Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment NYC Private Elementary Schools to Drop Test

I'm probably among the people who believes that, based on what I've seen locally and in my state, which has a fairly generous identification protocol, and nothing beyond it to differentiate, say, PG students from those who are the 92nd percentile.

Many administrators here genuinely believe (or have said to ME that they believe it, anyway) that there is "no real difference" between those two students.

While I agree that those students who are operating at a high level of achievement/performance among agemates deserve an appropriate education just as much as those who are HG+, I don't necessarily think that they have the SAME needs.

Personally, I think that is just as ridiculous as claiming that there is "no difference" among learning disabled children with low academic potential. There are clearly children that belong in mainstream classrooms, some who probably require pullouts for specialized instructional time, and those whose needs are best served in full-time programs.

MY ideal for gifted educational practices looks very much like Special Education. I'd be fine CALLING it that, come to think of it, because in my mind there really isn't any difference in terms of how "out of the box" education needs to be for a student in the 2nd percentile versus those in the 98th.


Ideally, both groups would get their needs met. Also ideally, neither group would be taking up so much time and energy from a frazzled classroom teacher who is trying to keep 30 children learning within their individual, proximal zones, either. Let's just be realistic-- it DOES make it far harder for a classroom teacher to have a 'spread' of abilities that ranges from 98th to 5th percentile. It's way more productive to have children placed in a classroom that spans one or two standard deviations in ability, which is why I am a huge fan of ability grouping and flexible tracking (maybe even by subject/skill).

Unfortunately some may be content to know these kids are both "above the ceiling" of certain tests/assessments/measures, and do not look any further to distinguish. By analogy, among kids considered tall, some kids are pretty tall and some may be really, really tall like a professional basketball player therefore may need a different size of desk or chair to sit in class.

Agreed!

Yes! A collection of success stories from which parents may choose examples to present as positive societal norms, when advocating... may establish a new societal norm... rather than the current reality of insufficient meeting of the needs of gifted students?

I'm curious if anyone has seen this done. My DD attends a full-day gifted magnet and one of its flaws is that there is very little tracking or grouping within the magnet. (They did do two groups for math once, but that's all I know of.) Interestingly, my DS attends the SAME school but is not in the magnet (he is in K and the magnet starts in 2), and he is ability grouped. I suspect they do not group the GT kids because parents might flip their lids about it, but that's just a theory.

How does the grouping manifest - in DS gifted school they read at their levels and supposedly get homework in reading spelling and math tailored to their assessed levels. But since parents aren't comparing homework sets how do you know they are doing different work? Having a math class move faster is apparently a very touchy subject with the parents but they do have it in the upper grades, but not for anything else, which is kind of disappointing..

DeHe

At a local private Gifted school with which I am knowledgeable, they accept only 95+% (WISC) and each grade is grouped in 4 levels PK-K. Groupings are done separately for Math and Reading. Beginning in the 1st grade, 2 grade-levels participate in grouping together allowing for a total of 8 differentiated placements. That arrangement was the best we have had for appropriate curriculum for our 2e PG guy. Unfortunately his "2e" was labeled bad behavior before we understood what was going on and the classroom became so damaging he was literally pulling his hair out.

The local public is very one-size-fits-all gifted. I sure wish we could have our Gifted School academics with the age-appropriate level of physical activity of our public plus the appropriate accommodations for his disabilities that we found at neither.

I don't think it can work so well when you row and file desks with thirty kids facing front. This year in the GT program, the teacher sees the individual variations and gives DS direct support on writing stuff, extra harder math challenges, and access to some move at your own pace online coursework. There are less than twenty in the class.

When it comes down to it, I think it is unfettered teacher skill with adequate professional development that can make it happen.

and
Agreed. Unfortunately parental pride gone amuck may be the nemesis of gifted ed, thwarting cluster grouping by readiness and ability, and creating one-size-fits-all rather than appropriate curriculum and pacing. Associating prestige and anticipated future success purely with advanced academics may tend to discount equally or more important aspects of what the child is learning: such as grit-vs-entitlement, growth-vs-fixed mindset, ethics-vs-cheating/gaming the test, a propensity toward sense of humor or defensiveness, and myriad other things observed in various human interactions, contemplated about what is experienced by self and others as a result of how the system operates, and honed in the child's own emerging sense of equality/fairness/equity.

When the preponderance of parents can accept multiple definitions of success and multiple paths to successes, they may be less focused on competition (undermining, excluding, or elbowing someone else's child out of position as a means to advance their own). When kids can try one level of math, move down to another, or even up a level, then freely determine at which level they are most comfortable with both the overall challenge and the balance in their lives with other interests, they are learning to take responsibility for their learning and shape their futures.

For a child to get a message that their self-worth is defined by their academic achievement, and/or their academic achievement relative to others, is a travesty. Many find the book A Parent's Guide to Gifted Children to be a helpful resource.

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Totally agree with this.

We are not in a gifted school, but in a public with very limited pull-outs. Despite this, we have had some very successful differentiation. The district does a lot of professional development and support in this area, and some of the teachers have been wonderful. (We have also had a few who are not "on board" with differentiation- with the expected results).

The most successful things for our kids have been spelling- a program called words their way, which uses a pre-test and sorts kids into leveled groups. What made it work for us, though, was the teacher recognizing that DS and 2 others were beyond the program and offering them lists with Greek and Latin roots, and vocabulary instead.
We have had pretty good success with reading/writing as well- kids read their own choices and writing is often related to what they are reading. (Example- one year DS's class had to write a weekly book letter to the teacher where they had to answer at least 3 questions or prompts from a list; the teacher would then answer each letter with appropriate responses, including questions for the kid to discuss in the next letter).
The times when the class reads one book all together have been the least successful- the format doesn't lend itself well to differentiation in my opinion, and things always seem to move at a snail' space.
Some of my kids classes have used an online site called Teenbiz- it's a non-fiction reading/writing support site. The kids take a pretest and are assigned via lexile level various articles each week; they complete activities such as answering comprehension or vocabulary questions or writing response questions which are evaluated by their teacher. My DD hated it, but this was because it was the first time she encountered anything close to "hard" in school.
Math is tougher- the best differentiation we had here was a teacher who grouped and re-grouped kids constantly, in small groups working together on variations of the same general idea (one group could be practicing finding area of a quadrilateral, while DD would be trying to derive the formula for area of a parallellogram, for instance). The nightly homework was basic, the same for everyone, but there was frequently a long-term challenge problem they were assigned with multiple parts, requiring some writing, they were expected to participate in an ongoing class blog about the challenge and give hints or advice to each other, etc. They also had to complete written "portfolios" at the end of each unit which involved fairly in-depth discussion questions, sections where they had to analyze any mistakes they made on the test and discuss, etc. Obviously these were done with varying levels of depth and thoroughness- my DD knew the teacher expected more from her and she worked hard at it.
All of this is greatly helped by what ZenScanner observes- the classes are not too big and the teachers are fantastic. Also, our school has lots and lots of support for struggling kids- there is an "extra help" period every day after school, and kids who need more intensive help are assigned to math and/or reading lab periods instead of some electives or study halls. In a few of our classrooms, there is an assigned special ed teacher in addition to the main teacher, to help facilitate everyone's needs. It requires a lot of flexibility and patience, and a tremendous amount of work from the teachers.

That sounds pretty great, cricket3!


I knew there were two math groups in DD's gifted class last year because the teacher told us. I think she just figured--get it out there. It was determined via pretest. Reading, spelling, and everything else have all been lockstep.

In my DS's case (he is in K--NOT in the gifted school yet), he is being differentiated through color-coded work presented in boxes. Much of their "work time" happens when they get sent to the boxes and work independently. DS and his classmates all know to look for the work with their colors on it. The box time is quite a long block of his day--75 minutes or something. Then he also has differentiated reading and math groups that meet with the teacher. So, as as a gen ed kid, he is far more differentiated than his sister.

DS has reading in his box but seems to me that the reading work is the same but applied to the different levels - like asking them to write so etching about the book they are reading but all are reading different levels. I guess that is differentiation but it's only in their reading boxes it doesn't extend to social studies or anything. But it seems to work.

DeHe