Featured Blog: The challenge of gifted education

When I find a great article on gifted education, I will share it with you.  If you see any articles or blogs worth sharing, please send them my way!  I’ve featured one blog today and listed a few others at the bottom.

Alex “Sandy” Antunes has another great post on gifted education.  I have some snippets below, but I suggest you read the entire post at Physics Today.

The provision of teaching to academically gifted children rests on many myths about how they learn. We are falsely confident that smart kids will do OK on their own. We assume that gifted students love school. We have a naive view that the presence of smart kids will help inspire and motivate the other students. We hope that teachers challenge all students, even when class sizes grow. Those myths lead to policy that leaves the academically gifted behind, yet we are surprised when these smart kids disengage and fail to reach their potential.

The [Maryland state code] notes further that “a gifted and talented student needs different services beyond those provided by the regular school program in order to develop the student’s potential.”

Getting those different services is a problem for parents. TAG just isn’t on the radar of most schools, which subscribe to the myth that smart kids can fend for themselves. As long as TAG is considered special or optional, our children will not get the education they deserve. We need to insist that TAG is not optional. TAG isn’t just an advanced curriculum, but an inquiry-based learning approach—even when the material is not more advanced than the comprehensive class.

I also recommend the following:

• Teri Pinney on “High-achieving students getting left behind in quest to pull up children who need lots of help“
• Linda Conner Lambeck on “Failing Bright Kids“
• Mary St. George on “Gifted and Very Active Young Children” and her other posts at Creating Curriculum for Gifted Students
• Carol Bainbridge on “Time to Consider Testing?“

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Thank you for reading Rochester SAGE!  Together we can make a difference for gifted students!