From the little research that has been done on the subject, it seems to show that while effective GT differentiation CAN be done in a push-in program, it most often isn't effective for multiple reasons, this too has been our experience.

1. The classroom teacher is often resistant as it creates more work for them, they take offense that they need "help" and they don't have the training to continue the differentiation without the presence of a trained GT teacher.
2. If a trained GT teacher is doing push-in as the main mode of service, they're often working with a half dozen or more teachers during the course of a semester. This results in an extraordinary amount of planning time needed, time that could be spent better serving students rather than collaborating.
3. The class that a student is currently taking at any given time when a trained GT teacher is doing a push-in may not be their area of strength. It doesn't do nearly as much for a student strong in math to have a push-in during English class when the focus is on writing and not math.

I'm certainly not saying the push-in shouldn't be a PART of a strong GT program. Certainly regular class teachers need to observe and learn about differentiation and implement it in the daily classes, however, the average regular class teacher has far too little training in differentiation to effectively do so.

The most difficult part for many school districts and students about a pull-out program is, how to schedule it. Most administrators aren't willing to pull a child out of a regular class room and "risk" them missing something that might be on a standardized test. They also hearing gnashing of teeth and grumbling from the regular class teacher about disruption when students are pulled from their class. Most K-8 students don't have a study hall, therefore, they must be missing another class in order to attend a GT pull-out class. There is no easy solution to this unfortunately without putting all GT kids in the same classes together (which some states won't allow according to state code) and pulling them out for individual subjects as needed.

Schools are going more and more to the push-in model not because it's more effective but simply because it's easier AND as is with our local school district, since GT has it's own special budget in our state, it's an effective way to put more teachers in the regular class room without adding to the budget. If you ask administration to give you the studies and data to support best practice of push-in GT programs or worse yet, co-teaching, they won't have that data....because there ISN'T ANY. In fact, not ONE study shows co-teaching results in higher test scores, not one study shows push-in programs have better results than pull-out programs (rather the opposite from my study on the matter), it's purely a matter of ease of operation for the school.

Last edited by Old Dad; 05/21/14 05:43 AM.