LPISD Curriculum Gifted and Talented

Gifted and Talented Program

Charlotte Rhyne
Director of Student Support Services
(281) 604- 7034Office
(281) 604-7026 Fax
rhynec@lpisd.org

Welcome to the La Porte Independent School District Gifted and Talented Program!

Mission Statement | Goals | Advisory Team | Schoolwide Enrichment Model

Mission Statement

Founded upon the belief that schools should be places for student talent development, the La Porte ISD Gifted and Talented Program is committed to providing the resources, encouragement, and opportunities to assist students in achieving at their highest levels of potential.

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Goals

Improve student academic performance with meaningful, enriched learning experiences.
Provide for responsible flexibility in the use of the school day to ensure time for enrichment learning.
Create and maintain a learning community that encourages professional growth for all staff in the philosophy, theory, and practice of gifted education.
Establish a collaborative relationship between school and community that promotes community-based service opportunities for students to grow socially and emotionally.
Develop a school culture that encourages a parent and school partnership in program planning, implementation, and decision making.

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Advisory Team

LPISD Gifted and Talented Advisory Team

2003-2004

Sandra Acosta, Coordinator of Bilingual/ESL

Cleo Davison, Community Member

Alfreddie Felder, Executive Director of Elementary Education

Anna Fontenot, Parent

Bill Fontenot, Parent

Gayle Jackson, GT Lead Teacher, La Porte Elementary

Joanne Kolius, Principal, Rizzuto Elementary

Tracy Kubicki, GT teacher, College Park Elementary

Dr. Muffet Livaudais, Associate Superintendent of Curriculum

Jill Miller, GT Lead Teacher, Reid Elementary

Charlotte Rhyne, Director of Student Support Services

Lynne Tolles, Counselor, Rizzuto Elementary

Angela Viator, Assistant Principal, Lomax Elementary

Gordon Westmoreland, Member, Board of Trustees

Extensive work by the Advisory Team resulted in a recommendation for the instructional model for the gifted and talented program that will be implemented for the 2004-2005 school year. A group of six teachers, one to be assigned to each elementary campus, will receive training in The Schoolwide Enrichment Model, or SEM, at the University of Connecticut . The University of Connecticut is the site of the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented, directed by Dr. Joseph Renzulli, a renowned, national expert in the field of gifted education.

The one-week, intensive course will equip the gifted and talented specialists to implement the plan while training all teachers on the campus in effective practices for teaching in a way that develops the talents of all of our children.

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Schoolwide Enrichment Model

Elementary Schools

SCHOOLWIDE ENRICHMENT MODEL

Grounded in scientifically based research on gifted and talented from the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented.

http://www.gifted.uconn.edu/nrcgt.html

Provides a full-time enrichment specialist on each elementary campus who will:

Plan and facilitate Type I learning opportunities for ALL students.

TYPE I ENRICHMENT

Offered to all students pre-kindergarten through fifth.

General exploratory activities designed to stimulate awareness of new interests.
History Fairs
Discovery Days
Product Fairs
Writing Extravaganzas
Shoebox Science

Provide Type II learning via weekly pull-out sessions for students
identified for the G/T program.

TYPE II ENRICHMENT

Weekly scheduled pull-out for students identified as Gifted and Talented. Designed to develop critical thinking and problem solving skills. "Learning How to Learn," research, reference, communication skills taught.

Provide Type III learning for all students who demonstrate task commitment

TYPE III ENRICHMENT

Advanced research that allows a student to complete a lengthy investigation of an area of serious interest.

Opportunities for high-end learners
Open to all students exhibiting task-commitment
Individual or small group independent work with teacher facilitation
Teach strategies and methodologies for high-end learning to all staff
Meet and plan routinely with other enrichment specialists

Additional Features:

Services are provided to kindergarten through second grade students who are part of a talent pool through Types I and III activities.
All kindergarten through second grade teachers will be trained in Reading Strategies for Advanced Primary Readers (developed by the Texas Reading Initiative Task Force for the Education of Primary Gifted Children).
Enrichment specialists will meet monthly to plan and organize district-wide instruction for consistency and continuity on all campuses.

Sixth, Seventh, and Eight Grades

Pre-Advanced Placement Classes
UIL Competition
Odyssey of the Mind
Duke Talent Search Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh, and Twelfth Grades
Advanced Placement Classes

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Tweleve Traits of Giftedness: A Non-Biased Profile

Trait, Aptitude, Behavior

General Description

How It May Look

Motivation
Evidence of desire to learn.

Internal drive or encouragement that initiates, directs, or sustains individual or group behavior in order to satisfy a need or attain a goal.

Demonstrates persistence in pursuing or completing self-selected tasks (may be culturally influenced); evident in school or non-school activities. Enthusiastic learner; has aspirations to be somebody, to do something.

Interests
Intense, sometimes unusual, interests

Activities, avocations, objects, etc. that have special worth or significance and are given special attention.

Unusual or advanced interests, topic, or activity; self-starter; pursues and activity unceasingly beyond the group.

Communication Skills
Highly expressive with words, numbers, or symbols

Transmission and reception of signals or meanings through a system of symbols (codes, gestures, language, and numbers).

Unusual ability to communicate (verbally, nonverbally, physically, artistically, symbolically); uses particularly apt examples, illustrations, or elaborations.

Problem-Solving Ability
Effective, often inventive, strategies for recognizing and solving problems.

Process of determining a correct sequence of alternatives leading to a desired goal or to successful completion of a performance task.

Unusual ability to devise or adopt a systematic strategy to solve problems and to change the strategy if it is not working; creates new designs; inventor.

Memory
Large storehouse of information on school or non-school topics.

Exceptional ability to retain and retrieve information.

Already knows; needs only 1-2 repetitions for mastery; has a wealth of information about school and non-school topics; pays attention to details; manipulates information.

Inquiry/Curiosity Questions, experiments, explores.

Method or process of seeking knowledge, understanding or information.

Asks unusual questions for age; plays around with ideas; extensive exploratory behaviors directed toward eliciting information about materials, devices, or situations.

Insight
Quickly grasps new concepts; sees connections; senses deeper meanings

Sudden discovery of correct solution following attempts based primarily on trial and error; putting disparate elements together in unexpected ways.

Exceptional ability to draw inferences; appears to be a good guesser; is keenly observant; heightened capacity for seeing unusual and diverse relationships, integration of ideas and disciplines.

Reasoning
Logical approaches to figuring out solutions.

Highly conscious, directed, controlled, active, intentional forward-looking, and goal-oriented thought.

Ability to make generalizations and use metaphors and analogies; can think things through in a logical manner; critical thinker; ability to think things through and come up with a plausible answer.

Imagination/Creativity
Produces many ideas; highly original

Process of forming mental images of objects; qualities, situations, or relationships which aren't immediately apparent to the senses; problem solving through nontraditional patterns of thinking.

Shows exceptional ingenuity in using everyday materials; is keenly observant; has wild, seemingly silly ideas; fluent, flexible producer of ideas; highly curious.

Humor
Conveys and picks up on humor well.

Ability to synthesize key ideas or problems in complex situations in a humorous way; exceptional sense of timing in words or gestures.

Keen sense of humor that may be gentle or hostile; large accumulation of information about emotions; capacity for seeing unusual; uncommon emotional depth; openness to experiences; sensory awareness.

Intensity ("Overexcitabilities") Strength of reactions, responses, behaviors. (The term "overexcitabilities" comes from Polish psychologist Dabrowski.)

Very Strong, even extreme, responses to stimuli in five areas: emotional, intellectual, sensory, psychomotor, and imagination.

Intense desire for experiences in the area(s) of overexcitability; powerful emotions; seeks intellectual stimulation; sensory experiences evoke strong responses; constant or repetitive movement or gesturing; intense fantasy life; may need creative outlets for intensity.

Sensitivity
Strong reactions to emotional stimuli

Events and situations in the affective and social domains elicit a stronger response than usual.

Strong sense of compassion; keen sense of justice; empathy; moral and ethical sensibilities; sense of being "different" socially; existential worrying; often overly self-critical.

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