Five Time-Effective Ways to Serve Gifted Kids in Your Classroom

As a classroom teacher, you probably know the feeling. You have that student in class that finishes his or her work early, asks lots of questions, gets bored easily and maybe even points out mistakes that others make, including yourself. As you struggle to help the lower-performing students, you wonder what you can do with this child.

What you may have is a gifted child on your hands.

And without the proper training and strategies, that child could join the ranks of others across the country, who remain unchallenged, bored, and frustrated in school. Reports published by the Neag Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development at the University of Connecticut have shown that most general education classroom teachers are poorly equipped to meet the needs of the gifted, and that gifted students can spend as much as half the school repeating curriculum and waiting for classmates to catch up.

Don’t let that be your students.

In this week’s blog, I’ll share five keys for success with gifted kids in the general ed classroom.  As a teacher myself, I am well aware of the incredible demands and challenges teachers face, so my five keys will be simple, time-friendly methods that you can immediately implement. The strategies, once in place, should not take a lot of time and focus, however, they will begin to address the unique needs of your gifted kids.

1. Curriculum Compacting

Pre-test your students and document where in the curriculum they show mastery. Do not make them repeat lessons. By knowing what they already know, you can challenge them with enriching lessons or accelerate them through the curriculum.  For more information on how to implement compacting, go here.

2. Question Them

Using higher-order thinking questions is a surefire way to increase the complexity and challenge of any lesson. For instance, your students might be writing a position paper on whether killer whales should be held in captivity. You could have your gifted students consider additional questions, such as: “do you think animals in general should be kept in zoos, circuses, etc.?” and have them present their positions to the class.  When gifted students are reading, perhaps independently, have them use bookmarks that feature higher-order questions on various literary elements. Examples can be found here.

3. Create Creative Opportunities

Provide gifted students in your classroom with more opportunities to be creative within the frameworks of the Common Core curriculum.  A great resource for ideas is Creativity x 4: Using The Common Core Standards by Carolyn Coil. The book demonstrates how to use the Six Thinking Hats, Questivities, and other strategies to spice up Common Core and provides step-by-step projects and lessons.

4. Get High-Tech

Use technology to enhance or extend your curriculum. For example, I’ve been experimenting with a web site calledpadlet.com, which allows teachers and students to post on a shared, virtual wall. This tool can be used to foster collaboration. You can post reflection questions, opinion prompts, and other tasks for students to work on when they finish their regular work.  Other sites, such as www.renzullilearning.com (districts have to purchase the program) automatically generated differentiated enrichment projects and lesson based on students’ interests.

5. Cluster Them

This just makes sense. Grouping gifted children together within the classroom (not all the time, but occasionally based on the learning objective at hand) provides them with an opportunity to collaborate with similar-ability students, which can cause them to positively challenge each other to higher performance levels. Academically, this allows the teacher to differentiate learning, perhaps providing the gifted cluster with higher-level content or enrichment opportunities.  In regards to affective needs, it also helps the gifted realize that there are other children that think like they do and might provide some needed emotional support and feelings of belonging.

These five strategies, with perhaps the exception of curriculum compacting, take very

 little or no time but are more about changing the way you view these children and their needs. You might want to use this blog as a list and check each strategy off as you implement it. Good luck and please share your experiences!

Thank you,

Steve