Thinking Curriculum for the Gifted
Defining the Roles and Responsibilities of Academic Departments
Jul 23, 2007
The "quiet crisis," continues in many educators’ minds in that the traditional classrooms in America are not meeting the needs of our gifted children. In its Case for Developing America’s Talent report issued in 1993, the U.S. Department of Education - Office of Educational Research and Improvement estimated that many, if not most of America’s gifted children are failing to reach their full potential. While there are numerous causes for this concern, given that schools customarily place children identified as gifted in regular education classes, the focus then shifts to the teacher’s ability to monitor and adjust instruction to meet the gifted child’s needs. Given that, schools need to assist our teachers by providing them with the right tools, which could include a special parallel “Thinking Curriculum” for the gifted children included in their regular classes.
Many schools have tried many different programs over the years to meet the special needs of gifted children. Some have been successful; some have not. Some of these methods have included differentiated learning within the heterogeneously grouped classroom, accelerated promotions, enrichment classes including pullouts, and even schools built and dedicated to teaching only the gifted. While these programs will be explored in detail in future articles, the schools that seem to have the most success are the ones that have the flexibility to blend these kinds of methods to best meet the individual student’s needs. Assuming that most schools use heterogeneous, or varied-ability groupings, no matter what the instructional approach taken by the school might be, it is important that the gifted child receive full instruction on the core curriculum along with whatever other enhancements are made during the day.
Goal Writing in the Thinking Curriculum
At the heart of any effort to meet the needs of gifted children is the school’s curriculum; however, before ever writing one word of a parallel thinking curriculum, the school community should begin with an honest and frank discussion about gifted education and its importance in the school. If it is not something that is valued, then that needs to be said. If it is something that the community treasures (as well it should be) then a committee should be established to set school goals designed exclusively for the education of its gifted children. Simply put, what should the school’s gifted children know, appreciate, and be able to do? These goals should be obtainable and easy to validate, and should be clear and understandable, along with having plainly defined benchmarks that should be easy for everyone to see happening. Once these goals have been approved by all elements of the school, then the work on the new thinking curriculum can begin.
The discussion should then turn to how to make the new goals come alive in the curriculum, or to answer the question: “How does the school operationalize its goals for the gifted students?”
The answer is from the top down. One of the best ways to inculcate these goals into an established curriculum is to ask, “What does a gifted student who is meeting this goal look like? What does he do? What does she know? What would he say?”
After answering these kinds of questions, the school will have a new list, mostly of verbs that describes the gifted students’ behaviors that are observable when the goal is being met. Taking this list to the individual departments, the chairs and team members can begin to write departmental thinking curricula that not only catalog core curriculum and standards, but also that include the giftedness essential skills (e.g., reading, writing, logic, thinking skills, researching skills, problem solving, speaking skills, leadership, respect, higher-order thinking skills, abstract thinking, etc.) that can be observed and objectively measured.
Building the Parallel Thinking Curriculum for Gifted Students
For example, if one of the verbs is ‘creating,’ consider how this history content standard could be rewritten to include the goal: Students will know the major events previous to the beginning of America and define their importance to the development of egalitarianism. It might look something like this in the gifted and talented thinking curriculum: Students will be able to create stories and plays that depict the major events previous to the beginning of America and find connections between these events and the development of egalitarianism.
As a logical progression, these departmental curricula can then be broken down further into course-level goals and standards that include benchmarks, interdisciplinary opportunities, texts, topics, and rubrics for assessments. In this way, the teacher can have parallel curricula that include equivalent educational objectives that meet the needs of the both the regular education students and those identified as gifted.
While we as a nation have made some good advances since the Case for Developing America’s Talent report was issued in 1993, there is still a great deal of work to be done in America to safeguard what could be our most valuable national treasure – our bright and gifted kids!
