CORE K12

Professional Development

• Professional Development
• Special Needs
• Evon
• Gifted and Talented

CORE Gifted and Talented:

Is creativity a casualty of acountability in your district?

"Creativity is more important than knowledge."
- Albert Einstein

Creativity and Differentiation --- to alleviate boredom --- to move to exemplary

Strengths: Our instructional coaches are themselves, gifted and talented, enthusiastic and creative. Programs designed for a variety of budgets.

Gifted and Talented

Data to Guide Gifted and Talented Classrooms (5 Sessions)

Focus

Gathering, analyzing, monitoring, and revising available data to indentify gifted children, nurture their needs, and develop levels of cognitive thinking to promote creative thinkers and lifelong wonderers.

Audience

School leadership and teachers

Session 1: Nature and Needs of Gifted Students

• Discuss the basic terminology, current definitions, theories, and models of giftedness
• Describes the implications of these groups' characteristics on programs for the gifted and talented.
• Details environments in which gifted and talented students feel challenged and safe to explore and express their uniqueness.
• Understands the characteristics of under-represented groups of gifted and talented students such as lower socio-economic status, physically challenged, African-American, Hispanic, limited English proficient, and learning disabled students.
• Demonstrates approaches for educating and involving gifted students from poverty.

Session 2: Identification and Assessment

• This session focuses on establishing processes, procedures, and protocols to identify gifted children for K-3 and 4-8.
• Uses broad-based, multifaceted identification procedures, including varied sources of information and qualitative and quantitative measures that match specific areas of ability.
• Identifies characteristics, bias, values, and predilections with their effects on academic and social settings for the gifted student to assess with fidelity, reliability, and ethics
• Identifies characteristics of under-represented groups of gifted and talented students such as lower socio-economic status, physically challenged, African-American, Hispanic, limited English proficient, and learning disabled students.
• Discuss Ascending Levels of Cognitive Demand which escalates one or more facets of the curriculum in order to match a learner's profile and provide appropriate challenge and pacing. Teachers reconfigure one or more curriculum components in order to ensure that students are working in their zone of optimal development.

Session 3: Social and Emotional Needs

• Discuss “Designing for Equity,” Removing the Mask: Giftedness in Poverty; Paul D. Slocumb and Ruby K. Payne
• Role-play “ The Academic Self Image”, From Rage to Hope: Strategies for Reclaiming Black & Hispanic Students, Crystal Kuykendall

Session 4: Creativity and Instructional Strategies

• Develop the value of differentiating instruction based on student strengths and weaknesses, interest areas and project-based Learning.
• Design lessons with activities integrating content/depth, process/pace, and product/complexity

Session 5: Differentiated Curriculum

• Investigate and explore differentiated activities, cooperative learning strategies and flexible grouping. A culminating activity focuses on the parallel curriculum that is designed to help students explore and participate in a discipline or field as it relates to their own interests, goals, and strengths, both now and in the future. Carol Ann Tomlinson's Parallel Curriculum Model with the Four Components
• Core Curriculum
• Connections between curriculum
• Curriculum of Practice and Language
• Curriculum of Identity