WCPSS Challenges Gifted Students
February 29, 2008 - More than 23,000 students receive Academically Gifted services in the Wake County Public School System.State legislation requires school systems to provide services for academically gifted students and encourages schools to challenge all students to aim for academic excellence.
The state requires school systems to develop three year plans for academically gifted education with input from parents, teachers and administrators. The current Wake County plan for 2007 to 2010 was approved by the Wake County Board of Education and the NC Department of Public Instruction. The program is designed to provide challenging educational opportunities for students who perform, or show potential for performing, at remarkably high levels of accomplishment in comparison to others of their age, experience or environment.
Identifying AG students
Students can be nominated for consideration for the academically gifted program at any grade level. At the third grade level, the effort is made to search out and identify students who qualify for academically gifted services.
All third graders take the Cognitive Abilities Test. Those students who score at or above the 75th percentile will go on to take the Iowa Test of Basic Skills Students who score at or above the 90th percentile on either assessment will be considered for further screening.
Letters went home this month to the families of the third graders with information about the Academically Gifted program and students’ testing results.
“The screening program for Wake is very intense where we don’t look at any one factor,” said Dan Turner of the WCPSS Academically Gifted Program. “We look at assessments, performance in class, grades, writing samples, portfolios, the student’s math profile, the student’s literacy profile. We also ask parents and teachers to provide information through checklists.”
The school’s AG Resource teacher works in tandem with the classroom teacher and works with small groups of students as part of third grade enrichment activities.
As part of the process, students identified to receive Academically Gifted Services are determined to have a level of service that ranges from very strong to moderate in language arts and/or math.
The school system currently serves 6,100 elementary students, 8,400 middle school students and 8,600 high school students with AG services.
Serving AG students
Schools select from the school system’s Academically Gifted Plan to provide a variety of service models and strategies for meeting the needs of students.
Students in grades four and five who are identified with a strong or very strong service level need receive a minimum of 45 minutes per area of identification. These students may go to the AG teacher for small group instruction, or the AG teacher may go into the classroom and work side by side with the classroom teacher.
“There is not a separate academically gifted curriculum in North Carolina,” said Joyce Gardner, WCPSS Director for the Academically Gifted Program. “The curriculum that our AG students work with is the same as the curriculum for everyone else. The NC Standard Course of Study is wide, but it is also very deep. And what we do with AG children is to be sure that the depth of that curriculum is reached and the opportunities to go to that depth are provided so that they are not just reaching the standard, they are going beyond the standard for that set of objectives.”
At the middle school level, the AG Resource teacher’s role is that of a collaborative planner with the regular core teachers in a middle school team.
“The AG resource teacher is skillful at planning within the framework of a lesson providing a template for tiering a lesson or scaffolding that lesson so that there are choices that add more rigor to the lesson,” said Gardner.
At the high school level, students may select to take part in a variety of challenging courses at the Honors or Advanced Placement level.
AG Resource teachers provide professional development in differentiation strategies with regular classroom teachers at their schools.
“At one school, the entire faculty has been involved in a series of sessions throughout the year in which they learn strategies, learn ways to ask higher order questions, learn how to scaffold lessons and units of study in all areas of their coursework,” said Gardner. “They are learning to constantly challenge students on a daily basis because a gifted child should be provided challenge throughout the day.”
The school system has 112 academically gifted teachers working in its schools to support high achievement for all students and to directly serve the 23,000 students identified as academically gifted.
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