What Might Gifted and Talented Education Look Like?
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| Photo by Noah Näf on Unsplash |
While classrooms with gifted students share many best practices and powerful learning environments that should be in every school, there are some characteristics specific to Ontario-Montclair GATE classrooms.
"There's no time in teaching when "just telling" is enough. The key to quality teaching is explaining." ~Douglas Fisher & Nancy Frey
As a teacher with gifted students in my classroom, one of my main concerns was providing them with an environment challenging enough to keep all of us focused and engaged in our learning. Through experience, I quickly learned if I was engaged and challenged in our learning, then so were my students. I really had to let go of being the one in the classroom with all the answers. Amazing things happened when I did not have the answers. If we were going to get to the learning we all wanted to occur; then students had to take ownership. I later learned about Stiggins' evidenced-based strategy and the value of Gradual Release. We shared responsibility."Our job is to create rooms filled with students' voices. Not be the main voice." ~Pernille Ripp
There are strategies in theory and strategies in practice.
The balance we must maintain as practitioners is between theory and strategy. Merely copying a strategy I saw used in my friends' classroom isn't going to honestly give me the impact I hope to have on the learning in my class, and neither is only reading about it. An excellent place to start is with Dr. Sandra Kaplan's Thinking Prompts. I would encourage you to watch this brief video to understand the theory behind this strategy. Click here for additional videos.
Want to learn more? We've created a one-page document of strategies to look for in our GATE classrooms. To connect theory to practice, how about joining our team on a Spotlight visit to explore what instruction looks like for our OMSD GATE students?
I would encourage you to connect with other educators and continue learning about best practices for differentiation for our GATE students.
Happy Learning,
Andrea Thune
Thank you for providing this one page resource to help remind us of strategies to use with students. The thinking marks are my favorite "go to" when having students think about anything they have read. I am often impressed by what connections they can make with the thinking marks as a guide that I may not have considered in planning for the lesson.
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