Rick: How feasible will it be to move some of these recommendations, especially in a polarized political environment? But to be sure, there are topics where we need much more research to guide practice, and we said that too. It helped that the Working Group included well-respected scholars including Nicholas Colangelo, Laura Giuliano, Tarek Grantham, Jason Grissom, Paula Olszewski-Kubilius, Scott Peters, Jonathan Plucker, and Jonathan Wai. By all means, readers should dig into the report and its citations to see if we succeeded. Mike: We worked hard to stay as close to the research evidence as we could when it came to developing our recommendations. Rick: You mentioned the group’s recommendations are “evidence-based.” Can you say a bit about how readers should understand what that means? Even self-nominations or peer nominations could be considered as part of the process. If a teacher sees potential in a student and thinks she could benefit from advanced learning opportunities-great! It’s just critical that we don’t make students jump through multiple hoops and hurdles to gain access, because that limits the pool and can introduce bias. ![]() Teacher recommendations, for example, are fine-as long as they aren’t required. But they can be supplemented with others. As for the measures, districts and charter schools should use indicators that are valid and reliable, and test scores and grades are hard to beat. Lots of kids can get what they need in a typical classroom, but high-achieving students will sometimes need something more or something different. The point is to provided services that students need in order to thrive and fulfill their potential. This isn’t about giving kids, or their parents, a trophy for being smart. Mike: First, I’d steer away from the use of the word “merit” here. Rick: What does the group have to say to those who don’t think that test scores or grades are reliable measures of merit, even with universal screening? We think it’s time to turn the page and for our schools to focus on high achievers and those with the potential for high achievement, rather than those with some sort of innate “gifts.” Critics aren’t wrong that the field of gifted education was at one time racist and classist. But even more importantly, we think that the term “gifted” carries a lot of baggage and would benefit from a rebranding. Nor did we want to engage with the many debates in the field about how to define giftedness. We weren’t focused on students with musical or artistic gifts, for example. Mike: Partly this reflected our focus on students who achieve at high levels-or have the potential to do so-rather than kids who are “gifted” per se. Rick: The report is titled “Building a Wider, More Diverse Pipeline of Advanced Learners.” But it strikes me that the focus is really on what we’d normally describe as “gifted education.” Can you talk about the notion of “advanced” learners as opposed to “gifted” learners? That way, every school has gifted programming, including high-poverty schools where achievement tends to be lower, and this allows you to cast the net much wider. Another is to use local, school-based “norms.” Meaning: Rather than say that a student has to score at the 90 th percentile nationally in order to receive advanced learning services, require them to score at the 90 th percentile in their school. This means selecting students for these programs by looking at test scores or grades for all students rather than relying on parent nominations or teacher recommendations, as those tend to overlook lots of kids who might benefit. One is to establish “universal screening” for gifted and talented programs. Mike: I am particularly excited about those focused on our youngest students. Rick: What are a couple of the group’s big recommendations? ![]() It was such a great experience, especially to be able to find so much common ground at this time of heightened polarization. ![]() Our final report offers 36 concrete, evidence-based recommendations to boost opportunities for advanced learners from grades K-12. After meeting four times, we finished up in June 2023. Our mission was to develop a coherent set of recommendations to states, school districts, and charter networks for how they could expand advanced learning opportunities for all kids, and especially for students from underserved groups. We launched in spring 2022 with an ideologically and racially diverse assemblage of 20 academics, practitioners, advocates, and policymakers. It’s a terrific group that produced an important report.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |