As a new school year arrives and new students enter your class your goal is to build lifelong learners by raising the bar, teaching higher order thinking skills, and embrace those teachable moments. It can be overwhelming to sort through the multitude of teacher manuals available to you in reaching these goals. How are you going to deliver all this information successfully to every individual learner in your classroom so that he/she retains every necessary detail?
This course is designed to help you meet the curriculum needs of one segment of your class – your gifted students. Many of you participating in this course may not have students who are identified as gifted, but by the time we come to the end, you may discover many students have hidden gifts.
Using the Sunshine State Standards and the National Association of Gifted Children (NAGC), Gifted Education Standards as your foundation, you will be introduced to strategies to help you modify, extend, expand, and elaborate upon the required curriculum. These strategies you will learn over the next eight weeks are designed to motivate, excite, stimulate, and inspire gifted students to access their higher level thinking skills by utilizing their strengths. Students will work at a comfortable yet rigorous pace, and successfully learn!
To better understand the rationale behind gifted education you will be exploring our Sunshine State Standards, those standards established for the gifted by the NAGC, and the language that guides educators as they strive to develop curriculum for the gifted. Sunshine State Standards. Retrieved September 11, 2007, from Your Florida Department of Education and Gifted Education Standards Retrieved September 10, 2007, from National Association for Gifted Children.
Believe it or not, you as the teacher of gifted learners are empowered by a legal document called an Educational Plan (EP). As per Florida State Law, every child who is gifted shall have an EP developed by a committee and that EP will be revised every three years for students in grades K – 8, and every four years for students in grades 9 – 12. Some districts have stricter guidelines, check with your county's policies.
Why do gifted students need a special program? They are bright so they should be able to handle the classroom work easily, serve as role models for other students, assist their peers when specific challenges arise, and keep themselves independently motivated if they finish their work early. In an ideal, perfect world, this would be true, however, some are satisfied to find ways to just “get by” or go to the opposite end, perfectionism, where they never complete anything because perfect is a state that can never be attained. All gifted students need curriculum that will enable them to make academic gains.
Dr. Joseph Renzulli, Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Connecticut, is a leader in research for the Gifted and Talented. He explains the phenomenon labeled gifted quite clearly, “...there are two kinds of giftedness: Academic Giftedness, and Creative-Productive Giftedness. Both of these types of giftedness, as well as the numerous occasions on which they interact, should be encouraged in special programs and opportunities created for their development.” Renzulli, Joseph S., Equality, Excellence, and Economy in a System for Identifying Students in gifted Education Programs: A Guidebook Executive Summary. Retrieved September 10, 2007, from Neag Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development.
As you complete the following required reading for this first week of Curriculum Development for the Gifted, you will have a better understanding of why we need special programs for our gifted learners and, more importantly, why a differentiated curriculum is a must to best meet the educational needs of these unique and diverse students.