Students work at different paces. Let them.

By November, I've generally established a positive, authentic class culture in which everyone is working as a team to learn a difficult subject.  This class culture will look different for different teachers, different school ecosystems.  Point is, now the class clowns have been brought into the fold or at least neutralized; the folks who'd rather whine or lawyer up than learn have similarly changed their priorities - or left the class.  

So we're doing a lot of laboratory work and problem solving in class now, and for the remainder of the school year.  A typical class day starts with a 3-5 minute quiz, after which students work on a list of activities.  Each activity must be checked with me for completeness and correctness.  A typical day's "order of work" might look like:

• One position-time exercise
• Experimental graphs worksheet
• Power in a bulb exercise
• Test 2 corrections
• Test 3 corrections
• Two more position-time exercises complete
• Two circuit graphing exercises complete
• “Graph that motion” interactive

And this list might be substantially unchanged for a week or two.  This is "teaching like a video game" - students feel like they level up when they complete each item in the list.

The question I'm often asked is, how do I handle the class when some students are on level 8, but others are on level 2?

Remember - I'm comfortable with our class culture and that each student is working in good faith.  I must support a student who took two days to finish a single position-time exercise and is now struggling with the graphs worksheet, the same way I support the student who, in those same two days, is nearing the end of the list.  They're both working at their respective ability levels.

Firstly, I can subtly slow down fast students and speed up slow students.  I don't mean artificially!  A student who is good at physics and does everything right should be allowed and encouraged to proceed quickly through the order of work.  But after the first 20 minutes, I'll probably be a bit more exacting about the standard of evidence a fast student presents me; and I'm more likely to let a slower student move along despite minor errors of reasoning.  

Next, since we've built a good team atmosphere, a faster student often slows down naturally.  Everyone knows that the price of my assistance on a problem is to pay it forward - the next person who needs help on that problem gets sent to the student I helped previously.  Helping classmates takes time!  It's time extraordinarily well-spent, because teaching others is the best way to learn physics.  Fast students often recognize how much they're learning by teaching, and so keep teaching.  Or, they get a nice ego boost by being the go-to person for their classmates.  Sometimes deep friendships are built around in-class collaboration, as physics can be a great social leveler - the universe doesn't care how socially cool or uncool you are, just whether your predictions are right.  Helping classmates is good for physics achievement, but it's also kind, friendly, and the right thing to do.

But in the end, I'm always gonna have a few folks who, comparatively, barely make progress.  That's okay.  At some point, the class moves on to new material - at which point, my order of work resets to new activities.  It's important that I do NOT insist that everyone finish every activity!  

I prioritize test corrections - these absolutely must be finished. And I'll bring in students to extra help time, or assign corrections as homework, to meet this goal.  For everything else, though, we just move on when it's time to move on.  Some students will have finished everything.  They will have been given a next-level challenge, or just allowed to do work for other classes while they wait for their classmates to catch up.  Others may barely progress, because they're bogged down in corrections, or in an exercise that's just not clicking.  No worries!  Not everyone even got to level 8 in Super Mario 3, let alone beat the level.  Not everyone makes the state playoff final.  We move on - to the next sports season, to the next Mario release.  

The stated goal for all students is that they work hard, take care of each other, and get better every day.  Nothing in there about the pace of their work.  As long as students are meeting these three goals, they get as much done as they can, without complaint from me.