NAGC – WOW Virtual Conference.
I’ve attended a couple of local NAGC conferences, and every conference has been extremely useful to help me be an advocate for my gifted. If you have an opportunity to attend one in person you should, but if NAGC offers a virtual conference if you can’t attend in person.
Every parent or teacher of a gifted child should attend at least one conference in their life.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — Forget about students spending one year in each grade, with the entire class learning the same skills at the same time. Districts from Alaska to Maine are taking a different route.
Instead of simply moving kids from one grade to the next as they get older, schools are grouping students by ability. Once they master a subject, they move up a level. This practice has been around for decades, but was generally used on a smaller scale, in individual grades, subjects or schools.
via Some schools grouping students by skill, not grade level – USATODAY.com.
KCMO is trying this because the district has been failing for years, despite the billions of federal and state dollars that have been flowing into the district.
But, if the economic situation was better, I don’t think schools like the KCMO school district would be trying this. However, engaged citizens have known for years that the current model of learning is outdated.
The present model of education is better suited to making widgets on an assembly-line or harvesting crops on a farm. We need a model that promotes creativity and critical thinking, ideal skills for STEM careers that we so desperately need in the United States.
I’m glad that districts are starting to wake up and realize that things need to change quickly.
Acceleration is one of the more hotly debated areas of gifted education. And yet, the research is clear – acceleration does not inherently hurt or damage the social development of gifted children (Kulik, 2004). In fact, many gifted children benefit from the exposure to more challenging work.
via More on myths: Acceleration and Gifted Kids « An Intense Life.
Acceleration is hard for administrators to track, messes up test tracking, etc. However, all of these are tired excuses that administrators use to discourage acceleration. If a district won’t do a complete grade-level acceleration, try a subject-level acceleration and if that is successful, push for grade acceleration.
Bottom line: gifted students must remain engaged in learning or they won’t reach their full potential.