Tag: Gifted

Is Compacting the Answer?

There are a number of things that the average classroom teacher must deal with regardless of location and circumstance.  We have our state or national government telling us what students in our class must master to graduate, we have mandates from our districts for what is going on in our classroom, and we have (for the most part) increased student populations creating and overwhelming amount of children per classroom.  With the vast number of things that are increasing the pressure on teachers as well as trying to work with struggling kids, providing for children with learning disabilities, and entertain students in ways we never thought we would have to how to we find time for everything?  Is it possible that compacting curriculum could ease the pressure on the classroom teacher by allowing the gifted learners the opportunity to achieve higher while allowing the struggling learner the opportunity to have more time and attention from the teacher?

Compacting

Compacting is the idea that we pretest the students in our classrooms before each unit to see what they know and do not know about the upcoming material.  If a student struggles with the material (as most should since you haven’t taught this yet) they move at the same pace you would normally teach.  If a student can show aptitude that meets your definition of mastery you would compact their curriculum.  All this means is that the student would not need to be retaught all the things they already know, but would be given an individual enrichment project based on their individual interests that they would work on while the rest of the class learns the material they have already mastered.  If a child masters certain topics but not others you would have them work on their project only during the concepts they have not yet mastered.

I can almost hear complaints from where I sit typing this out right now.  This seems like a logistical nightmare.  Kids wandering everywhere doing something or another while you are trying to hold class for the kids that need to learn.  The bottom line is that there will not be a significant amount of children being compacted at a given time.  If more than a handful of kids have mastered concepts you are about to teach them, you might think about upping the rigor of your class rather than compact them all.  Some classes may have a few kids while some may have zero children being compacted.  If a child who has had their curriculum compacted decides to distract the class instead of working on their individual project, they can come on back and work on the stuff they have already mastered for the day.  You can then talk with them about the choice they made and they can decide to choose to work on a project that works them in a way that will not distract the class or they can be bored out of their minds while they relearn old material.

Putting it into practice

I’ll be honest when I say that I have not tried this out in my classroom…yet.  I’m going to try it out with one student this upcoming school year and really try and keep great records on how things go.  I want to prove to myself that this can work and that it’s what’s best for the students in my classroom.  I’m excited by the opportunity and I’ll try and report back on what is going on with the lucky child.

Summer Plans

The end of the school year is here.  This was signaled by the 6th grade taking their annual field trip.  In previous years we’ve gone to a roller skating rink, but since the past few years we’ve had some fairly major injuries we decided to take them to a local water park.  My comment was that now we’re trading possibility of serious injury for the possibility of drowning a middle school kid, but everything went fine.  With the end of the school year, my brain automatically starts to plan for summer break and what I’m going to do with my time (outside of family time, which is a given).

  • Planning for our pilot project next year.  A few teachers on my campus are going to be trying standards based grading as well as some other parts in Mark Barnes’ book Role Reversal.  We’re going to be meeting soon after summer begins to try and plan for next year and see how we can support each other through this major transition in the way we teach.
  • Getting ready for Confratute.  I’m going to be heading to the University of Connecticut in July for some training in gifted education.  There are a number of things that need to be planned.  I need to read up on the course options for my time there as well as some sights to see on my days after.  I also need to figure out how I can help Haley to be successful since she’ll have a four month old and this will be the longest we have ever been apart from each other since we’ve been married.
  • Updating my reading list.  I’ve done my best to collect an overwhelming amount of books to be reading over the summer about a variety of topics.  At the beginning of putting this list together I was trying to borrow as many as I could, but I’m running into a few books that I had to order.  Some reviews to come (assuming I read as much as I plan on this summer)

I also have a number of projects that need to happen around my house this summer.  It should be a busy summer and hopefully a productive summer.  Any ideas for any other ways I can fill up my short summer break?

Reflecting on Paternity Leave

I head back to my classroom tomorrow.  It’ll be a bittersweet day in that I’ll have to leave my baby girl at home, but I will head back to my kids who I have missed.  As I look back on my plans for paternity leave, I wonder if I could have done better with my plans.

My plan for paternity leave was to have my kids produce an end of the year project where they created their own country.  It included all of the themes and skills that we have been building on throughout the year.  They had to place their newly formed country in a body of water that was not already occupied by land.  They needed to understand how their location would affect their climate and in turn how that would affect their economy.  They needed to choose a government for their country and understand how it would affect their people.  They had to invent a flag for their nation as well as an anthem for their country.  After they created all these elements they had to reflect on how all their decisions would shape their country and how their culture would form.  All in all, I think it’s a great concept for a project to wrap up the year and have the kids show off all the knowledge they have acquired over the course of a school year.

The problem I fear for this project is that I wasn’t there to help kids along.  The substitute teachers we employ are great people, but I’m not sure that they could help a struggling kid to recall certain things we’ve learned throughout the year.  I tried to leave hints and prompts for the sub to help remind my kids (who are GT level kids by the way) and I am hoping for the best.  I also wonder if it was the best thing for the students.  The best is for me to be in the classroom, but given the fact that I was going to be absent for two weeks was this the best I could have done?  I guess I’ll find out tomorrow as I return and see what they have produced.

If anyone has any advice for such long-term plans and how to continue to push kids while not directly being in the classroom I would love to hear from you.

Confratute Bound

Yesterday evening I got confirmation that I received a scholarship to go to the University of Connecticut’s Confratute.  Better yet I found out that one of my colleagues also got a scholarship to go as well so I’ll have some company.  I really can’t wait for this opportunity to network with people in the education field and to attend such a highly regarded professional learning event.

As I did the first time I heard the name, you might be thinking what is a ‘confratute?’  Taken straight from their website:

“Confratute is a combined CONFerence, and an instiTUTE with a lot of FRATernity in between. Confratute is geared toward providing educators with research-based practical strategies for engagement and enrichment learning for all students, as well as meeting the needs of gifted and talented students.”

Speaking from the perspective of a gifted and talented teacher, if this event can live up to what it claims it could be revolutionary to my growth as a teacher.  I don’t doubt that any of these claims are true based on the people that I’ve talked to that have been and rave about this program.  Oddly enough, I’m also really looking forward to the atmosphere of living on a college campus for a week and spending time getting to know others attending.

Speaking as an outsider looking in, there are some things about the confratute that I’m struggling to understand.  I’m trying to understand the schedule for the week, but it’s not the most user friendly thing to look over.  There are tons of classes, but there are also references to a strand that we’ll take so I’m not sure exactly what my schedule will look like for the week.  I’m also relatively uneasy about driving through the Connecticut countryside, but with my trusty iPhone I’m sure everything will go fine.

I’m not worried in the least and I’m anticipating what valuable resources I can learn from such an event.  Did I mention I’ve never been to the state of Connecticut?  This is going to be an awesome experience!

Gifted, Prepared, or Well Funded

Being labeled ‘gifted’ is always a desire for students as well as their parents.  Who wouldn’t want to have their child labeled as gifted by their school district?  It’s affirmation by the educated in your community that your child is ‘smarter’ than the rest of the children in their school.  Often people focus on the good aspects of being gifted and not the difficulties, but that will need to be saved for another post.  Is every child labeled ‘gifted’ truly gifted?  And if they are truly ‘gifted’ at one point in their life should they be labeled ‘gifted’ forever, or does our gifted-ness change through time?  By no means do I have answers to all these questions, but I’m starting to see some commonalities.

What is considered ‘gifted’?

There is a ton of debate over what should be considered ‘gifted’ versus ‘good student’ or ‘smart’.  In the state of Texas, “no more than five percent of a district’s average daily attendance are eligible for funding”, but funding does not always equal the total number of students in a program.  Currently I work at a school of approximately 800 kids, and I have 57 gifted kids in my classroom every day.  Simple math tells you that I have seven percent of my school’s daily attendance in my classroom every day, and I teach one subject and one grade level.  Does that mean that mean that there are an abnormally high number of ‘gifted’ students in my district or that we may have set the bar too low?  Or could there be other things at work?

Other possibilities.

Is it possible that what we consider a test that measures the gifted-ness of our students is actually just another test that we can teach to?  I would say yes.  Teachers, by nature, are a breed of humans that strive to have their children succeed. We want our students to do the best they possibly can.  We do this by researching both the tendencies of our students as well as the tendencies of the test.  We know our students from getting to know them and by both formative as well as summative assessments throughout the year.  The test will take us a little while to figure out, but sooner than later we figure out the heart of a test and better equip our students to conquer it.  People call this various things like “teaching to the test” but who wouldn’t if your job was on the line?  But while teachers are out for the best interest of their students, there are others that take advantage of the desire to see children succeed.  In this case people are making serious money off the ability to teach to the test.  In some cases, the same company who is producing the tests is also supplying the textbooks to teach the students as well as private study materials (see here).  In essence these companies are making money three different ways and one of them is by teaching kids strategies to test as gifted!  I’m in favor of gifted education and having tests that can measure giftedness, but I doubt the spirit of giftedness is being taught how to beat the test by the makers of the test.  The other problem with this is that it caters to wealthier children.  Only those who have disposable income can afford to have their children how to do well on tests or buy supplemental books or classes.  While I would concede that your home life is the biggest contributor to success in school, is it possible that the size of your family’s check book is a contributor as well?

Summary

In the end this mini-rant is not going to change the process of how we label students as gifted.  What it will take to have something like this happen is a generation of people who want what’s best for kids…all kids.  We need to realize that just because our children are not labeled ‘gifted’ does not mean that we have failed them as parents.  Is it possible that a kid can go through their life in regular education and live a happy, fulfilled life?  Absolutely.  Somewhere along the way we have misunderstood happiness and success as what level of classes my student is taking in high school.  Hopefully, we can better understand our own kids well enough as well as the big business world looking to make a buck off of their situation in life and take a couple of deep breaths.  Is being gifted an indicator or success, maybe on some small level, but there are a billion other indicators that matter just as much or more.