March 20, 2016

Brown, Alison. “Advice for Parenting and Supporting Highly Able Learners“. Expert                     Beacon. Expertbeacon.com. 2014. Web. 20 Mar. 2016.

• Be open to students’ ideas to show their learning and give them compliments on good ideas. Highly able learners need encouragement and guidance to fully explore intellectually and satisfy their curiosity (Brown, n.pag.).
• Parking lot: teachers can draw parking spaces on a piece of poster paper and tape it up in the classroom. Any time students have ideas for information that they want to share or ideas for ways to exhibit their learning, they can stick a sticky note in a parking space if they don’t want to or don’t have time to share it in class. The teacher can collect the sticky notes at the end of the class and provide feedback on the sticky notes before returning them to the students.

Johnson, Ben. “How to Support Gifted Students in Your Classroom”. Edutopia.                           Edutopia.org. 10 Oct. 2011. Web. 20 Mar. 2016.

• Be observant and recognize when students have an aptitude for something. (Johnson n.pag.) When students are told that they are good at something, they are more likely to pursue it.
• Find resources and higher learning opportunities that will enhance students’ natural talents.
• Push Students to achieve higher personal standards vs. giving them more work to do or making them help less able peers. I would like to try gamification of learning in my future classroom and encourage students to achieve higher levels. After students finish the main task, they can unlock “hidden levels” and challenge themselves by doing things that require more thought so they push themselves to try and do better.

Kingore, Bertie. “High Achiever, Gifted Learner, Creative Thinker”.                                              bertiekingore.com. 2004. Web. 20 Mar. 2016.

• Differentiate between different types of learners. Parents often conflate children who are high achievers with those who are gifted.

http://www.bertiekingore.com/high-gt-create.htm

I think this image really made me realize what is going on in the heads of different types of highly able learners when you assign something, and that even within the term “highly able” you have different types of ability. I think to really support these highly able learners, it is important to leave some flexibility in how students show their learning because the creative and gifted learners can have so many good ideas.

Davis, Leah. “Gifted Children”. kellybear.com. N.D. Web. 20 Mar. 2016.

• Help highly able learners to recognize their differences as assets (Davis n.pag.). These students may be shy to share their talents because of fear of standing out in a negative way and being ridiculed by peers.
• Encourage gifted students to benefit their community of fellow students by collaborating on creating resources to be collected in a class blog/website that they can share with friends or teachers can promote amongst each other.

Own Reflection on Learning Journals:

Looking back at my learning journals, I think my biggest development throughout this course is coming to understand new ideas about gifted/highly able learners. Before taking this course, I think I had a lot of commonly held beliefs like talents are innate characteristics. I’ve now come to understand that gifted/highly able learners also need a lot of affirmation, support, and guidance to let their talents really shine. They too need guiding questions unlike Seinfeld when he teaches history. They also need a mentor and the space or tools to practice their skills.