Special Education
Gifted Education - A Resource Guide for Teachers
Appendix 2: Teacher Planning Guide
In what ways might I facilitate the development of programming that will meet this student's unique learning needs?
Will the student's placement provide thinking and learning challenges? Is the level of accomplishment such that the student needs another setting some of the time? ...all of the time?
CONSIDER:
- Content
- Accelerate to a higher level for appropriate subjects
- Telescope by covering content in less time. For example, two years of math in one year.
- Environment Alternate forms of grouping:
- in class,
- within the school,
- pull out programs, and
- in the community.
- Program Alternate forms of programming:
- honours programs
- advanced placement
- correspondence courses
- distance learning
- mentor (student, teacher, other)
- early entrance to school, to university
Does the classroom program include the teaching of skills or knowledge that the student already knows or can learn faster than other students?
CONSIDER:
- Content
- Compacting to free student to extend learning in other areas
Are there opportunities for the student to work with content that deals with complex issues/ abstractions?
CONSIDER:
- Content
- Organized through the use of:
- broad based themes that promote interdisciplinary connections.
- realistic or real problems (local, provincial, national, global).
- cases built around realistic scenarios
Are there opportunities for the student to work with processes that require higher order thinking?
CONSIDER:
- Processes that involve the student in:
- critical thinking
- creative thinking
- problem solving
- affective thinking
- discussions that promote exploration of meaning
- Programs
- Great Books
- Future Problem Solving
- Odyssey of the Mind
- Research activities using:
- Primary sources of information -- interviews, surveys
- Secondary sources of information -- books, videos
Are there opportunities for the student to communicate results of studies in many different ways?
CONSIDER:
- Products that allow pupil choice
- Multimedia presentations
- Displays
- Dramatizations
Are there opportunities for the student to communicate results of studies to real audiences?
CONSIDER:
- Products produced for real audiences:
- works published in children's literary magazines
- displays in public places -- malls, banks, shop windows,
- creation of oral history tapes for library
Are there opportunities for the student to be actively involved in the planning and assessment of learning outcomes?
CONSIDER:
- Involving the student in developing:
- independent studies/investigations
- negotiation of a learning contract
- means to assess process, e.g., journal, learning log
- criteria for assessing the study's outcomes
- Working with the student to determine:
- positives of the project
- thing to imprive another tim
