Gifted Education Pull-Out Programs Are Not Enough
On November 7, 2005, Get School: An Education Blog posted several criticisms of what is happening in many gifted education pull-out programs.
The blogger, Patti Ghezzi, writes that "Parents often complain that ... [pull-out programs are not] ... enough. Their kids are still bored in traditional class. They also complain that the projects are to showboaty and lacking in substance. They tell me they want their child’s gifted education to extend beyond the pull-out program, and they question whether teachers understand the complexity of the gifted child."
The blogger then asks the questions, "Parents, are you satisfied with your child’s gifted education program? What would your ideal program look like? Teachers, how do you handle gifted children in the classroom?"
The blog has been flooded with more than 60 responses from parents and teachers alike. Visit this blog posting titled, The Gift of Gifted Education.
Geography and Gifted Education
When I started working as a gifted education specialist at one elementary school, I was told that there was a second grader at the school who was a whiz at geography. Peter was a whiz-kid! His father had introduced him to the subject before he ever started public school and he had been devouring it ever since. Ask him to locate any place on the map and he could point right to it. But he wasn’t just good at place names. He could tell you the climate, the animals, and the vegetation of the area. If asked to reason why a certain event might take place in a specific country or city, he would pause and then begin his sentence very slowly with, “Let’s see…” He would then take all the information he knew about the place and reason very logically why that event might have taken place there. He might also add, “But I would also like to know…” Peter was a phenomenal reader. At second grade, he was reading at a 12th grade level. This enabled him to research easily. Peter was gifted in geography.
I often wonder how many other kids might be gifted in geography if they were just exposed to it. After all, a child can’t get excited about something to which he has never been introduced. While most students in first or second grades are learning about their neighborhoods in school, Peter was exploring the world. Peter knew that geography was not a dry subject.
Geography is much more exciting than many people think, involving far more than places and locations. Geography helps us to understand the relationship of places and people. With a little searching adults will find that there are resources available to introduce young people to this subject.
To give you an idea of the scope of geography, check out the
definitions that were compiled from participants at the Geography Summit II which was held at Southwest Texas State University in 1996 and collected by Dr. Ed Fernald of the Florida Geographic Alliance.
Great Resources for Teaching
To help people gain a greater understanding of geography, in 1984 the Joint Committee on Geographic Education of the National Council for Geographic Education (NCGE) and the Association of American Geographers (AAG) developed
Five Themes of Geography. These themes include location, place, human/environment interaction, movement, and regions. Be sure and take a look at this site as it explains each of these themes and lists fun activities to teach them. More activities for teaching the Five Themes can be found at
Education World.
At the
National Geographic Xpeditions site, you will find not only the U.S. National Geography Standards, but lesson plans, activities, an atlas, and an interactive learning museum.
Want to know if you have a student who is
gifted in geography? The national curriculum of England has actually set up standards.
Finally, if you would like to pursue geography on a competitive basis, take a look at
GeoBee Challenge. This site includes information for kids, parents, and teachers, including information on the National Geographic Bee.
So, have lots of resources available to students, including maps, atlases, and globes. I have a large world map hanging in my kitchen. There’s no need for me to look for it or open it up when I want it. If I read about a place and I’m not sure where it is, I can look it up. If I’m doing a crossword puzzle and one of the questions pertains to geography, I can look it up. Have maps for everything. I live in a sports oriented state, so I have maps of bike trails, hiking trails, ski area trails, and cross-country ski trails. They are fun to study. Also interesting are topographical maps, relief maps, political maps, and weather maps. Each gives different kinds of information.
If you go to the zoo, get a map of the animal locations. If you go to a museum, get a map of the exhibit locations. Have your child make a map of your house. Talk about the arrangement of the rooms and how the present locations function in your house. Then have your child create a map of his ideal house. Have him explain why he placed the rooms where he did. Is it more functional that way?
Use maps when studying history. Observe border changes. Why do they change? How does geography influence where people settle? How does it affect where people move? Discuss geography in relationship to current events. How does geography affect alliances and conflicts throughout the world? Why do the names of countries change?
Teach students how to read legends. Understand longitude and latitude and time zones. How does geography affect climate? Make geography a part of everyday life both at home and at school.
Benchmark Testing and Gifted Education
From November 11-15, the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) is holding it's annual conference in Louisville, KY. Yesterday afternoon I flew in to Louisville with my best friend, Todd. Todd is Director for Advanced Academics for a large school district outside of Dallas, TX. Todd is an influential administrator and participates on lots of committees here at NAGC. Getting his take on the administrative end of education is often informative -- if infuriating. Apparently, the newest trend for school districts is to commit to something called benchmark testing. You can get a general description of benchmark testing from a recent Education Leadership article, but, in general, benchmark testing involves district-wide testing of kids progress every nine weeks or so with district-wide, district-developed assessments.
I want to say up front that we are making a big leap to assume that the central office staff in most school districts is qualified to develop the benchmark tests being used. But, even given this leap, benchmark testing is a mistake.
Todd says that benchmark testing is like weighing in at a Weight Watcher's meeting. It tells you how you are doing. I think Todd's analogy is false. It's more like going to a Weight Watcher's meeting and spending two days standing on the scales. Benchmark testing, if nothing else, wastes a lot of instructional time.
More importantly, most people attending Weight Watcher's just want to lose weight -- weight is their only measure of progress. It's simple. Education is much more complex. In a truly differentiated classroom, kids are learning a variety of things in a variety of ways. Qualified teachers are both artists and scientists as they build learning communities that support and challenge every child in their classroom. Some kids need more time to learn objectives, some kids will need to be accelerated on to more advanced material because they've already mastered an objective, some kids will need some direct instruction, other will want to work independently. The classroom that really differentiates for the variety of learners present needs a lot more breathing space and flexibility than can be measured by a nine-week benchmark test.
What I suspect we will find out with such tests is that slower learners aren't doing as well with the benchmarks and the gifted children have already mastered them. Something a qualified teacher could have told you in the first place. We've just taken millions of dollars in staff time and instructional time to develop, administer, score, and report information that any qualified teacher knew to begin with. (Oh, and don't think there aren't a lot of educational consulting firms and test development companies salivating over the potential school dollars that will flow to them once districts buy into this idea).
I suspect there is actually another issue in play here. Giving benchmark tests every nine weeks forces teachers to drill and practice students on a narrowly defined set of objectives (i.e., the "benchmarks"). It's a big stick held over the teacher's heads with the administration saying if you don't teach these narrowly defined set of objectives, we'll know it every nine weeks. It's really just a way that administrators, worked into a lather over all of the testing forced down their throats by No Child Left Behind (NCLB), can control what teachers are doing in their classrooms. The vision of these administrators isn't on creating exciting learning environments were every child can be challenged and succeed -- it's on drilling and practicing on a narrowly defined set of objectives so that every child in the room will reach a minimum level of achievement as measured by NCLB approved tests.
Groups that advocate benchmark tests speak out of both sides of their mouth. On the one hand, they say we can serve a variety of learners in truly differentiated classes, and on the other, they call for teachers to drill and practices on basic skills so schools will perform well on NCLB assessments. These groups can't have it both ways, and kids, classrooms, and teachers are being marginalized by their rhetoric.