting some FUN!

This post goes into a little more depth on the components of quality vocabulary instruction, as well as some of the activities that I used with students to engage them in meaningful word learning and purposeful practice. Just as a quick reminder, a child's vocabulary is a huuuuuuge predictor of academic success in ALL areas.

What the Research Says

One of the best-known researchers in the field of vocabulary instruction is Robert Marzano. In his studies, he found six key steps were the key to better vocabulary instruction. The first three steps are done with the help of the teacher:

1. Teachers should give students an example, description, and/or explanation of the new term. 
2. Students need to restate the explanation, description, or example using their own language.
3. Students should construct a picture, pictograph, or symbolic representation of the term.

(If you hop back to my previous blog post, you will find a free download of a graphic organizer on which students can engage in steps two and three). 

 4.   Periodically, students should engage in activities that help them add to their knowledge of the terms in their vocabulary notebooks.

 5.   Students should be asked to discuss the terms with one another sometimes.

 6.   Students are periodically involved in playing games that enable them to play with terms.

In studies conducted with classrooms using these strategies, it became clear that when teachers engaged their students in alllll of these six practices, students usually showed significant gains in vocabulary learning. 

Other well-known vocabulary researchers, Dr. Kate Kinsella and Dr. Kevin Feldman, point out three things that don't work in their article, Narrowing the Language Gap: The Case for Explicit Vocabulary Instruction: "looking up words in the dictionary, using written context to determine word meaning, unplanned, extemporaneous vocabulary teaching."

Instead,  teachers should focus on four important ideas: wide reading, direct teaching of important individual words, teaching word learning strategies, and fostering word conscientiousness through various activities that encourage language play, and choice in writing (Graves, 2000) and (Nagy and Scott, 2000).

My General Flow of Vocabulary Instruction and Assessment 

Now that I've shown you some research, and told you a little about how I preassess and introduce the words, as well as how I accommodate gifted learners, I'm thinking you might be curious about how it all fit together for me.

A typical vocabulary cycle flows like this for me:

1. Pre-test students on new words by having students complete a self-ratings-scale prior to starting a new list 
2. Introduction of new words. If they already know any of the words well enough to define and use in a sentence, they don’t have to study those words. You can find more about how I pre-assess for vocabulary in this blog post.
3. Students add their words to our  “Map It Out” cards. We discuss the definitions of the vocabulary words together. Students continue to work on these throughout the entire cycle, starting with the synonyms and antonyms (you can even do this part together) and reserving the sentence writing portion until near the end. The “Map It Out” cards are great for students to keep with them when they are working on the other learning activities throughout the cycle, too!  They can always go back to the cards and add to or revise them as they learn more about their words. You can read more about introducing the words and find a free download of the Map It Out cards here.
4. Students add their words to a catalog or make word wall cards for each root or affix. The “Map It Out” cards themselves are sized to fit on a 5 x 7 notecard or in a composition notebook. I like students to keep a record of all of their words for the year to use for reference and as evidence of all the learning they’ve accomplished! 
5. Students choose one to three (or more) learning activities (like the ones outlined below) to complete. *The number of activities chosen should be a reflection of how much time students have and the number of activities you think each student needs. Gifted students may require much less repetition than “typical” peers or students with other learning differences so the activities that go more in-depth may be a better fit for them!* 
6. Use a quick-check strategy every couple of days to measure progress on learning. I do not use this as a graded quiz. It is meant to be a low-stakes, low-risk tool that students can use to quiz themselves as they are progressing toward mastery. This is a research-based strategy that has been shown to increase retention. 
7. Assess student learning following the completion of the activities.

This cycle is flexible, but I found it generally took about 7 school days to get everything accomplished. Yours might take more or less time, depending on how much class time you can dedicate to it, and of course, on your students' needs. 

How I Encouraged Word Play in My Classroom

While I definitely engaged students in the super important pre-assessment and direct instruction activities, my FAVORITE part of the vocabulary learning process was definitely allowing students to engage in different activities that helped students achieve deep learning and understanding of their words. This was definitely the part my students enjoyed the most, too.

I'll outline a few of my favorite activities here, and maybe even provide a *free* download for you at the end.  

"WordTube"

This activity is a play on the popular YouTube website. Students write each assigned vocabulary word and draw a picture of it on a “WordTube” screen. Then they use the “Up Next” boxes to write the part of speech, identify the roots/affixes contained in the word or the origin if the word does not appear to have Greek or Latin roots or any affixes,  and define the word. Students should paraphrase the definition, as this strategy requires more critical thinking and will ultimately help them remember the meaning of the words better. 

Word Analogies

Students create their own analogies for vocabulary words. Creating and using analogies when learning new material is a research-based strategy that requires students to have a deeper understanding of vocabulary words, activates prior knowledge, and helps students bridge the gap between their schema and new learning. There are two ways students can use this strategy-- students can create their own analogies for vocabulary words and complete the entire analogy. Or,  students can create partial analogies that they can trade with a partner to solve. For this option, they must also make up an answer key (I suggest they create the answer key first). You'll want to be sure to teach children the different kinds of relationships you can create with analogies--for example, analogies can show part to whole relationships, the can reflect synonyms, antonyms, time sequences, increasing or decreasing intensity, etc. 

Shades of Meaning

For this activity, students generate semantic gradients for their vocabulary words. This requires them to think of or find words that are semantically similar to their vocabulary words and then to arrange the words in order. This activity helps students make meaningful connections between words they already know and their new term. There are, again, two variations of this activity that are fun and useful. For one variation, students would either think of, find (or be provided with) a list of synonyms that align with the original vocabulary word. They would then arrange the terms in order from the strongest expression of the term to words that express the term to a lesser degree.  

For the second variation of the activity, students think of or look up 5 synonyms and 5 antonyms for the vocabulary word. They place the vocabulary term in the center of the continuum and then arrange the synonyms and antonyms so that they get stronger as they move away from the center. When students are finished, they should discuss with someone why they chose to put their words in order. They could write their rationale instead if no-one is available to discuss. 

I like to allow students access to both options because some terms don’t really have opposites. Further, I always allow some flexibility with the number of synonyms and antonyms students have to find, as some words—particularly words from content area studies—don’t have many synonyms or antonyms. Also, since these are fairly subjective and there is lots of “grey” area in terms of how the words are arranged, grading these should either be avoided, aside from completion, or rely heavily on the child’s explanations. I highly suggest this activity be completed with pairs or small groups of children to encourage the rich conversations that can occur as they are determining the order in which to place the words. 

Making Connections

Making connections between words really encourages students to think deeply about the meaning of words, and how they relate to other words. This activity is well-suited for small groups of students, as well as the entire class at once if you’re all studying the same words at the same time. 

Students are each assigned one or two unique words, and then they spend time interacting with others in an effort to find a word that they feel connects with their words. Eventually, students settle on a connection or match. Then, students explain either in writing, to the class, or just to the rest of their group members how their terms are connected. 

You will want to spend some time with your students discussing the difference between surface-level and deeper connections. For example, students need to look past words having the same number of letters, starting or ending with the same letters or sounds, being in the same chapter in their science book, etc. The activity (and related research) suggest that making deeper connections between words and concepts are really what will help cement the vocabulary into children’s learning, creating long-lasting, authentic learning experiences. 

Interview a Word

This activity is great for helping deepen students’ understanding of words and their possible connotations. One student “becomes” one of the words, and the other student is the interviewer. It
is fun to encourage the “words” to show their personality and act as though they were truly embodying their word. My students really enjoy acting things out like this! I suggest doing this activity in pairs or small groups, however, if a child is working independently, he or she can just write down the answers to the interview questions on paper instead of posing the questions for someone else to answer.

For this activity, you may find it useful to allow students access to websites such as visualthesaurus.com and www.etymonline.com so they can research some possible answers to the interview questions.

As a fun aside, having students make and wear nametags for this activity is a fun way to boost engagement!

Create a Menu

Students get full creative license over designing a menu for a new restaurant and using their vocabulary words in the descriptions. Students start by deciding on a theme and name for the restaurant. Then they decide the names of dishes to include on the menu, all fitting in with the designated theme.  Next, students use all of their vocabulary words to create a restaurant menu. 

In my opinion, it is not necessary that each menu item use a vocabulary word, as long as they have managed to include all of their words on the menu somehow, using them properly in context. 

Creating a themed restaurant and sticking to only including dishes that fit the theme definitely requires higher level thinking skills. If you find this to be too challenging for some of your students, you could allow them to include dishes on the menu that do not fit into a particular theme, as long as they are still using their vocabulary words to write the descriptions.  If you want to take this to the next level, you could do something like have students design and create an actual (miniature) restaurant storefront, or allow students time to visit each other’s restaurants and “order” something off of the menu. 

Sound like fun? 

There are SO many other great ideas for helping your students engage independently with their vocabulary word study. I put three of the above ideas together for you in a free exclusive download if you're ready to give them a try. This freebie is available ONLY to my subscribers and can be found among many other free resources in my free resource library.  Click the image below to gain access to your free copy! *Just to be clear, by clicking to get these freebies (and instant access to the growing collection of free resources in my library of subscriber exclusives), you're also agreeing to be added to my email list, where I'll send occasional messages with fresh ideas, tips, and other resources straight to your inbox. You can unsubscribe at any time.*

If you're ready to save TONS of time, you can find these three activities and many more in my store by clicking on the images below.

So far, I have FIVE separate volumes of nine activities created and ready to download and print. Each volume includes a table of contents and full-page student-friendly directions for each of the activities. They also include a choice menu for each volume, which allows students to make choices about which activities they work on to learn their vocabulary words each week. It is also a good tool to track completion of menu options depending on how long or how many options you allow students to complete. All three volumes also include a rubric, the "Map It Out" graphic organizer and nine vocabulary activities that can be used with any of your own vocabulary lists. Each volume of my Word Study Activities also has one or two FREE bonuses, from a formative assessment tool to a student activity proposal form to a pre-assessment and self-ratings scale. 

    

   

I also bundled these activities together for big savings. You'll get all five volumes (45 activities!) and the corresponding bonus resources for the price of four volumes!  If students complete one different activity a week, there are enough activities in the pack to last the entire year (or longer)! You can access the bundle by clicking the picture below.

Let me know if you have any questions! I love hearing from my readers! 

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Meeting the Needs of Gifted Learners: How Does a Differentiated Classroom Actually Work? 3.5/6

How Does a Differentiated Classroom Actually Work? 

If you're like me, you've finished reading another post (or two, or three) about differentiated instruction and you're thinking, "Well, now what? How can I actually put this information to work for me in my classroom?" It takes lots of practice, and I'm positive there are other teachers doing it differently (and well!) in their classroom, but I'll go ahead and write about how I was able to differentiate in my own classroom. And for the record, these ideas worked for my both in general education classrooms when I had only a few GT identified students and in my self-contained gifted classes where all students were identified as either cognitively gifted or gifted in a specific academic area.  

Some Key Ideas

Classroom Management

The most important aspect of being ready and able to accommodate the different learners in your classroom space is really all about how you manage your classroom. I'm not talking about your behavior plan, clip charts, token economy system, etc. I'm talking nuts and bolts--how to you use each and every minute of your school day to maximize the time you have to spend with your students. The thing that made the biggest impact for me was using a guided math and guided reading type schedule for those two blocks. Whether you do legitimate guided reading Fountas and Pinnell-style or the Daily 5 model, or some variation of those, what matters most is building in time to your schedule each day  to be able to meet with students individually, or in small groups. You could also meet this need for content differentiation by holding a whole group mini-lesson and then assigning several different activities, according to readiness, or you can set up different learning centers according to interests and/or readiness as well.  Structuring your day in these ways will allow a few magical things to happen:

• When you build in time for small groups, you simultaneously build in time for your students to work independently, which means you are FREE! Run while you can! Joking of course, but seriously, once you've trained your students to function without you constantly hovering providing close guidance and support, you are freed up to work with individuals or small groups as needed. 
• Your students value the time they get to spend with you one-on-one or in small groups. They look forward to this time and you look forward to it, too, because you get to connect on a deeper level with your kids. 
• You have time to spend meeting the needs of your students--tailoring materials and content to match their needs and push them towards real growth, which is a BIG win for alllll of the stakeholders. 

Time to Plan

Once you've carved out some time in your day, the next step is making sure you have gathered all the necessary information you need. What do you want your students to know? What do they already know? What do they want to know? How to they learn best? And where will you keep all of this information? I used my paper grade book pages to record pre- and post-test results, also noting which standards students still needed to work on. I also gathered some information about students' interests and recorded them on paper as well. All of this helped me in my grouping and planning so I could be sure to pull students back for small group work as they needed it.

After you pre-assess and gather information, it's time to start planning. If you're new to this, I think it's slightly easier to start in a subject area that has really discrete/distinct skills that are easy to separate from one another. Math, grammar, and content areas are a little less complicated to start with. I'm going to use math for my example, but the same general progression will work for most every subject. Here's my general flow:

• Pretest, sort information--students with the same missing skills get grouped together. You can see an example of this in my grade book checklist picture above. Sometimes I wrote information in there, sometimes I used sticky notes and stuck them in my planning pages. 
• I also kept notes on each student using a compacting recording sheet (my last post for a free copy), so that I could to it at conferences and around report card time. 
• Decide what students can be doing in the time that they buy back. I called my time "Choice Time" but you can probably think of something more creative! For student choice time, students were working on a variety of things. In math, sometimes they worked on learning computer coding from code.org or Khan Academy, sometimes they created games for each other to play, and sometimes they worked on strengthening deficit areas. In language arts, my students had lots of choices about what they worked on--vocabulary/word study activities were a choice based on students' interests, independent reading was always a choice, based on interest and readiness as well. 
• Decide IF and HOW you will evaluate tasks and learning accomplished during choice time. My own opinion is that these alternate activities don't always need "graded," however they still need to be evaluated using a rubric or some other tool so that students can get feedback--even if it's only feedback on independent study behaviors. Students need to know that what they're doing is valued,  but I also hope to instill in them a sense of ownership and pride in learning for learning sake. 
• A note about interest-based and learning profile content differentiation--these are, in some ways, lower-prep alternatives to differentiating by readiness. Here's why: generally speaking, if you offer children lots of choices in your classroom, they will gravitate toward what they like most, and you don't have to tailor it as much directly toward individuals. And once you get into the habit of giving students choices, you begin to build up your repertoire of materials and options that can be used over and over again, so it's really not as bad as it sounds.  

Math

Here is what my math block often looked like: (P.S., I say often because there were days where we did lessons and activities as a whole group. #reallife P.P.S. I was BLESSED to have 60-90 minute blocks of time for my instruction, so yes, it did make it easier to structure my time, but it is totally possible to do this in less time--you just have to be a little more judicious with how you build in your choice time--maybe it's every other day, or every third day instead of every single day, but I promise--it CAN be done!

• 10-15 minutes-Problem Solving in math journals (sometimes differentiated, often not because they were challenging problems on which I allowed students to choose to work collaboratively)
• 15-20 minutes (sometimes)--Whole group mini-lesson or explanation of math stations/choices
• 30-60 minutes--Guided math (small group) lessons and choice time. This is either self-directed or done in a rotation style. We changed it up, depending on what we were working on. If children had a big project they were working on, they often just worked on the project the whole time while I met with small groups. In small group time, students learned the skill and practiced it. They had some independent work to complete on their own in class as well. 
• 5-10 minutes--Exit ticket/show what you learned/Q&A time

ELA

Below are two versions of what the ELA block looked like in my classroom  (again, I had 90 minutes in upper elementary and more like 150 minutes in lower elementary to work with but it can be modified to work in less time):

Version One

• 5-10 minutes --Independent reading time or Picture of The Day as children trickled in from different classes
• 5 minutes-- Status of the Class (click the picture to the right if you're interested in downloading one for yourself from my free resource library). *Just to be clear, by clicking to get the freebie (and instant access to the growing collection of free resources in my library of subscriber exclusives), you're also agreeing to be added to my email list, where I'll send occasional messages with fresh ideas, tips, and other resources straight to your inbox. You can unsubscribe at any time.* 
• 15-20 minutes --Whole-group reading mini-lesson based on a skill that students will be applying during independent reading time 
• 20 minutes--Choice time--students work on word work, independent reading, or other projects 
• 15 minutes--Whole Group OR Small group mini-lesson
• 20-30 minutes--Choice time

Version Two

• 20 minutes: Whole-group standards-based reading mini-lesson based on comprehension, decoding, fluency, or vocabulary skills that could be applied to any book
• 45 minutes: Guided reading groups, individual conferences, and Independent Work--students apply the mini-lesson skills or concepts to books on their reading level and then work on word work, vocabulary, and/or other literacy-based centers 
• 20 minutes: Whole-group standards-based writing mini-lesson
• 45 minutes: Guided writing groups and/or individual writing conferences
• 10-20 minutes-Rotation between exit slips, fluency practice, sight word practice, Author's Chair, etc. 

Some Final Notes 

Of course, these general plans worked for ME in my classroom, but you may need to modify them to work for YOU in your classroom. They are intentionally very general. When I taught kindergarten, having students sit and attend to a 20-minute mini-lesson was pushing it for their attention span. Working independently for 45 minutes was also a lofty goal, especially at the beginning of the year. To accommodate students' needs, I broke lessons down into smaller chunks, allowed for shorter spurts of independent work, etc. I worked together with the class for weeks modeling what our classroom looked like, sounded like, and felt like during each stage of our language arts and math blocks. The time spent at the beginning of the year paid off very well in the middle and end of the year when we were truly able to maximize our learning time and minimize distractions and time during transitions. 

If you're ready to read more about differentiating, check out this post on how to differentiate the learning process. 

I hope you found this information helpful! Got more ideas about how to make differentiation work in your classroom? Leave a comment below or send me an email (jen@soaringwithsnyder.com). I love hearing from my readers!

Thank you,

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Meeting the Needs of Your Gifted Student: Differentiated Instruction--Overview 1/6

If you've been in the education field for any length of time, there is no doubt in my mind you've heard the term differentiation or differentiated instruction. It's hard to sit through even one staff meeting or PD session without hearing the terms once or twice, right? There is also no doubt in my mind that your understanding of what those terms truly mean, as well as your comfort level with actually implementing differentiated instruction in your classroom is likely as varied as the personalities of the students in your classes. The truth is, all of us teachers fall somewhere along a spectrum of knowledge and implementation for classroom differentiation. Some of us are well-versed and have been walking the walk for years, and some of us are just starting out--learning what differentiation is, learning what it looks like in the classroom, and learning different strategies for implementation.

I'm going to embark on a series of posts tackling differentiation. This is the first of six posts focusing on different aspects of differentiation. First, I'll outline what is really is (and isn't), and then I'll work on giving practical strategies, tips, and resources for making it work in your classroom. Differentiated instruction can be hard. Capital H hard. It can feel overwhelming and scary and frustrating. It can leave you wondering whether it is really worth the extra work it takes to make it happen. The good news is that differentiation is possible. There are some ways that you can schedule your days or lessons to make it easier, and it is 100 percent worth it. Not only will your gifted students benefit from it, but all of your students will benefit.

Differentiation is...

First, the definition. As the term implies, differentiation means different. Differentiated instruction is meeting students right where they are and giving them the content, tools, and strategies that they need to meet (or exceed) grade level standards. It's not a program, or package, or worksheets. It's a philosophy, a way of teaching. It's knowing your students so well that you can provide for them just what they need to continue learning. It's operating your classroom with the understanding that your students are all unique in their needs, and that they all need something different from you in order to have a successful school experience.  

According to Susan Winebrenner, author of one of the most useful books for educators Teaching Gifted Kids in the Regular Classroom (2001), there are five ways you can differentiate for students in your classroom. Differentiating through content, process, and product are the three most common ways teachers meet student needs. However, teachers can also differentiate the learning environment and the way student learning is assessed. All are important, and my subsequent posts will follow up on these key areas.

Differentiated instruction has a few key components that are important to consider as you get started (or continue your journey!).

One, the structure of your instructional time is critical to your success in differentiating. If you're providing different activities, content, or processes for learning, you have to allow time to give students different instructions for activities or processes, or you need to carve out time to deliver different content to individuals or groups of students. One way I provided for the element of time in my classroom was by setting up guided reading and guided math groups, or a Daily 5-esque structure of mini-lessons and independent work time. This allowed me to have all students in the classroom engaged in various learning or application opportunities while allowing me to work with individuals or small groups of students. The nice (and research-based) thing about providing students with small bursts of content instruction and then lots of time to apply their learning was that not only did it address students' attention span, it freed me up to work with students and support their learning as it was happening. I could interject help right as mistakes or misunderstandings were occurring, providing on-the-spot scaffolding. I could also provide hard enough content, activities, or experiences for my gifted learners so that they were challenged appropriately.

Second, differentiated instruction must be based on knowing your students. You have to know them really, really, well.  This means you need to spend time getting to know them as people--personality, learning preferences, etc., and also as learners--what skills and strategies do they already know, and what do they need to know next. Learning what their previous achievement or IQ scores is helpful, for sure. Finding out this information is necessary so that you can plan for instruction, learning activities, and flexible groups in your classroom. However, please note: it is important not to group your students ONLY by their ability. Just because two students have an IQ of 130 doesn't mean they have equivalent skills in analyzing nonfiction text. It also doesn't mean that they are better at analyzing nonfiction text than your student with an IQ of 115. IQ is a measure of perceived potential, not of students' previous achievement. Aside from being an attentive teacher, one of the best ways you can get to know your students is by using formative assessment. The information you can glean from a simple pre-test is not only helpful, it is imperative. One of the worst things we can do for any student is to make them "learn" content or skills that they already know.

Finally, differentiation should involve student choice (at least sometimes!). Allowing students to choose what they're reading, what they want to research, or how they'll show their learning are just a few ways we can provide for students learning preferences and interests. And if we do this often, we find that our students are more engaged, more involved, and more receptive to learning new material--even when it's time to learn something they didn't have a choice about.

Differentiation is NOT...

So, just like when we teach our students new vocabulary, we have students think of examples of the word, and we also strengthen their thinking by having them think about the non-examples.  It's important to note a few important things about what differentiation is NOT. 

Differentiation is NOT tracking students by broad ability, or even grouping them solely based on ability within the classroom. Like I hinted at above, these models don't allow for enough flexibility in meeting students' needs on a case-by-case or skill-by-skill basis. Further, tracking often results in children who are in minority populations or who have lower socioeconomic status being placed in lower groups based on teacher bias and then getting stuck there because they receive lower quality teaching (http://www.nea.org/tools/16899.htm). The alternative to tracking and ability grouping is flexible grouping, particularly in the areas of math and reading instruction. And IF students are grouped flexibly within their classroom, they should be matched to curriculum and instruction that is closely related to their needs (Tieso, 2005).  Cross-grade grouping in reading has also been shown to be successful (Robinson, Shore, and Enerson, 2007). 

Differentiation is NOT group work IF each group is doing the SAME thing! I've seen this happen many times. If they're working on different activities at the same time, great. However, if your intention is that they will all still complete the same activities, just at different times, this is NOT differentiation. You might as well just do several whole-group activities and save yourself some trouble because these are essentially the same thing. 

Finally, differentiated instruction does NOT mean everyone in your classroom is on an IEP! While goal setting and progress monitoring are valuable tools, and individualization is ideal, it is not realistic to think that you will be able to fully differentiate every subject for every student every day of the year. You just can't. You're only going to frustrate yourself or burn yourself out. 

If you're interested in learning more about strategies for differentiating, including tricks and tools for implementing them in your classroom, click here to visit the next post in the series about preassessment. 

Sources:

Robinson, A., Shore, B. M., & Enersen, D. L. (2007). Best practices in gifted education: An evidence-based guide. Waco, TX: Prufrock Press. 

Tiesco, C. L. (2005). The effects of grouping practices and curricular adjustments on achievement. Journal for the Education of the Gifted, 29, 60-89. 

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How I Use Bloom's Taxonomy To Reach All the Learners in My Classroom

If you're a teacher, there is a 99.234% chance that you've heard about that guy named Benjamin Bloom, creator of the infamous Bloom's Taxonomy. But have you actually used the taxonomy in your classroom? Like, really, thoughtfully used it? It's a great framework for educators to implement while planning for instruction and creating assessments that are aligned to the standards. First, though, it's important to have more than a vague idea not only of what each of the six levels of the taxonomy are, but what it means to create and implement lessons and activities that are both aligned with the consistently reach the highest levels of the taxonomy. Gifted learners NEED this consistency, and they really need to spend the majority of their learning time in the highest levels of the taxonomy. Due to their very nature as high-ability learners, it's likely that ( if they don't already know it) gifted children will move very quickly through the lowest levels of the hierarchy. In order to meet their needs, they need to be interacting with content and skills in deeper, more meaningful ways. Let's explore the taxonomy a little, and then consider some ways to strengthen the implementation of the taxonomy in your own lesson and assessment design.
hierarchy of learning,  and reaching towards allowing students to

Bloom's 101

First a little crash/refresher course, a Bloom's 101-ish type review of the important aspects of where the taxonomy originated, and how it has evolved.

Benjamin Bloom and some colleagues first published their framework for learning in 1956. Their motivation was really creating a way to categorize educational goals. They called it "Taxonomy of Educational Objectives", but eventually it became more widely known as Bloom's Taxonomy. (Am I the only one who feels bad for the colleagues of his who don't get much credit for this creation? Sorry, I digress.) It was created with six categories: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation. The Comprehension level and every level above that Bloom considered to be skills and abilities; they were things that could only be achieved after the knowledge was already in place.

Here is a simple graphic I found that shows the original taxonomy:

Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching has a great article outlining the six levels of the taxonomy. Here is an excerpt of their definitions of the levels, based on their interpretation of the original publication:

"Here are the authors’ brief explanations of these main categories in from the appendix of Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (Handbook One, pp. 201-207):

• Knowledge “involves the recall of specifics and universals, the recall of methods and processes, or the recall of a pattern, structure, or setting.”

• Comprehension “refers to a type of understanding or apprehension such that the individual knows what is being communicated and can make use of the material or idea being communicated without necessarily relating it to other material or seeing its fullest implications.”

• Application refers to the “use of abstractions in particular and concrete situations.”

• Analysis represents the “breakdown of a communication into its constituent elements or parts such that the relative hierarchy of ideas is made clear and/or the relations between ideas expressed are made explicit.”

• Synthesis involves the “putting together of elements and parts so as to form a whole.”

• Evaluation engenders “judgments about the value of material and methods for given purposes.”

The 1984 edition of Handbook One is available in the CFT Library in Calhoun 116. See itsACORN record for call number and availability."

In 2001, a former student of Bloom's decided to revise the taxonomy to include verbs as descriptors instead of nouns for each of the levels, because verbs imply action, and are more fitting to the fact that learning is an active process.

The revised taxonomy is summarized beautifully in this table from Iowa State University Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching. It's easy to see how the cognitive process moves from lower order thinking skills like remembering and understanding up into the highest levels of thinking: evaluating and creating.

So, now what?

Now that you remember and perhaps understand the taxonomy, it's time to learn how to apply the learning. Start by analyzing what you're doing in your classroom already-- evaluate your current curricular materials, including your learning objectives and assessments. Are they helping you to reach the highest levels of the taxonomy? There is a good chance that the materials you're using are not going much beyond the first three levels of the hierarchy. So, now it's time to create materials and build lessons and objectives that help your students learn and achieve at the highest levels. 

Getting into the habit

Crafting Questions, Lessons, and Assessments That Employ Higher Order Thinking 

One of the first things I found helpful when I set a goal for myself to be more mindful of reaching for those higher order thinking skills with more intention was to first teach the taxonomy to my students. Yep. I said it. Teach it. To them. 

You know how you have accountability partners when you start a new workout plan, or you have certain people in your life that you ask to help keep you on track when you're trying to reach new goals you've set for yourself? Well, aside from a teacher friend in your building to whom you can talk each day about how you think you did, or an administrator who can tell you how they think you're doing, there is an easy, effective solution to help get you started and keep you going. And the solution happens to be sitting right in front of you. Times 25. I'm serious. You can teach Bloom's Taxonomy to your students, and they will help you stick with it. 

When I taught the taxonomy to my students, I used an analogy from one of my favorite teacher authors, Jen Jones from Hello Literacy.  She has a passion for literacy instruction, but she also has a background in gifted education, which is how I stumbled upon her years ago. She created a set of posters that equate Bloom's taxonomy to cell phone signal strength. So smart, right? It is probably difficult to find a child, even in the youngest classrooms, who isn't at least aware of those little bars on the mobile phone, right? Take a look at what the posters look like in my classroom: 

Here is a closer look, right from Jen Jones' blog, Hello Literacy: 

SO great, right? (You can link to her blog by clicking on the picture directly above, and you can buy her posters for yourself here.) The nice thing for me about the posters, aside from how they made a really dynamic display on my classroom wall, is that they were a constant reminder for me and my students about our goal to strive for the highest levels of thinking each and every day. It's a little tricky to see in the picture, but there are verbs on each of the poster that also help us to do things like creating questions easily during a discussion of ANY topic, and design activities while lesson planning, keeping the levels in mind all the while. And the best part about using this in your classroom and getting the students involved? They will help you. With practice, they will use the display when developing their own questions, they will recognize when you are doing activities in the upper levels, and they might even call you out if they see you spending too much time on lower order thinking. It truly is amazing (and helpful) to involve your students on this journey. 

Another thing that helped me design better lessons, activities, questions, and assessments was by having a (bigger) list of those verbs, along with a set of question stems and possible activities right in my plan book. One important thing to keep in mind as you're planning--it's really important when you're designing (or finding) curriculum and assessments for your students that you match the verbs in the standards to the verbs in your objectives and assessments. You can locate the verb on the Bloom's chart, and then make sure that at a very minimum, your students are able to complete tasks that are aligned in their depth and complexity with the expectations of your standards.

If you search Bloom's question stems, you'll come up with TONS of search results, but here are a couple of quick links: 

Bloom's Taxonomy --These are aligned to the older version of Bloom's, but still very valuable, as the document contains questions, activities, and assessment ideas. 

Questions for the Revised Bloom's Taxonomy 

What kinds of activities are aligned with Bloom's? 

The activities for the lowest levels of the hierarchy are fairly straightforward and likely to happen in the duration of a regular day. You know these ones--making lists, reading fact charts, doing worksheets, writing summaries, etc. So, in order to help get your wheels turning a little more here are some examples of activities I've done in my classroom that employed higher order thinking skills and, side note--these activities are FUN! And when children have fun in the classroom, they learn better! (You can read more about that here.)

Here, my fifth-grade students are playing with peer-invented board games.  The games included the creation of complex math problems that aligned to whatever math topic we were studying at the time. And you better believe that they were not allowed to create problems that were lower than the application level of Bloom's!

Below, students are also playing another student-created board game. They LOVED creating the games, and they also really loved playing the games on game day. I loved the activities because they were working on the highest levels of the taxonomy, meeting learning standards, getting extra practice with math skills, and of course, having FUN!

The picture below is of an art project that a dear colleague and fellow creative thinker, Mrs. Scalli and I worked on implementing. We found the idea on NCTM's Illuminations website and adapted it for our classrooms. Students had a list of "must include" geometrical ideas that they put into their paintings. We integrated a little art history lesson about an artist named Wassily Kandinsky, whose paintings were often created as interpretations of feelings he had while listening to music. Students also had to write an artist's statement to describe to us how their geometry elements and colors helped create the mood of their painting, using mathematically accurate and relevant vocabulary. Again, students were engaged in high-level thinking, with a fun and creative activity and the results were awesome, as you can see.

Finally,  like I've mentioned in previous posts, part of my mission is to help others use strategies in their classroom that are relevant and meaningful in meeting the needs of gifted learners, I will share with you here a book unit that I just created, with activities for EACH of the level in Bloom's Taxonomy.

Using picture books with Bloom's activities is a really great way to reach your gifted learners, particularly in the lower to mid-elementary age, because there are many picture books that are filled with rich vocabulary and complex concepts and ideas that your gifted children will really enjoy working with.

The added bonus is that some of the best picture books for young children are actually written at higher readability levels so you can give your littlest students books that are aligned with their instructional reading level. The other thing I love about using notable picture books with gifted children is that although the books are sometimes written at a fourth- or fifth-grade reading level, the content in the book is generally more appropriate than some of the other options. If you have been working with a gifted student (or you have one living with you at home), you are likely very familiar with the difficulty of finding content-appropriate books for your advanced readers (it can be SO hard sometimes, right?).
I created the unit based on an Irish Folktale, "Jamie O'Rourke and the Big Potato," by Tomie DePaola, which is a story about a lazy man who gets tricked by a leprechaun into taking a magic potato seed instead of his pot of gold. It has lower level activities in it, like making a timeline of the story's events and answering comprehension questions, but it also has higher level activities like using descriptive language to create a soundscape for a favorite scene in the book. Children can also write a book review, but it has to be in the style (and length) of a tweet. Holding a debate, creating a board game, or developing an advertisement for the leprechaun's magic seed are also tasks that encourage lots of creative and critical thinking. You can click on the picture below if you want to know more. This is the first in a series I will be creating, so if you find yourself liking this product, make sure you follow my store, Soaring with Snyder, on Teacherspayteachers.com.

If you're into offering students choices and powering up their learning by using Bloom's Taxonomy in your classroom, here are just a few of the time-saving resources that are ready to print and go to work for you! Click on the pictures below to access these documents and others. 

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