District Administration - June 2008 - (Page 22)

Conversations Sally Reis and Joseph Renzulli Differentiation and Enrichment Renzulli Learning links students to engaging individualized resources. The DA editorial team recently chatted with husband and wife Joseph Renzulli and Sally Reis about Renzulli Learning, their for-proﬁt, subscription-based online program that matches students’ interests and learning styles to various activities that are designed to enrich and challenge them both academically and personally. The program also oﬀers professional development and online video training for instructors. Reis is a professor and former department head of the educational psychology department in the Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut (UConn), where she also serves as principal investigator of the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented. Joseph Renzulli is the Neag Professor of Gifted Education and Talented Development at UConn, where he also serves as the director of the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented. Renzulli: It’s really guided by four principles. One is personalization or interest, which means that you’re pursuing a topic because you have a strong interest in it. That could be either an oﬀshoot of the school curriculum or an independent project. We have a feature called the Wizard Project Maker, [an online tool] that walks a student through a project from hypothesis to resources to products, outlets and audiences. The second principle is the use of authentic methodology. We have a database that has how-to books—for instance, how to be a poet, write poetry, and how to get your poetry published. The third consideration is that the program is intended for an audience in addition to the teacher so that young people see their work going someplace to make something happen somewhere. The fourth consideration is that there’s no single predetermined correct answer. That’s the best deﬁnition of constructivist learning, as far as the way we approach it. DA: Can you tell us what the philosophy is behind the Renzulli Learning method? Joseph Renzulli and Sally Reis share a moment in their UConn office. DA: How are the Renzulli technique philosophies unique from what’s now done in gifted education? Renzulli: Our database is probably the most unique feature. Nothing on the Internet does what we do. For instance, if you put “Egypt” into Google, you’ll get about 420 million hits and it will take a long time for a teacher to ﬁnd what’s going to work with kids. Some databases out there may narrow that to 180,000 possibilities, but there’s no categorization. Renzulli Learning activities are categorized by the database so the teacher gets a breakdown of what’s available. For instance, in searching online it may say virtual ﬁeld trips: 26, or critical thinking: 12. The second way we classify content is according to estimated age and grade of the student, as well as diﬃculty level. Most of that has to do with the vocabulary level of the material. The third way we classify is by the various proﬁle items, which include interest, learning styles and expression styles. And the fourth way is by state standards. 22 June 2008 We used our work on the enrichment triad model, featuring type 1 enrichment, which is general exploratory experiences to get kids excited about something, type 2 enrichment to introduce a broad range of thinking and methods skills, and type 3 individual and small group investigations of problems. The idea was to take what we were already doing to create a districtwide enrichment model so that we could serve more than just students identiﬁed and in the gifted program. We wanted to apply the pedagogy of gifted education to all kids. We’re not saying that all children are gifted, but by providing the right opportunities, resources and encouragement within interest areas, we can get students interested in poetry, for example, to see themselves as aspiring poets. We want all kids to have an opportunity at this type of learning. Reis: What we began to see was a change of state guidelines to more of a talent pool approach, which coincided with a more ﬂexible approach to student identiﬁcation. And what we’ve found is that even in the states that still use high IQ for District Administration

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of District Administration - June 2008

District Administration - June 2008
Contents
Editor’s Letter
Letters
News Update
Technology Update
Inside the Law
Conversations
Online Edge
Speaking Out
Professional Opinion
Crisis Response
Administrator Profile
District Profile
Cutting Costs from the Inside Out
New Literacies: Entering the Future
Online Videoconferencing
Achievement Today
Transporting Special Needs Students
How Well Does This Web Site Work?
New Products
Problem/Solution
Calendar of Events
Understanding the Times

District Administration - June 2008