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Articles from
May 2008
SCAMPER Your Way to Creativity
SCAMPER is an acronym for a list of words that can help you and your students think differently about a problem area and enhance creativity.
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S
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Substitute
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What or who can be used instead? What other ingredients, place, or time? Other material? Other Process? Other power? Other place? Other approach? Other sounds?
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C
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Combine
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What materials, features, processes, people, products, or components can be combined?
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A
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Adapt
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Is there anything that can be changed? What else is like this? What could be copied?
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M
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Modify, Magnify, or Minify
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Can you change the meaning, color, motion, sound, smell, form, or shape? Can you distort it?
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P
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Put to Other Uses
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Are there new ways to use or reuse it? Is there another market?
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E
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Eliminate
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Can you reduce time, effort, or cost? Can you remove part of it?
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R
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Rearrange
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Can you interchange components or patterns? Can you change the pace or schedule? Can it be reversed?
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Just a few possible ways to use SCAMPER.
- Read a simple story. What elements of SCAMPER could be used to rewrite the story? If you get stuck on a writing assignment, will the ideas from SCAMPER help you to keep going?
- Create your own invention. Take any common object and think about how it might be changed or improved upon. Think about the history of some common invention, such as the telephone. Go back to the earliest phone you can find and see how the elements of SCAMPER were used to improve each generation of the communication device.
- Take a current social or political problem and discuss how elements of SCAMPER might be applied to come up with possible solutions.
- Use SCMAPER to analyze a Web site or a brochure. Can you find ways that the Web site or brochure might be improved?
- Take any common object—a penny, a shoe, a table. How can you apply the elements of SCAMPER to come up with a new and creative use of the object?
New Tests of Giftedness
Robert J. Sternberg is a nationally known psychologist who has spent much of his career designing new measures that might more accurately capture the full range of students’ intellectual potential. He believes that conventional assessments measure only a narrow subset—memory and analytical skills—and do not necessarily measure all the abilities students need to succeed in life, namely a combination of practical, creative, and analytical skills.
While traditional assessments are frequently good predictors of success, plenty of people succeed without ever fitting that pattern—people like Virgin Airlines founder Richard Branson or filmmaker Steven Spielberg, both of whom were high school dropouts.
A team of Yale University researchers is taking Sternberg’s ideas and rethinking tests that schools use to identify students for gifted and talented programs. Dubbed Aurora Battery for the colorful spectrums created by the northern and southern lights, the assessment is being translated and tested with tens of thousands of students between 9 and 12 in the United States, England, India, Kuwait, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, and other countries. Aurora is a comprehensive battery that includes a group-administered paper-and-pencil test, a parent interview, a scale for teacher rating of students, and some observation items.
With the Aurora assessments, scholars hope to get a read on the skills that make the Bransons and Spielbergs of the world successful, as well as the academic skills that intelligence tests have traditionally measured.
The new assessment could yield a very different pool of gifted students—one that includes a higher proportion of those from traditionally underrepresented minority groups. It also has the potential to capture a population of students with a more varied and better-qualified array of skills.
Gifted Homeschoolers’ Forum
Not every school is a good match for every child. Homeschooling can be an ideal academic alternative for gifted children because it provides an education tailored to individual intellectual, social, and emotional needs. The flexibility of homeschooling allows children to set the pace of learning and work from a wide variety of educational materials. It also allows more time to pursue interests not covered in the classroom and to find experts willing to share their specialized knowledge. All of these attributes are beneficial to very bright children.
Gifted Homeschoolers Forum (GHF) is a non-profit, all-volunteer organization that works to support, educate, and advocate for families choosing alternative educational paths for their gifted children. It was originally founded to support gifted homeschoolers in California but, because of technology, is now able to make its information available to everyone. This Web site has many resources that are beneficial to parents who homeschool their children. Links include the following:
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Favorite traditional and non-traditional curriculum resources
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Information about twice-exceptional (2E) kids
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Blogs
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Organizations
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Mailing lists
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Books and publications
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Nationwide distance and short-term residential programs for gifted children
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Regional resources
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Articles about homeschooling
If you are considering homeschooling your child or you already are a homeschooling parent, you will likely find lots of helpful information at this Web site.
Gifted Gab—The Art of Rhetoric
Do you have a student who is preparing a graduation speech right now? Do you have a gifted student who wants to work on his or her verbal skills, especially public speaking?
American Rhetoric is a great resource. It has a database of and index to 5,000+ full text, audio, and video versions of public speeches, sermons, legal proceedings, lectures, debates, interviews, other recorded media events, and a declaration or two. They are great examples to watch, listen to, and learn from.
In addition to great examples of speeches, there is a compendium of more than 200 audio (mp3) clips illustrating 40 different rhetorical devices. These devices, or stylistic figures, are techniques used in both writing and speaking. For each rhetorical device, there are definitions and examples, both written and audio. Audio examples are taken from public speeches and sermons, movies, songs, lectures, oral interpretations of literature, and other media events.
This entire Web site is a great teaching and learning tool.
Gifted Student College Application Rejected
There was an interesting interchange this past week on the Washington Post Web site. In What to Do With Gifted Students?, staff writer Jay Mathews talks about a letter he received from a mother of a very gifted student. (The boy was reading a college-level book in third grade.) Mathews admits that he has not been very sympathetic with parents of gifted students, but this one is an exception. In fact, he was so sympathetic, he invited readers to respond.
In a nutshell, the student in question had received rejections from a number of colleges/universities. The parents had focused on learning, not grades. The boy’s standardized test scores were very high and he had taken many advanced courses and scored very well on final tests. However, his grades were not great. He often didn’t do all of his assigned work, so received zeros. The classes didn’t move fast enough for him, so he did different work on his own and handed notes to the teacher and classmates.
After college rejections, the parents and student found out that many schools of higher learning do not look at things like AP scores until after students are admitted. (The boy had so many high scores on AP tests, that he would be qualified to place out of about a year of college.) The fact that his GPA (3.275) was low, in the minds of the admissions department, indicated to those decision makers that the boy is lazy.
In retrospect, the mother wishes that she had homeschooled her son. If he had been homeschooled, the colleges would have looked at the same scores that they now ignore.
The conversation of reader responses to this dilemma is worth reviewing. Since the staff writer who put all this together selected the responses to include, he was able to offer a variety of ideas by articulate people. You will not have to wade through a lot of the same comments written in a poor fashion. This article and letter responses would make a great discussion point for a group of parents, educators, or graduate students. I highly recommend that you read it.
May Clearance Sale on Gifted Education Books
 As many of you know, once a year, I need to clear out some of our oldest or overstocked titles to make room for our exciting new releases for the next school year.
Each May, we offer a selection of titles at drastically reduced prices. The books I have placed on clearance are in perfect condition. Many of these wonderful titles have been quite popular over the years, but I simply have too many in inventory, and I want to sell them while they are still great tools for the classroom.
Save money on exciting classroom materials during Prufrock's year-end inventory clearance.
Order before May 31 and receive these books for 99¢–$1.99! Supplies are limited, so please act quickly.
Click here to visit our "Web-Only Clearance" sale.
School and School District Purchase Orders Accepted Online
If you need to make purchases using a school or school district purchase order you may do so online. Our online shopping system accepts purchase orders.
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