Berlin - School Report Question and Answers

Totally teacher dependent. My children tried to do a math differential placement, which for one of them was sort of OK, offered mild challenge, but for the other, with another teacher, was just awful. Mercifully we had teachers who were willing to offer differentiated instruction to our kids. One of them also suggested that we accelerate one of our kids a grade, which we declined for social/peer reasons. That said, the age-range of classes tends to be bigger. Rather than instruct to a particular age-group/individually differentiating, there is a lot more openness to just accelerating a kid, so the age-bracket of students within a classroom can be big, with academically gifted kids just being moved up. That wasn't going to work for us knowing that we'd be transferring out, so we had to figure out alternative ways to keep the challenge up. Thankfully we had really supportive teachers for this. I do not take that for granted, but I also cannot say that all teachers will be willing to do that. - Sep 2018

Noted above. - Oct 2015