What Does a GT Teacher/Coordinator Do?
What kinds of things does the GT Specialist do for students, parents, and teachers?
There are six main aspects to our Polson GT services, all designed to fully meet state law & accreditation standards, board policy, national gifted education standards, & research-based best practice:
1) IDENTIFICATION. In Kindergarten and 1st grade, I go into every classroom (we have 12 total K and 1 classrooms) approximately every-other week throughout the school year to do half-hour thinking skills lessons with the whole class. This is the beginning of our identification process. By doing this, we are "frontloading" inquiry and thinking skills for all students. Research shows that when inquiry and thinking skills are frontloaded in the primary grades, more proportional identification is achieved when all students are later tested for GT services. Our numbers bear this out, as we have statistically proportional representation of subgroups in our GT program (e.g. Native American students, free and reduced lunch students, etc.). All students are tested in spring of 1st grade and any student in any other grade level can be referred for testing at any other time. In addition to all 120-ish 1st graders, I also test around 40+ referred students in other grade levels each year. This referred number is roughly equivalent to about the same number of students who are referred for evaluation for Special Education services.
2) CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS AND PROBLEM SOLVING. Identified students K-5 meet with me (GT Specialist) in small groups at least once a week where we focus on critical thinking skills (logic, strategy, analysis, analogies, creativity, etc.) and problem solving (including creative problem solving). I intentionally give the students challenging work that they will have to try 10, 20, 30 times before solving, in contrast to the two or three times they may have to try something in the regular classroom. They know I won't let them drown in the struggle, but they also know they will have to work harder for success. One big lesson they get out of this is how much more satisfying it is to accomplish something one has worked hard for and struggled through than it is to "accomplish" something that was a piece of cake. I want them to relish that struggle because they now know a more genuine thrill of victory is on the other side. These types of challenges also give gifted students a more realistic self-assessment of their abilities (rather than the falsely inflated sense that comes from always getting everything easily).
3) SOCIAL/EMOTIONAL NEEDS OF THE GIFTED. The students and I have specific conversations over multiple years designed to help them build skills for managing topics and issues relevant to gifted and advanced learners. These are things such as managing perfectionism, learning how to self-advocate for more challenging work, learning how to tolerate frustration when something is finally challenging, and learning how to persist on challenging tasks. We also talk about procrastination, dealing with high expectations (whether internal or external), and appreciating and celebrating that it's okay to be a nerd in a world that tries to tell us otherwise. Our world needs all kinds of people.
4) INDEPENDENT LEARNING PROJECTS/CREATIVE PRODUCTIVITY. Our middle and high school students pursue topics and challenging independent projects of personal interest that don't "fit" into regular school (in addition to continued discussions mentioned in #3). They develop not only specific talents and a unique knowledge base through this opportunity, but also greater self-reliance, independence, and responsibility. Over the decades, students have done a wide variety of independent learning projects, such as writing and self-publishing books (which are available for check-out in our school libraries), learning beading (including a student who made her first traditional dress and has gone on to do so much more), learning programming languages (one of these students used to work for Google but left to create his own tech company, AirTable), dissecting animal organs acquired from local butcher shops (this student is about to complete her medical school training through Stanford and was recently inducted into the Association of American Indigenous Physicians), a student who made a documentary about issues impacting Indian Country (including #MMIP), and a student who learned mushing and created her own dog sled team - competing in the Junior Iditarod while in high school and starting her own dog sled tourism business after high school. She is about to compete in her first Iditarod! Another student learned welding, magnetics, and physics while creating an air-pressure-powered cannon and an underwater camera case for his projects, and he is now a lead design engineer for Dynamic and Sub-Critical Experiments at Los Alamos National Laboratory. And so many more! In the world of gifted education, we often call this kind of opportunity a Type III, based on the work of Joe Renzulli from the University of Connecticut.
5) ASSISTANCE FOR TEACHERS. Additionally, a GT Specialist position is also a valuable resource for parents and teachers! I help teachers with ideas and strategies for differentiating in their classrooms, for example. I help teachers understand how giftedness may be the source of some of a student's quirks and behaviors. I advocate for challenging and advanced content-area courses for our students. I lead the process of grade-skipping a student when appropriate. I assist in helping our schools and teachers subject-accelerate students (subject acceleration is going to a grade level above for a particular class or subject in order to receive more challenging content that the student is ready for.) I also send “5 Minute GT PD” emails to all staff (and anyone else interested) to help them learn more about gifted students and reaching them.
6) ASSISTANCE FOR PARENTS. I help parents understand how giftedness may be the source of some of their child(ren)'s quirks and behaviors. I also offer parent discussion groups where parents can learn more and share strategies with one another. I often hear from parents that I am the first person outside the family who understands that raising a gifted child is not the cakewalk everyone else seems to think it is.
Have questions or want to know more? Feel free to contact me!
Tamara Fisher Alley
(406) 883-6335 ext. 328 (w)