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Providing Extra Challenge - Going Beyond Grade-Level Work

“I’m all done,” my student said, handing me a completed assignment just minutes after I handed it out. I looked at the paper, wondering how they had done it so quickly. Now what could I give them to occupy their time so they didn’t grow bored or worse, distract others who were still working? 

Every year, some students seem to move more quickly through the completion of tasks than their peers. This speedy behavior can create a lot of frustration, and not necessarily because kids are rushing through their work. Sometimes, students are thirsting for options that make an assignment a little more challenging, or perhaps they need an entirely different (and more rigorous) pathway. As we all know, implementing any kind of differentiation effectively is often easier said than done. Within any class, students tend to have widely varied needs, and meeting them can present significant hurdles. To begin making meaningful changes for kids who seem bored by the class, it is first important to figure out what kind of help they need.

Defining Grade-Level Work

Both ideologically and practically, students must have access to grade-level work to receive equitable access to good instruction. Surprisingly often, teachers accidentally assign work that is below the grade level standard. For example, I sometimes see high school teachers going over instructional concepts that are covered in the primary grades, such as the elements of plot. While it makes sense to remind students of what they have learned in the past as a scaffold, instruction should not become stuck at that point. Instead, building student capacity up to the indicated grade-level content standard is key to ensuring that they have the opportunity to meet appropriate expectations. Otherwise, we are unfairly keeping them in a place that does not facilitate growth, and that holds especially true for students who have the potential to work beyond the standard and stretch themselves.

Extension or Enrichment?

When students become bored by the work provided in class, one possibility is that they need a little bit more to do cognitively. As the word “extension” implies, students who are given the chance to extend their learning can go further in the same amount of time as their peers. For example, if the class is doing a series of math problems and the teacher wants to provide a few slightly more difficult problems that assess the same skill, students might opt to try those “spicier” problems instead if they feel ready. In the case of extension, all kids in the classroom are working on the same standard and skill, and the extension element is a student-driven choice.

By contrast, enrichment is typically teacher-driven, and it’s an entirely different pathway for students who have demonstrated their ability to work beyond the grade-level standard. Students receive enrichment in a variety of ways, but they are often placed into entirely different classrooms or programs. Therefore, there is less need for differentiation with enriched instruction, whereas teachers who provide opportunities for extension within a classroom populated by students of varied needs have a more complex job to do. However, from a grading perspective, extensions on any assignment are still within the same task and students choose to take on that challenge, so there is no need to engage in gradebook Tetris to make an entirely new grade for any task that has extension options. 

Lightening the Teaching Load

When it comes to any kind of differentiated instruction, the biggest hurdle teachers face is an increased workload. After all, is it possible to have students working toward the same skill in a variety of ways within one classroom? The answer is yes, but it takes time and careful planning. For example, before teachers embark on any unit, it is essential to establish precisely which standards will be prioritized for honing student skills. 

If I’m teaching a fourth-grade class to write a paragraph that expresses an opinion, it would make sense to figure out what exactly is needed to demonstrate proficiency in this standard. Perhaps I might wish to focus their learning on providing clear facts or details above any other elements of writing. For the students who seem to struggle with this skill, I can scaffold their learning with some appropriate resources. For those who easily locate details and insert them into their paragraphs, I might wish to offer an extension option of providing more details or getting an additional detail from a different media source, like a podcast. With an added awareness of what we want students to specifically work on improving, it becomes a little less daunting to differentiate because we’re not trying to accomplish all the things at the same time.   

Serving the needs of students who need an additional layer of challenge is clearly an important and worthwhile endeavor; however, it can get complicated, and fast. Taking the time to analyze measurable indicators of where student success sits in relation to content standard expectations might seem like a heavy task, but it will allay boredom and increase achievement in the long run. By increasing our awareness of how much students should be challenged and how to help them grow, we can help kids make the most out of what each school day has to offer.

Written by Miriam Plotinsky, Education World Contributing Writer

Miriam Plotinsky is an instructional specialist with Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland, where she has taught and led for more than 20 years. She is the author of several education books with W.W. Norton and ASCD. She is also a National Board-Certified Teacher with additional certification in administration and supervision. She can be reached at www.miriamplotinsky.com or via Twitter: @MirPloMCPS

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