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    Joined: Feb 2014
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    I was reading the news about our district's new AIG plan, and it states that there will be more "push in" services vs. the "pull out" model they have been using. Our older DD gets pulled out currently with other designated AIG kids. From what I read, "push in" sounds like the AIG teacher will co-teach with the regular grade school teacher. Has anyone heard of this? Reviews please!!

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    Our school started this model a few years ago, at least in the middle school (don't know about elementary anymore...)

    Pros- the push-in units are generally fun, creative, better than what they would be doing in regular class. They tend to be group projects where the group competes with other groups in the class, or sometimes in several classes, so those who enjoy competition enjoy it, and it helps motivate some kids.

    Cons- definitely not an adequate replacement for pull-outs. However, our pull-ours are weak, and our kids haven't really cared much (they still do pull-outs, just not as many or as often). Also, the groups are often chosen by the teacher, and our kids seem to often get the least desirable (to them) team job, usually the scribe who has to record everything. There are various roles, which is definitely helpful in pointing out how different kids have different strengths (there is usually a talking role, one who gets to move around the room, often one who has to do calculations, etc). Sometimes our kids have been in more of a leadership role, which depending on your kid can be good.

    Overall, my daughter kind of liked the chance to direct her own little team; it played to her people/leadership skills. She definitely liked the more flexible use of classroom time. My son was usually frustrated; he describes these activities with scorn as "those projects where the goal is for everyone to compete to see who can make the most money." Actually, I don't think all the units have focused on making profit, but they are designed to be competitive, which my son does not enjoy. The team, team, team aspect can be difficult for some kids to put up with, particularly when teams are deliberately heterogeneous with regard to ability.

    Last edited by cricket3; 05/20/14 12:08 PM.
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    Children of different ability levels should be in different classrooms full time.

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    Originally Posted by 22B
    Children of different ability levels should be in different classrooms full time.

    Or at home where you can always make this a reality. For some people they need to work with what they have, so while your statement is absolutely 100% correct, the unfortunate reality is that (as we all know far far too well) it's not the case.


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    Push in is actually a model for meeting the needs of different learners that is used quite effectively when addressing low-performing students. There is no obvious reason it should not be effective with certain high-performing students as well. But like all forms of differentiation, there is usually a point at which the range of students is too wide for the extremes to benefit.

    As a blanket principle, placing children of different ability levels in different classrooms full time presents philosophical challenges to our ideal of a caste-less, multicultural, diverse society. Which, of course, is one of the ongoing tensions of gifted programming in general.


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    Last year, my DD was in 3rd grade and the school was using a push-in model for GT (in 1st and 2nd grade it had been pull-out). I thought at the time it was a dismal failure. This year we got a new GT teacher who seemed open to parent involvement so I volunteered once a week to help with 4th grade GT kids, and it was back to the pull-out model. I also helped file student paperwork in the regular classroom and got a sense of the abilities of her classmates.

    Things I noticed:

    Not all the GT kids struck me as really GT. There are 25 kids ID'd as GT out of 87 4th graders - almost 29% of her grade?! And yet, based on classroom work I saw as well as knowing some kids outside of school, there were some kids not in GT who I thought could be. I'm not privy to testing details.

    The classroom teacher was cooperative about the pull-outs but I could tell she was not happy about them. Sometimes the class would be in the middle of a fun, interactive hands-on activity, and I hated pulling the GT kids away from something like that because that's exactly the kind of stuff I think they should be doing. (So I wasn't the most efficient volunteer sometimes.)

    The pull-out activities were engaging, but not at all connected to what the class was doing, so the GT kids were doing extra, unrelated work in addition to whatever they were missing in class.

    Because of the high number of GT kids, each kid might have gotten 10 minutes of face time with the GT teacher every 3-4 weeks. In this case, pull-out was really not an enriching experience except for what each kid did on their own time working on their GT project.

    I know that last year with the push-in model, my DD didn't see any distinction in being GT because in her eyes there was nothing different being done for GT kids vs. non-ID'd GT kids. This year, she definitely felt there was a difference.

    The GT teacher signed up the school for a math competition, and it was open to anyone who wanted to do it, GT or not. 3 out of 8 of the Honorable Mention winners in DD's grade were not GT kids. And I know the parents of those 3 are not hot-housing parents.

    So I'm left with mixed feelings about push-in vs pull-out, at least the version that exists in our school. Our school district had an external review regarding how our gifted services measured up to the state regulations, and was found deficient in programming, evaluation, accountability, and personnel (honestly no surprise there).

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    Originally Posted by cricket3
    Pros- the push-in units are generally fun, creative, better than what they would be doing in regular class. They tend to be group projects where the group competes with other groups in the class, or sometimes in several classes, so those who enjoy competition enjoy it, and it helps motivate some kids.
    Problem I would see with this if it was for my son. Fun GROUP activities are a difficult for my son. He struggles with the social interaction and they don't really challenge him intellectually. He doesn't enjoy the competition. It is not what he would need from a GT program. It's not clear this really addresses what a child really needs.

    When my DD was in 5th grade the new resource teacher decided that rather than pull out the kids, she would work in class with the two kids that needed extra help. Problems with this were that she her schedule had her helping in math time, both kids needed help in language arts. And two it made it even more obvious to the other kids who was getting help for what.

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    It may be driven by cost-effectiveness, just plain old budget cuts.

    I think the teachers also are in a different paradigm. Their work environment, work reality, constraints are so different (aren't they) from the environments that the gifted children will work in.

    I think their utopian or arcadian model might be for society's personal / non-work life.

    I don't think they have been in work environments where everyone is working very hard 24 / 7, 365, consistently at a very high level and enjoying it.

    People seem to understand and support the athletes in the Olympics, but it never translates for the mentally gifted people. They don't really support the type of achievement that we are capable of. They are not impressed by our academic Olympics. (Huge problem for gifted people. Insert your own humor here.)

    Honestly, the topics we are interested in are so different from anything that the non-gifted people want to explore.

    So, as soon as your gifted child is mature enough for college, college is probably the best answer and not one of those party schools where you wonder, Did you ever see that person study?


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    So push-in is always group activities? Why? I don't get it. (I have no experience with push-ins, either as a child or parent)

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    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.

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