Are we doing enough for gifted and talented students?

Posted on December 1, 2013

So much of a teacher’s time is spent on struggling students who do not understand concepts. I would estimate that 80% of my time spent with students is trying to guide the students who are failing and I generally leave the students who are working well to just get on with it. Of course there should always be differentiation going on in the classroom but gifted and talented students simply do not get their fair share of my time. How could I change this? I’ve been looking at Flip Teaching, The process where you record your lessons on a tablet and the students watch the video back at their own pace, answering questions as they do. I tried using the principal’s iPad to record a basic test of the idea using an App called show me. The great thing about show me is that all the recording and publishing software is built into the app. The only problem I have with it is that all the material that you produce goes straight on to the show me servers and I have no control over it. Here in South Africa we are still limited by our broadband speed so it would be much more useful to dump the videos on the local server here in the school than have them eating away at our bandwidth and data usage, which at R30 per gigabyte can soon get expensive when 30 students are all streaming video content. I think over the Christmas holiday I might try to produce a few lessons in video and do a little experiment in flip teaching in the new year.