CSD Gifted Services Model Reflection:
The City Schools of Decatur model of gifted services at the secondary level are highlighted in the brochure to the left. This brochure was created collaboratively between myself and a fellow high school math teacher at DHS. Students in CSD district eligible for gifted services will receive a minimum of 5 segments of gifted service per week or the yearly equivalent. CSD Gifted service models currently include:
CSD gifted services definitely strives to create a supportive school environment to meet the intellectual, academic, social, emotional, and motivational needs of gifted and high-ability learners. |
Artifact #2 (click on link for brochure)
It is my opinion that it is a misnomer to call the middle school a cluster model because although students are clustered together in 2-8 gifted students in a class, sometimes they are placed in a class that includes a significant number of struggling students and/or with students needing exceptional student services. When this occurs, the disparity across the learning continuum is too great to meet the needs of all students, including the gifted students. The teacher is then stretched too thin trying to differentiate for all the needs of his/her students. To best enact the cluster model, CSD should eliminate having gifted students in the same class as ESS students. Similarly, class sizes should be limited to 24 or less to facilitate a 1:1 teacher engagement with students so as to meet their individual learning needs.
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In the Classroom: My new understandings of the qualification process will impact how the gifted students will be served in my classroom. After this class,I am much more conscious of the four areas of gifted identification (achievement, mental ability, motivation and creativity). As such, I am now explicit in planning and including choice tasks that emphasize all four areas. My weakest area as a teacher is in the creative arena, so now I am more self-conscious and diligent about including creative tasks to facilitate and show learning for my gifted students. I have changed up my warm up tasks to rotate between factual, reasoning, pattern based and creative tasks. Students have responded positively and really enjoy sharing their creations (from thinking maps, to models, to facts). Examples include drawing a model invention of an alternative energy source with labels, creating thinking maps in chalk on the black lab benches as a way to review prior to final assessment.
Parent Interactions: My new knowledge of the gifted qualification process and the parent conference roll playing will greatly improve my explanations to parents and students about eligibility and placement in the gifted program. Not only did it give me the confidence, but also great talking points to answer questions for parents whose children were eligible as well as for those parents whose children were not. Some of these talking points include:
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Creative Warm Up Example
Chalk Thoughts on desks |
Card Sorts as Formative (above)
Self Assessment Goal Sheet (below) |
Formative Assessment: One area of strength is my ability to identify appropriate formative assessments for high ability learners. First, I identify appropriate formative assessments following Lorna Earl (2003) who looked for assessment OF learning, assessment FOR learning, and assessment AS learning. The easiest and most common assessment to identify and use in the classroom is the assessment as a judge of knowledge (multiple choice test, open-ended questions, google quizzes, question and answers). The next is an assessment for the purpose of informing teaching of high ability learners (i.e. Ticket out the door, thumbs up/down, any questions assess in whole class discussion or small group to understand where on continuum of understanding the class is), and finally an assessment to inform learning (help with self-learning). as a jumping off point to independent learning and moving toward mastery of a standard. (i.e. When students complete a goal sheet and review past learning of an IB standard prior to taking a second assessment for the same IB standard or students take a google formative and based on their score they complete a tiered task to improve learning on what they did not understand. We do this every Friday) In reality, all those perspectives play a role in effective teaching high ability learners and thus must all be used regularly in the classroom. I use formative assessments throughout my class every day from warm ups, to quick quiz for understanding, to quantitative scores dictating what assignment a student completes next, to a ticket out the door to determine what to plan for the next day. The most powerful assessments are the assessments students use to recognize their own level of understanding and then use it THEMSELVES as a jumping off point to independent learning and moving toward mastery of a standard.
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RUBRICS: A second area of strength, that is connected to the first, is in creating rubrics for my formatives and summatives. Creating strong analytic rubrics requires the teacher to know what standards they are assessing, HOW they are assessing it, and what the continuum of mastery looks like. Strong rubrics ensure clear, explicit expectations so that the students knows what they have to understand and do to master a standard and HOW to do it. It also provides them with a map to recognize where they are along the way. The goal is to ensure that the students are using the rubric at the beginning, middle, and end of the learning task. This means that the students read it prior to the task, review it to answer their own questions during the task, and then self-assess (and peer review) using it to enable final revision.
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Artifact #3: Special Population Formative Assessment PL Lesson
Website Table of Contents
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My one area of weakness is how we evaluate Mental Ability, Achievement, Motivation, and Creativity for eligibility? Although I understand the basics, I still feel like the process is cumbersome and I do not feel confident without having my cheat sheet from the state manual and our school district next to me. I forget the different test names and which category each tests for. I think one problem is I am a visual learner, so I would have a better recall/processing ability if I could see each of the tests (cover page and questions). However, since that is not legal and offers up potential unfair advantage, it is not a possibility. Thus, to improve this area of my skill set, I could help our 6th grade director of gifted students when she is evaluating students in the gifted evaluation process. Like all learning, practice and interaction with content is the key to improvement of learning. Also, by self assessing as I am doing with this test, I am able to use assessment FOR learning.
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