Education Week - November 27, 2019 - 16

| OPENING THE GATES

Using Distinct Lessons to Screen All Students for 'Giftedness'
picture using the stickers.) How well do
they remember the directions and how
to interact with their peers? How imaginative are their pictures?
Most students simply try to connect
all the dots into a pattern and then
color them in, Morrison said. She was
looking for unusual thinking.
Evan turned his dots into a Christmas scene, with himself dancing in a
neon snowstorm and others decorating
a tree. Ashtyn drew a rainbow-striped
flag-perhaps not so unusual, except
that she curved it from one dot to the
next to create a ripple effect.
"That's surprising," said Principal
Penny Espinosa, noting that the girl is
a struggling reader and hasn't "stood
out" academically in other subjects.
She paused, watching the little girl color.
"You know, it's neat to see their creative
thinking; I don't know that we give them
enough opportunities to do things like
that," Espinosa said.

By Sarah D. Sparks
Louisville, Ky.

Guiding Teachers

Jared Hamilton for Education Week

To find talented children who historically have been overlooked in
gifted education, Wheeler Elementary educators are learning to see
their students in a new way.
Early one morning this fall, 3rd grade
teacher Kristin Finck watched Tiffani
Morrison, a gifted teacher in the district's Reaching Academic Potential
program, give her students a lesson on
ocean ecology and conservation and
ask students to come up with inventions to protect endangered animals.
She circulated quietly, listening to her
students excitedly describe armor for
sharks and radar to locate floating islands of trash.
"One of them drew a turtle and
talked about how pollution can damage the shell, and she had a robot
machine that could clean it," Finck
said. "And it wasn't a student you'd
think would do that-it wasn't one of
our high-performers. ... It's just a reminder that gifted and talented covers several different aspects, and it's
not just a black-and-white thing."
The number of gifted students
identified at the school has risen
from 22 when the project started in
2015 to 39 in 2017. Districtwide, more
than 9 out of 10 students who have
been identified as gifted under the
program qualify for free or reducedprice lunch.
It's a hopeful sign for Jefferson
County, which like many districts has
been working to expand the number
and diversity of academically gifted
children it serves. In a nationally representative survey by the Education
Week Research Center, 58 percent
of gifted educators reported that
students in poverty were underrepresented in their programs-higher
than the percentage who reported
service gaps for students with disabilities.
The best way to do this, experts say,
is to test everyone, preferably with
more than one kind of test. Jefferson
does give every 3rd grader verbal and
nonverbal giftedness tests. But it's not
an ultimate solution; the tests are expensive and they may not differentiate
a student who comes to school with
deep background knowledge and lots
of educational advantages from one
who may be less advantaged but can
actually learn faster.
In the Education Week survey, a
little more than 1 in 4 gifted educators reported that their districts
screen all students for gifted services once in elementary school, but
nearly 3 in 4 said they used teacher
referrals to identify potentially advanced students. That's why Jefferson County, Seminole County, Fla.,
and a handful of other districts are
taking a different approach to improving gifted identification.
In addition to traditional gifted
screening tests, educators in the pro-

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP:
After reading the book,
"Cloudy With a Chance of
Meatballs," gifted education
teacher Tiffani Morrison asks
kindergarten students at
Wheeler Elementary School
in Louisville, Ky., to draw
"what they would want to
have fall from the sky if they
could choose anything."
Jasen, a kindergartener at
Wheeler, draws what he
would like to see fall from
the sky.
Kendall, another
kindergartener in the class,
draws her choice: ice cream

grams use portfolios of student work
and a series of "response lessons." By
giving a lesson on an unusual topic-
which even economically advantaged
students likely haven't seen-teachers
can compensate some for differences
in students' background knowledge,
and focus instead on how quickly students learn something new and how
creatively they can think about it.
In a response lesson, a trained giftededucation teacher presents the class
with a series of lessons in a variety of
subjects over the course of a few weeks.
Each lesson has been calibrated to encourage creative thinking and problemsolving, and over time, students' answers have been studied to identify the
quality, intensity, and frequency of students' ahead-of-the-curve responses.

raining down.

16 | EDUCATION WEEK | November 27, 2019 | www.edweek.org

Response Lessons in Practice
Teachers also learn to create their
own response lessons, which could help
make the model more sustainable for
resource-strapped schools, according
to Kathie Anderson, the gifted education coordinator for the Kentucky state
education agency.
"I would think the response lessons
would be less expensive, because you
could take almost any book to create
a prompt for students and then look at
the results," Anderson said. "It would
use resources [districts] already have
on hand, so I don't think it would cost as
much as, maybe, getting the Williams

[scale] or the Torrance creativity tests,
which cost about $8 to $10 a pop."
The 660-student, K-5 Wheeler Elementary has about 45 percent of students from low-income backgrounds
and is one of five in Jefferson County
testing the program. One day this fall,
Morrison sat beside a projection of
George Seurrat's famous painting of a
beach scene, "A Sunday on La Grande
Jatte," with a little crowd of 1st graders
at her feet. She explained pointilism-a
painting method in which dots of paint
create patterns and shapes-and highlighted the dots in the painting, before
reading Peter H. Reynolds's "The Dot,"
about a little girl learning to paint.
"Just make a mark and see where it
takes you," she read.
The group discussed concepts that
might be considered advanced for 1st
graders: positive and negative space,
randomness, connections between
pointilism and pixels on a screen, and
the details seen close and far away.
Then Morrison dismissed students with
handfuls of green and orange stickerdots to spread randomly on a paper and
hand over to a classmate, who used the
page to make a picture.
"You're going to use your imagination, and you're also going to write me a
sentence so I can see in your brain what
you're trying to show," Morrison said.
There's a lot to see in each of these
pictures. How well does the student
understand randomness? (Some immediately make a grid, or try to draw a

Teacher professional development
forms the core of the programs' identification strategy.
Seminole County, Fla., public schools
partnered with the University of Central
Florida to deepen professional development for teachers on how to spot students with high potential.
"We have spent a lot of time working
on the characteristics of gifted students,
but also how [those characteristics] can
manifest with students who are coming
from diverse backgrounds," said Jeannette Lukens, the director of Project
ELEVATE, in Seminole County schools.
"We've spent quite a bit of time addressing myths, misconceptions, stereotypes
of those learners."
For example, Lukens said teachers
often discount leadership or creative
thinking when it comes in the form of
playground pranks. "For example, a
student influences students to behavior that may not be appropriate on the
playground. ... but [the student] really
has leadership skills that show they're
able to get students on board and keep
them engaged."
Since implementing ELEVATE, the
district's overall gifted population has
risen 44 percent, to more than 2,300.
Low-income students have increased
from 22 percent to 38 percent. The program has also become more diverse,
with 175 additional black students, 310
more Hispanic students, and 75 more
English-learners identified as gifted.
Lukens said the district is developing
case studies based on some of the students and using virtual simulations to
help teachers understand how to spot
students with high-but sometimes hidden-potential.
Coverage of the experiences of low-income,
high-achieving students is supported
in part by a grant from the Jack Kent
Cooke Foundation, at www.jkcf.org.
Education Week retains sole editorial
control over the content of this coverage.

http://www.jkcf.org http://www.edweek.org

Education Week - November 27, 2019

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