THINGS YOU DID NOT KNOW ABOUT GIFTED STUDENTS

Gifted Students Need Support

Gifted students need supports just like musicians and athletes. They need to be guided by teachers who are trained and supported in providing gifted education. The gifted student needs to be continually challenged and supported to fully develop their talents. In a survey of teachers,it was found that 73% of teachers believe that the brightest students are bored and under-challenged in school (Fordham Institute...

GIFTED STUDENTS LEARN DIFFERENTLY

Gifted students learn differently and require special education supports in order to grow academically and achieve their potential. This includes:

• Appropriate identification
• Academic field exploration with the field and study in-depth learning
• Accelerated and enriched academically challenging curriculum
• Instruction tailored to unique abilities and needs, interests and learning styles
• Opportunities to use and develop their creativity.
• Persistent and...

HOW DO I KNOW MY CHILD IS GIFTED?

In my experience, there is not a grandparent in the world who is not convinced that their grandchildren are gifted. To listen to them, that giftedness is present in just about 98% of all children born. While such protestations make for great familial comraderie, I fear that the testamonials will not suffice for inclusion in an AP Program. So, let's see what the legislature has to say about the gifted child.

The current Elementary and Secondary...

THE STATE OF GIFTED EDUCATION

UNDERFUNDED AND INAPPROPRIATELY ADMINISTERED

Gifted Students come from all economic, racial, ethnic, and cultural populations and constitute 3.2 million school children or 6% of the school population. Gifted students perform at higher levels than their same-aged peers in one or more domains. They require access to appropriate learning opportunities, modifications to their educational instruction, social and emotional support, and guidance to develop their talent...

20 QUESTIONS

PARENTS SHOULD ASK AT THE IEP

If I hear just one more time how cute or how polite my son is I may never recover from the screaming meemies that will immediately descend upon me. It is wonderful that you recognize his cuteness but his cuteness will not improve his functional reading skills, or his social competency, or any of the myriad of other challenges he has in order to become a functioning independent adult.

There are two things that a parent absolutely must make sure are...

DEFINING MEASURABLE GOAL COMPONENTS

If you have a student with an IEP you have read lots of goals, but do you have any idea about how appropriate a given goal is? Will this goal lead to any functional outcomes or is this just one more exercise in frustration? So how can I tell that the goal is a good goal for my child?

Before anything is considered as a goal, it is important to recognize what specific skill is being addressed. That specific skill is not one of the umbrella terms of reading,...

SMARTER GOALS – R

RESEARCH/EVIDENCE-BASED METHODS SHOULD BE USED.

 
So why the emphasis on research/evidence based methods or programs? If you google something like "teach phonics step by step" you will have a mere 1,460,000 responses to plow through and figure out which ones work and which ones do not. The advantage one has with research based programming is that the program has been shown to be effective over time with multiple students. There are also programs designed...

SMARTER GOALS - E

EVALUATION OF THE DATA MUST BE DEFINED AND REVIEWED BY THE TEAM WITH READJUSTMENTS TO THE IEP BASED ON THAT DATA. IF THE DATA IS NOT RELEVANT OR SPECIFIC ENOUGH THE IEP OUTCOMES WILL SUFFER AND CHANGES ARE “BEST GUESSES” VS DATA-DRIVEN.

 When determining what data will be collected and what evaluations will be done, it is the specificity of that information that allows the iep to go from an incompetent legally sufficient document to one that can have...

SMARTER GOALS - TEACH

TEACHING MUST  BE INDIVIDUALIZED WITH SDIs & RELATED SERVICES

Special Education is specially designed instruction (SDI's)and the related services needed by the child to benefit from that instruction according to the US Dept of Education.

Instructional Aids, Services, Supports, and Strategies  (SDIs and SAS)

Supplementary Aids and Services (SAS)  

SAS means Aids, Services, And Other Supports that are provided in general education classes, other...

SMARTER GOALS – R

GOALS MUST BE RELEVANT TO CURRICULUMS: General/Core, Modified, Expanded, & Functional

• General Education - Core Curriculum - Subject centered
  • Use of State Standards or Common Core Standards²
• Modified Core Curriculum - Subject centered
  • Based on ability and priorities
  • Use of transitional IEP development
• Expanded (Functional) Core Curriculum - Problem centered

• Includes General or Modified Core Curriculum
• Based on special skills needed due to a...