Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy List of tips to schools to help gifted students

There are so many good suggestions, I'm not sure I can make any new ones. I particularly like from HowlerKarma & indigo.

-- Don't assume that "high potential" = "high achievement."

-- If a child is "bored" this is not a statement against you, personally, and does not call for retaliation.

-- For industrious and energetic bright youngsters, differentiation via more work than classmates MIGHT be appropriate-- but it is rarely so for truly gifted children, and the higher the level of cognitive ability, the LESS appropriate it is to add repetition.

-- Another tip may be to realize that children may develop asynchronously, and to teach a child at his/her level of readiness and ability in each area.

And a book might be a perfectly fine book to read, answer questions about, analyze and enjoy for every single kid in the class. But for a gifted kid it might be an hour or two worth of work and for the rest of the class it is a huge 3 week novel study. My son considers these "novels" fine to read but more like a short story to him. (Example...Stone Fox)

How true. While requisite formal education may be lacking, there is an abundance of material which could serve as curriculum.

Starting places may include articles on the Davidson Database, lists of books on Hoagies Gifted Education Page, the Davidson Educators' Guild, and publishers such as Great Potential Press, Prufrock Press, free spirit publishing, and Gifted Education Press.

The problem with this is that schools will group by performance not ability and often by the weakest skill. So your gifted child could still end up in the wrong class due to not writing fast enough to complete the test or not being good at creative writing or group work. I would prefer they grouped by subject and need rather than the results of one test as often happened when I was a kid.

Agreed! Kiddos can easily have different readiness/ability in different areas.

Flexible cluster grouping by readiness and ability, in each subject area, across grade levels, and without regard to chronological age, may make it logistically easier for educators to teach, while learners benefit from receiving an appropriate challenge with their peers.

Results from tests such as MAP (Measures of Academic Progress) could be utilized as a datapoint in creating flexible cluster groups.

Within each flexible cluster grouping, differentiation may be effective.

Lots of thoughts about differentiation on this thread... reminded me of this old post. To express this information in the format of tips for schools:

Another tip may be to describe plainly, with transparency and accountability, what a child will receive in terms of gifted programming, content, and delivery. When describing "gifted programming", do not attempt to mask any lack of an appropriate level of teaching, curriculum, or services by using buzzwords. To manage expectations, openly provide details such as Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How (the 5Ws).

Another tip may be: Don't be surprised if few gifted students are pleased with receiving differentiated task demands rather than instruction with more depth/breadth and/or at an accelerated/compacted pace, grouped with intellectual/academic peers.

There will never be a perfect way to assess ability, although there is room for improvement.

But it is so important to do this.

YES!!!!

This; so, so much.

Or not. Also allow for the kid who has highly developed literary taste and sensitivity, and disagrees with the teacher's opinions and choices.

Oh MegMeg...when I was a kid I wouldn't read a book about an animal before turning to the last page to see if said animal had been killed off or not. If the author killed the animal, I put the book down and found something else to read.

I looked through Newberry and Caldecott winners a couple years ago, and decided that they tend to be books that adults think kids should like, rather than books that kids themselves like.

But either way, I don't get the need to kill the dog.