Innovative Teaching Tactics for Students Who Finish First

Discover the secrets to transforming your classroom with our latest deep dive into the world of early finishers. I'm Patty Furth, and in this episode, we dissect the challenges that swift completers present to elementary educators. You'll learn about the three distinct archetypes—the rushers, the workhorses, and the intellectually gifted—and how to tailor your teaching to each student's drive. We don't just examine why these students finish early; we explore how to elevate their learning experience with strategies that emphasize quality over speed, ensuring that every task is an opportunity for growth and genuine engagement.

As we navigate the educational landscape, we also unveil how to create an environment where learning never stops. With no guest this time, it's just you and me unpacking the power of 'genius hour' projects and passion-driven assignments that enrich and extend the standard curriculum. We discuss ditching the busy work in favor of meaningful challenges that cater to every student's potential. This episode will equip you with the tools to foster a classroom culture where students are continuously captivated, working on tasks that test their limits and ignite their curiosity. Join me for an enlightening conversation that promises to reshape your teaching philosophy and turn those early finishers into lifelong learners.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:16

Welcome to the Ignite your Teaching video podcast, where we help elementary teachers to make good teaching easy again. I'm your host, patty Furth, mama-free wife and experienced classroom teacher, who has made it my mission to help other teachers establish efficient routines, find effective solutions and deliver engaging lessons over at MaddyLearningcom. So are you ready to ignite your teaching? So, for most of us in our classroom, one of the things that we probably have to figure out as classroom teachers, specifically in the junior grades, is what to do about early finishers. Now, I think there are three different types of early finishers that we might have in our classrooms, and there's going to be a couple of different things that we are going to want to try and to avoid with those specific type of early finishers. Now, exactly what is an early finisher? So, an early finisher is a student who, when we give them an assigned task, they are one of the very first ones finished that task, which causes a bit of a problem, because if we have 25 students in our class and we have 10 of them finish well before the other students in our class, what's going to end up happening is those students have nothing to do while the other students are continuing to finish the assigned work. This is where we have a problem, because when students are not occupied and they don't have things to do, we have students that are bored, act out or really get involved in things that we really don't want them to do and becomes a bit of a classroom management issue or nightmare. So what we want to do is we want to design our classroom environment to address these opportunities for early finishers. So why do we often encounter early finishers in our classrooms in the first place? Well, a lot of the times it can come down to the types of tasks that we are asking students to do, the types of organizational systems that we have in our classrooms and the kinds of students that we have as well. There's lots of reasons why early finishers exist and why it is a problem that we, as teachers, need to address.

Speaker 1: 2:34

Now, there are typically three different types of early finishers. One we have the rushers. Those are the students that are. Often we give them an assignment and they very quickly just rush through it, not giving their best quality work, but they're motivated because they want to be done, probably because there's a task they want to work on or they want to do some free time activity that is far more entertaining for them or motivating for them than actually doing the work. So their priorities in terms of what is motivating them is a little bit off. We also have the workhorses Now. These are students that generally just work at a regular pace and they finish the assignment along the timelines that we would expect. So after they're often stuck, even though they took a regular amount of time, they're often stuck waiting for perhaps some of the stragglers that are still not finished the work, that are taking a lot longer than you necessarily expected.

Speaker 1: 3:34

Then we also have a third type of early finisher, and these are going to be our gifted and talented students. These students are ones that are very, very capable. They often don't require the same amount of front loading or the same amount of instruction required in order to grasp a concept. They grasp them quickly, they grasp them early and they master things a lot faster. So they are ready for more complex learning and they're just really our group of gifted or talented students that are just, really just need that extra push. So there's really those three different kinds of early finishers that we need to prepare for Now. When we look at those three different types of early finishers. We really have to identify and understand how those students are motivated, because when we understand what motivates that student to become an early finisher, it allows us to pre-plan and identify how we are going to motivate them and handle them.

Speaker 1: 4:32

So first let's talk about the rushers. So a rusher is a type of student that is going to rush through their work. Quality is not their motivation here. Their motivation is to get it done. They're ones that might be motivated by a checklist because they're just like I'm done, move on, let's go. They're probably not super invested in what they're doing. They are probably motivated or encouraged through other ways. School might not be the most exciting thing. Learning might not be something that they might typically be motivated on. They see often the tasks that we're giving them for teacher as just an obstacle towards what they actually want to be doing.

Speaker 1: 5:13

Now. For a lot of students these days that's video games or things. They don't really see the value of the work that we're doing, so they don't value it. They just realize they have to get it done, so they will get it done as fast as possible. But they are not really prioritizing quality or their actual motivation of like I'm going to learn something and I'm going to do better. So that's that they're not getting that motivation out of it. So when we have a rusher, one of the things that we really want to be encouraging for our rushers is to encourage the quality over speed, especially if we can impose upon them these ideas that you, as the teacher, expect quality, you prioritize quality and a student doing their best work at all times, not always over speed. It does require you to actually check the quality quickly of the work when a rusher is done, to ensure that they are getting the work done when it is supposed to be done and to the quality they need to do.

Speaker 1: 6:15

You also need to know this rusher, what they are capable of. What does good quality work from that rusher look like, so that you can impose upon them what exactly is expected? And the idea that if they don't do it with a good enough quality the first time, the expectation is that they will do it over again. This is something that's not going to be really motivating for a rusher. They want to get it done and if they rush through it and give you a bad quality piece of work and they know that it's a bad quality piece of work, and they know that you are going to turn it right back around on them and be like nope, that's not what you're capable of. I want you to go back, recheck the criteria. I want a better quality piece of work. This is not your best quality, so therefore it's not good enough for you to move on yet. So this will be frustrating for a rusher and they are going to go a couple of times and probably groan and grumble and so on and so forth.

Speaker 1: 7:12

But these are also the same students who will tell you that they're bored in class. So they're bored because they're rushing, but they're rushing because they don't actually want to do the work. But if they did the work and spent time on the quality, there would be less time for them to be bored in class. So really that sense of boredom is on themselves because they are the ones rushing through the work. So when we're looking and dealing with a rusher, we really have to focus on the quality and what it is that that student is capable of, and be very clear with them to communicate that what it is that you need them to do.

Speaker 1: 7:51

Now we also have types of early finishers and these are the waiters, these are your workhorse students that are in our classroom and they are the ones that are completing tasks along the timelines you estimated. So whenever we come up with that assignment, we always estimate well, I think it's going to take a whole week for us to do this. So we're going to estimate and that's exactly how long it takes them, but inevitably we always have students who are going to take longer. So that means that we're going to have some of our work courses that are motivated by doing their best quality work, so they're not skimping out on it. They're not like our rushers. They're doing their best quality work every time. But they're done and then they're waiting. We're waiting for the stragglers. So what do we do with those students?

Speaker 1: 8:36

So, without holding some of those students back, well, one of the best ways to deal with the early finishers that are your waiters, the ones that your workhorse waiters is to deal with the stragglers, because if you deal with the stragglers and you reduce the amount of kids straggling behind, it will reduce the wait time for those competent workhorses that do what you ask them to do in the timelines you provide them. So, by supplying some scaffolding support for your stragglers, by providing some alternative types of assignments, perhaps simplifying the assignment without simplifying the complexity so you're still not modifying. But maybe you're giving them a different way that they can show you that same learning that might be easier for them or take less time might be more appropriate for their learning style. Maybe it's just providing a scaffolded support. Maybe it's understanding that good for them might look different than good for some of your other students. So we want to push them to work at where their capacity is now and help them to grow slowly over time, to improve over time.

Speaker 1: 9:45

But it's okay sometimes if, say, a straggler hands you and works really hard and hands you a C. If that's a piece of evidence of a really good effort for that student, then it's okay for us to accept that. We don't necessarily need to wait until they are ready to get to a B. Maybe they're not ready for that yet, so it's okay to accept the C. It's also okay for us to just put a deadline and say this is the day I am not going to give any more class time for this assignment, while my inbox or hand in bin will remain open, you will no longer be given any more class time to complete this assignment. It is due. It is currently sitting incomplete on my grade book and you let them know that it's not complete, it's not done and you can continue to work on it and hand it in, but we're done with class time.

Speaker 1: 10:37

It's time for us to move on At some point. We just have to sometimes look at this and say, okay, we've got to cut our losses and say I can't keep giving two weeks, three weeks, four weeks more for a student, two or three students, to complete this task. It's time to move on. And providing we are communicating with parents that this is what's happening, and providing we have given supports. Perhaps this is where we rely on some other teachers to be pulling those students to provide, to do that sometimes, to give them that support additional to what you've already provided them. Perhaps it's just you collect what they have done and mark what they have done, even though it's not quite finished. That's okay too, but sometimes we just have to move on. We can't expect our entire class to always be waiting for some of the stragglers.

Speaker 1: 11:27

Now, the third type of student that we have that are early finishers are going to be our gifted and talented students. Now, these students, again, are people that get the concepts really quickly. They probably don't need as much time to get from brand new to the concept to proficient at the concept. They pick things up really, really quickly. They don't need a lot of extra practice, they just get it and they get it really quickly. For these students, they're still giving you great, quality work. So you can tell the difference between the gifted and talented students versus the rushers because of the quality of work that's given to you. If you are given quality work and it's great A level work every single time and it's done really quickly, you're probably considering that this is a gifted and talented student, not Now. It doesn't mean that you need to be identified as gifted and talented in order to be in this category of students.

Speaker 1: 12:28

Some students might not meet the threshold of a psychoeducational assessment, but still have the learning qualities and learning criteria that would put them in this category of an early finisher. In this case, it's okay to differentiate for these students and recognize that these students need a little bit less time to get to proficient, so they need alternative tasks. So instead of practicing multiple multiplication strategies with these students for two to three weeks, like the majority of your class requires to gain mastery, these students might gain mastery after one week. Maybe they can show it to you. They understand it. They have a very thorough and deep understanding of the concept you're teaching. So then they can be omitted from the rest of the practice that the other students are in.

Speaker 1: 13:18

Yes, they might want to participate in the lessons, but you can also provide students with an opportunity to do a genius hour project. This is an extension project that can be used in place of other tasks that they've already shown mastery on. So if you already have students that have a thorough mastery of multiplication, give them something else not more something else an alternative assignment that allows them to go deeper, more thoroughly, into a piece of learning that they're interested in. Maybe they're interested in coding. Do you have any coding robots? Can you give them a robot that they can code? Is there a place that they can go with your learning resource teacher? Maybe you have a gifted and talented teacher that can help provide some support for those students. Perhaps it's something they themselves are very interested in. Maybe they want to learn a new language. So they can go and do a lingo and you can have them learn a new language. They can learn about something that's interesting to them. Maybe they're really interested in ancient Egypt and the construction of the pyramids and the engineering of that. Allow them to explore that. They can go on lessons that are online.

Speaker 1: 14:28

There's lots of free extension teaching lessons where they can dig into something they're very, very interested in and they do that in place of doing something else in your classroom Not above and beyond. They can do it above and beyond, but it means they don't need to spend as much time to reach mastery. They've already shown you they can do mastery. They know that concept, so maybe you're teaching them how to write summaries For the rest of your class. It's taking them six, eight, 10 weeks to be able to write a good quality summary. Maybe for some of your gifted, talented early finishers, they are able to show you a great summary that is super productive exactly what you're looking for after three weeks. So in that case, instead of them continuing to write summaries over and over again, give them a challenge and have them do something different that is still language based, that is still going to allow you to gather literacy marks, but on something that they are interested in, and they can do that for independent work instead of something else. So that could just be a deal that you have with those students.

Speaker 1: 15:38

Now, out of all of this, you certainly could have, say, an early finishers board somewhere in your classroom. You could have a board in your classroom with a whole bunch of tasks. That is kind of busy work that students can do when they finish a piece of work. I, however, think that there is a more effective way to do that. There's a more effective way to manage early finishers in your classroom, and one is through a culture of continuous learning and self-improvement, when you establish in your classroom that you always are going to push yourself to work to your fullest capacity, so that work should always be challenging. If it's not challenging, then you should be pushing yourself further. If you find it easy, you didn't push yourself enough, so we definitely want to build that into our classroom. I also think that it's really important to establish the kinds of structures and assignments in your classrooms that allow for open-endedness, allow for differentiation, so that there's more opportunities for students to challenge themselves. Now, this can look a lot so different ways In my classroom, specifically in literacy, students are always writing and they can rush through one piece of writing and finish their story, but the next assignment is right there waiting for them.

Speaker 1: 17:05

There is always going to be another assignment that they are going to work on, so there's no motivation to finish, there's no motivation to rush through it and not provide a great quality piece of work, because if you do, you'll just have more to do. You'll have another piece of writing. We're always building our portfolio and we recognize that not everyone's portfolio is going to look exactly the same. Some people are going to have lots of small stories, other people are going to have a few stories, but they're going to be fairly in-depth because that's the kind of writer they are. So we have lots of different pathways in order to look successful in writing.

Speaker 1: 17:43

This is where we have an open-ended task. We have lots of different ways that success is shown and we have a lot of different opportunities to do that within the assignments that are being assigned. So, in social studies, providing a project, and a project that allows students to demonstrate the learning, not necessarily check off tasks on a to-do list. So we need you to show that you understand how, say in social studies, how the government of Canada helps citizens. So one person can do a very in-depth study on how the government helps citizens on a specific issue, whereas another student might do less complex study based on what they might be working on.

Speaker 1: 18:30

So while my early finisher or my gifted and talented student can really dig in and give me a big, in-depth assignment, other students might do less, and I'm expecting somewhere in the middle and I will mark accordingly. So when you structure some of the assignments and the tasks in your classroom so that they are more open-ended, they are more available for students to challenge themselves and push themselves and really work to their full potential at all times. It's going to mean a less need or a reliance on, say, tasks that require students to do the early finishers. I'm not constantly struggling with early finishers because there isn't a task that's being finished. They know that the next task is just going to follow right up after them. So there's always that continual learning, that continual assignment that is happening so that students can know exactly what's to effect, and it reduces the motivation of just to finish it, because they know I'm going to be focused on the best quality work over the completeness of and the number of assignments that they are able to complete.

Speaker 1: 19:41

Early finishers is definitely a challenge in most classrooms and it is something that we have to deal with. But when we recognize the type of early finishers we have in our room, we recognize what is motivating them, as to why they're finishing so early, what conditions are allowing that to happen, and we address those versus just giving them something to do to keep busy. It's going to mean that we are better and more capable of handling early finishers in a much more effective way, so that it becomes less of an issue overall in our room. Thanks so much for joining us. We'll see you next time.