Reply to How does your DCPS help advanced students?

Forum Index » DC Public and Public Charter Schools

Reply to "How does your DCPS help advanced students? "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]We've found our middle of the road highly divers DCPS to be very responsive to advanced learners (not Brent but probably somewhat similar in to its upper grades). Sure, there is the constant attention to those who're far behind and struggling but that same attention has yielded extra opportunities for our advanced learner as well. "Apps" isn't the answer, not all of it for sure, I agree. It either comes from a teacher/school who doesn't know better or a school who is homogeneous and hasn't had to figure out ways to differentiate its learning. You can advocate for more project-based, small group, and otherwise differentiated learning opportunities, directly with the teacher as well as with your school's LSAT. I'm not sure there is one single model to this and rather than tell you here "ask for SEM" or as for "expeditionary" or ask for whatever, I think it's better for you to get a sense of what your school is already doing in that department and then ask and advocate for ways to extend those opportunities to advanced learners.

Paradoxically, it may also help you speak with the special ed teachers at your school to get a sense of that and figure out whether or not the school is set up to push those teachers into the classroom in ways that help differentiate rather than simply pulling out those that need help.

Lastly, think well about how you approach your question with the teacher, namely in terms of the problem (here is what I'm hearing/seeing) rather than the solution (this is what I want you to do). Unless you're an educator, I'm not convinced that teachers are receptive to your layperson suggestions, nor should they be really. But if you go and say here is what I'm seeing with my child (and be sure to figure out exactly what she is saying in what context and with regard to what subjects), what could we as a team - teacher and parents - do to challenge her more, then that will resonate more.

And let me give you an example of why that works from our own experience with a child who started saying "I'm bored/it's so easy": When we went through this process, like you assuming that nothing was there for him to challenge himself further, we found incidentally that there indeed were higher order activities for him to choose from but that he thought it more convenient to spend his time "winning" every "count by" contest held at the same time. No wonder he was bored. Why don't you move on and take your teacher up on the extra challenge, boy?! Here is to how well Montessori would work for him...
So in working with the teacher in that particular context, we found that by us knowing about those extra opportunities and the teacher knowing about his "boredom", both of us were able to get him to challenge himself within the context that was already available to him but that he just wasn't intrinsically drawn toward.
[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics