Catering for Gifted and Talented Students
Policy Statement Sections: Identification; Professional development; Opportunities for students; Teaching and learning strategies.
Policy Statement 4
Teachers will make planned provision to meet the learning needs of gifted and talented students in their classes.
Implementation strategies
4.1 To ensure that a qualitatively and quantitatively differentiated programme is offered to the gifted and talented students in their classes, teachers will consider the individual needs of those students and encourage high achievement, originality, problem solving, higher order thinking skills, and creativity.
4.2 A variety of teaching / learning strategies will be considered. Teachers can:
- examine the level of challenge.Create a balance in the content of lower and higher levels of thinking. Create opportunities for skill development: allow self-pacing, and ensure there is privacy in "failure". Incorporate problem solving, inquiry, and creative production in the programme. Teachers may extend the curriculum and use accelerated learning techniques;
- introduce individualised enrichment programmes. Teachers can make use of contract work, with students negotiating the contract components, encourage individual research, provide opportunities for peer tutoring, or involve mentors with specific expertise;
- use curriculum compacting. Use of pre-testing to acknowledge pre-knowledge can free up time to work on special individual projects;
- nurture the gifts and talents that are valued by other cultures. For example, Maori culture values, amongst those already listed; abilities and qualities such as spiritual, affective, aesthetic, cultural, and leadership; and expect these abilities and qualities to be used in the service of others;
- plan a range of tasks that offer choice. Group students and specify prerequisites – allow choice component. Include activities that cater for learning styles and multi-category talents;
- cater for learning style needs and multiple intelligences in the regular classroom. Use a variety of teaching methods that allow students with differing learning styles to flourish. Pose open-ended questions, activities and assignments;
- use curriculum models and taxonomies and include multiple intelligences and learning style opportunities when planning student assignments;
- use group work, allowing scope for leadership, cooperative decision-making, and student-initiated perspectives, but also allow sufficient time for students to work independently;
- have appropriate expectations – goal setting which take achievable steps towards improvement – use specifics rather than general terms or just marks;
- provide opportunities for success that give intrinsic satisfaction (personal meaning, value);
- provide work that is meaningful and appropriate to ability level, bearing in mind that gifted students with learning disabilities will not be motivated to achieve on a diet of work that is below their cognitive ability, regardless of the level of their disability.
4.3 Teachers will evaluate the effectiveness of programmes for gifted and talented students. They will:
- be summative as well as formative – fitting the evaluation to the programme;
- use a range of evaluation models to assess the classroom programme – including observation, teacher diaries, self-assessment, teacher-made tests, product evaluation, interviews and questionnaires, and focus groups (refer Ministry of Education New Zealand, 2000, pp 54–56);
- be designed to make changes or adjustments to the programmes according to outcomes.