Whether in workshops or via email, one of the most common questions I hear is:
What do I do with my early finishers?
But, friends, I do believe that this is the wrong question.
What we should ask is: why are students finishing so fast in the first place?
…
So… why do some kids finish so darn quickly?
It’s likely that the work they are doing is simply too simple for them.
Here are the symptoms of simple tasks:
- have exactly one right answer
- have one known way to get to the answer
The solution to early finishers is to give them a sufficiently complex task to begin with, not to try to keep them busy once they finish a too-simple task quickly.
To do that, we could:
- Pre-Assess, so we know who already gets it before we teach. This will free up time so that students can do more interesting things.
- Avoid those common differentiation anti-patterns to make sure we’re actually offering something different, not just more.
- Use Gallagher and Ascher’s framework to ask higher-order questions.
Above all, we must make sure that we’re asking students to think, not merely remember.