One of the things I’ve been working on is curriculum compacting. Which sounds like you’re taking the curriculum and packing it down to make it go quicker. Which is not a bad description.
Essentially, curriculum compacting is determining the mastery level of a student and differentiating their work to prevent repetition within the content. It can also be used to streamline practice for your students that don’t need a lot of repetition.
The purpose is to reduce the redundancy that our advanced students deal with in school. This is good for your gifted students, as well as the ones that are just faster learners.
Research has shown that many of our advanced students already know much of our curriculum before they even “learn it” in class. In fact, as much as 40%-70% of elementary and middle school curriculum can be eliminated for 10%-15% of our students (Reis, Westberg et al., 1998)! This is especially true in skills-based classes, such as math and reading. This means for our brightest students, they aren’t being challenged in school. A lack of challenge can lead to boredom and behavior problems that the teacher then has to deal with.
Think about your specific curriculum and think vertically across other grades. How much repetition exists? For example, in Biology, we will start with cells and viruses. Guess what students learned in 7th grade? Cells! If I assume that all of my students remember what they learned in 7th grade about cells and plan my lessons from there, I have created 2 problems. First, some of my students will be left behind because they don’t remember enough (or they never learned it in 7th grade) and should start at the beginning. Second, I have the small group that remembers everything they need to know and would greatly benefit from a more advanced lesson or enrichment activity.
This is where compacting can be really useful. By determining the current level of mastery of my students, I can plan lessons that accelerate my advanced students beyond where they would be with repetitive lessons. I can also identify students that are likely to learn new material faster than average and streamline lessons for them to reduce repetition.
Does this sound like differentiation? It is! We are differentiating for our advanced students to increase their depth of knowledge, create a challenging learning environment, and give them more time to pursue enrichment activities. This can be done by eliminating the content these students already know and accelerating them through the content that don’t already know, but are capable of mastering more quickly.
I know at first, this sounds like it will be really complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. I will be sharing how to get started and ideas on what to do for your advanced students that need a challenge.
