If I really knew the answer to this, I feel like I'd be making a lot more money.
However, I think you have to start with education. Administrators, teachers, specialists, EVERYONE needs to learn the basics for gifted education, including...
- How to recognize giftedness - with the understanding that all gifted kids are different, and some may not be easy to recognize.
- Understand the statistics on giftedness, with respect to level of giftedness. (This has to be spelled out, as in "Statistically speaking, you will probably only see ____ highly gifted kids in a 20 year career.")
- The challenges gifted kids face in the classroom. I think it helps to present this information with case studies to showcase the range of issues students face and how this may present in different ways (including 2E kids).
- Various effective methods for helping gifted kids in the system - subject or grade acceleration, in-class differentiation, cluster grouping, etc. This should be presented with successful and unsuccessful case studies to help schools understand the complexities of each method. Also present various effective methods of differentiation so teachers can choose methods that will work best for both themselves and their students.
- The idea that
each student deserves to make roughly one year of progress in each subject every year!
How do you spread these ideas? I'd like to think that undergraduate and graduate education programs would step up, but even if they did, current faculty need to be given this information too. One idea I'd suggest is contacting professionals that deal with giftedness and see if they would be willing to provide some
in school professional development for the faculty (make it really easy for the teachers to attend). Realize that you might have to raise money for this, but most states require quite a bit of PD (our state requires 60 hrs/year!), so teachers are often very happy for the help in meeting this requirement.
Honestly, it's a big shift in thinking & will probably take a long time. I'm not sure that such a big change can occur before our children are out of the system. Wish I had a magic answer! But if I did, I can assure you that you'd already know it, because I'd be shouting it from every mountaintop I could find!
