How to advocate in this situation?
1) Stay closely aligned with your child's thoughts and level of happiness about:
- whether he learned anything new in school that day,
- whether he wants to learn something new (open to anything, or interested in learning more in a particular area),
- whether he perceives there are other children in similar circumstances (potential intellectual/academic peer group),
- what causes him to believe he would be seen as too different from his classmates if he asked for more challenging work (what someone has said or done to give him this impression)
2) Learn from the teacher(s) what the "more challenging work" would consist of. For example, would he be learning something new in a small group or cluster of same-age or older children, would he be self-taught, engaged in independent study, or be expected to complete more difficult and/or time-consuming homework to earn the same grade? Would he be tutoring other children? What would he experience?
3) Document
4) Manage your expectations about what has been known to be occurring in the education of the gifted, including the unfortunate requirement that children must too often make a
choice between meeting academic/intellectual needs -or- meeting social needs.
5) Here is a
roundup on advocacy, including links to crowd-sourced tips for meeting prep.
