Compacting: How Are You Challenging My Child?

My child is Advanced, and consistently scores well on test scores.  What are you doing to challenge him/her?

As an educator (and Differentiation Specialist), I provide your child with the education I hope my own child is provided.  I want my daughter to not only be challenged, but to be encouraged to take intellectual risks.

The up-and-coming vocabulary in education is Compacting.  However, this is not a relatively new concept.  Compacting is a research-based concept and proven to provide advanced students with  appropriate accelerated needs.  As stated in the link (which wonderfully summarizes the concept), "(C)ompacting can dramatically reduce redundancy, and challenge gifted students to new heights of excellence (Reis et al., 1993)."

So, what exactly is Compacting?  There are 3 steps to consider:

1)  Backward planning- I am a HUGE proponent.  Using standards as a starting point fosters making targeted, instructional decisions.

2)  Backward planning- I am a HUGE proponent of this.  Using benchmark data means teachers  make targeted differentiation decisions for instruction 
     a) With the above data, teachers determine the 1.  Standard Outcomes  2.  Students who have already mastered it, based on data

3)  Engaged curriculum- We e use data as a diving board- where students are able to leap from, based on what they already know.  Now students can engage in high-interest inquiry.  Since they already mastered the foundation content, we take it to a deeper concept.  

 Note:  I did not say we speed of the pace or scope and sequence.  Yes, I said "Deeper".  Depth over Breath has been around for years.  When working with advanced learners, Breadth is not necessarily better!  Please keep an open mind for Depth:  it's more engaging, more authentic, more...well, it's just Best Practice! (another blog for another day)
As stated in the article:  "They learn that if they do my best work, they are rewarded with harder and more work. Instead, we recommend that students' interests should be considered."

I read multiple articles about students being able to "bargain" about a unit.  I like this concept because it means allowing flexible understanding:  depending on the content, some will already have it mastered, some will not.  This allows a variety of children to be the "masterer".  These are the children who can take ownership over their educational experience.  They choose to Compact the curriculum, or to take the current learning experiences and build upon it.  For example, a student who bargains on a lesson about determining importance (Standard), may Bargain by working to help other students create a book recommendation commercial for morning announcements, using the most important details supporting the Main Idea.

This is 1 of many articles that coherently explains how Compacting is best used in the classroom, and I appreciate the research embedded in the article.

http://www.gifted.uconn.edu/general/faculty/reis/compacting_for_at_risk.html