Gifted & Talented (G/T)

Gifted & Talented Team:  Melissa Lettis, Jill Fenn, Tiffany Babcock  
     Coordinator:  Melissa Lettis
     Math Liaison:  Tiffany Babcock
     Language Arts Liaison:  Jill Fenn
 

At McGraw Elementary, an IB World School, all students receive a level of support that enables them to succeed within the range of their abilities.  Our teachers implement teaching strategies that address individual learning needs.  This is especially true for our gifted and talented students; the IB program works well with self-directed learners who wish to enrich their learning.  In developing appropriate curriculum for the gifted and talented students there are many strategies that are incorporated into everyday curriculum planning.

• Each classroom provides differentiated instruction.  Differentiation is seen as the process of identifying, with each learner, the most effective strategies for achieving agreed goals. Dynamic groupings within classrooms, use of preassessments to discover students' strengths and areas to focus instruction on, targeted instruction based on preassessments, and provision of materials (such as Accelerated Math, enrichment packets, and challenging books/articles) designed to address students' level of readiness are some examples.
• The IB curriculum provides students with rich tasks which invite an open-ended exploration of a topic. A rich task is defined as culminating performance or demonstration or product that is purposeful and models a life role. It presents substantive, real problems to solve and engages learners in forms of pragmatic social action that have real value in the world. Inquiry, as the dominant mode of instruction at McGraw, takes many forms. A few examples are: socratic seminars, inquiry circles, individualized student research projects, and modeling of high-level questioning by teachers.
• Transdisciplinary units involve students in an investigation of a concept-based central idea that goes across a number of disciplines (subject areas) to develop depth and detail in one’s knowledge and understanding.  Transdisciplinary understanding is defined as the capacity to integrate knowledge and modes of thinking drawn from two or more disciplines to produce cognitive advancement e.g. explaining a phenomenon, solving a problem, creating a product or raising new questions in ways that would be unlikely to occur through single disciplinary means.
• Tiering is a process of adjusting the degree of difficulty of a task or product to match a student’s level of readiness allowing a teacher to cater to the wide-ranging abilities within any one class.

Please see our responses to these frequently asked questions about how we meet the needs of students identified as gifted and talented.

The following websites are good resources for parents of advanced learners/students identified as gifted an talented to reference: