Instructional Pacing

What is pacing?

Pacing is the purposeful acceleration or deceleration of instruction. Rigor remains a constant consideration whether students are provided more or less time in mastering content standards. Most educators would agree that pacing alone is insufficient. Student achievement must also be impacted by a number of other factors, including: content rigor, alignment to assessments, and time attending to task acquisition. Recently, there has been a renewed interest in the pacing of lessons combined with the attention of instructors and students on Academic Learning Time. This model condenses all opportunities for learning into ever-decreasing units of time as measured by student engagement and teacher response.

What to consider when differentiating instruction

Accelerating instruction benefits learners who do well learning at a fast pace. For example, some students with special needs work well with shorter, intense periods of instruction interwoven throughout the day. For some advanced the pacing acceleration could be reflected in either the completion of grade level course work in less time (that is a one-year course completed in a semester) or the advancement of a learner from their grade-level standards to the subsequent grade-level content.

Decelerating instruction provides more time to interact with the content or lengthier time to practice skills. For students experiencing difficulty in an academic discipline, the same content might be extended over a period of time for additional reinforcement of challenging concepts. Planning for extra time to master content can aid English learners who may need additional time for processing linguistic aspects associated with the content.

Resources

Academic Learning Time (ALT)
http://chiron.valdosta.edu/whuitt/col/process/ALT.html (outside link)
This webpage provides an research-supported overview of Academic Learning Time: the result of many decisions about how time is spent in schools and classrooms.

California Department of Education - Curriculum Frameworks
http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/cr/cf/allfwks.asp (outside link)
Each of the curriculum frameworks contains a section on Universal Access, addressing instructional pacing as one of the considerations in differentiating instruction.

National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC)
http://www.nagc.org/index.aspx?id-978 (outside link)
NAGC works with educators, parents, and policymakers to support the needs of high-potential learners.