Beginning in the 2017-18 school year, all Wisconsin public schools are required to provide their grade 6-12 students with Academic and Career Planning (ACP) services. If implemented effectively, ACP can be an incredible tool for identifying and meeting the needs of gifted students.
This session will explain the vision of ACP and how ACP can help schools better understand how to provide the experiences gifted students need to be challenged and continually challenge themselves. The session will also show how ACP can facilitate much deeper engagement of students in designing and executing their own learning plans and the critical role families and all teachers have in the ACP process.
Participant Outcomes:
Our path to Talent Development emphasizes inclusive practices, centered on personalized learning. Our processes emphasize identification of student potential and unmet needs, which in turn, drives programming in intellectual, academic, fine arts, leadership, creativity, and social emotional domains.
Our aggregate student population is high-achieving in relation to national norms, and as a result, student data is also considered in relation to local and subgroup norms to identify outliers within those contexts.
Our discussion will outline our Talent Development Handbook, a two year project designed to revolutionize the concept and reality of educational opportunity available to all students, K-12.
Participant Outcomes:
Our gifted children face many stresses in the educational environment that impact their capacity for joy. Some are external, some internal. Research in neuroscience has led to conclusive findings regarding the connection between joy and learning.
This session will discuss the importance of joy in a child’s education and life in light of recent brain research. We will also share strategies that will help parents and teachers increase joy in their gifted and talented children and teens.
Participant Outcomes:
Wisconsin currently has two active federal Javits grants for projects related to gifted students. Both focus on delivering appropriately challenging and culturally relevant instruction within the RtI framework.
Expanding Excellence is DPI’s grant on mitigating the excellence gap for low-income students and English Language Learners, especially at the primary level. The Smart Spaces grant to UW-Madison/WCATY expands access to high-quality blended curriculum for underrepresented gifted middle school students.
This session will provide an update on each project and will also provide numerous suggestions and strategies based on lessons learned that participants may find useful for implementing gifted programming in their own districts, schools, and classrooms. Issues addressed will include inclusive identification, programming within the RtI model, and parent involvement.
Participant Outcomes:
NAGC Standards addressed : 2, 3, 4, 5
(Exhibitor Session)
The greatest hurdle for incorporating project-based learning in the curriculum is that there is rarely enough time in the school calendar to devote to multiple project based learning experiences. For your gifted and talented students, you want them to have project based learning opportunities, but you just don’t know how to work it into your GT program. Until now.
In this session, Wisconsin Destination Imagination (DI) provides you with an experience every DI team member experiences at every team meeting: an interactive experience of project based learning that is completed within 15 minutes. Our session will provide you with our approach to rapid problem solving project based learning experiences that you can fit in multiple times during the school year.
In this session, you will learn skills – and have FUN!
Advocacy for any cause can be both rewarding and overwhelming. Building skills in negotiation can provide a framework to effectively advocate at both the school and district levels. Whether you are a parent, educator or administrator, effective negotiation skills can allow you to be a proactive part of ongoing discussions for including Talented and Gifted education in your district’s priorities and actions.
In this session, we will outline key negotiation factors and how they can be put to practical use as an individual advocate or as part of a larger network of advocates. We will discuss both strategies that have worked and ones that haven't worked to better target time, energy and resources to have the greatest effect.
We will use information from the book "Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement without Giving In" by Roger Fischer and William Ury and the NAGC Advocacy Toolkit to develop our negotiation and advocacy framework. I will share examples from my experiences as an advocate and consultant in the Madison Metropolitan School District.
Participant Outcomes:
Innovation relies on culturally responsive practices teaching and learning. Few, however, include any analysis of the personal equity analysis necessary to use the white power and privilege most Wisconsin educators were born with to disrupt racism.
This session will provide a unique view of changing demographics, provide a vocabulary necessary to function in our racialized social world, challenge participants to begin a racial autobiography as well as provide a variety of resources for the journey and the work. Information on teaching a similar pilot unit to high school students will be described.
NAGC K-12 Programming Standards explicitly addressed in this session:
This session will share the Office of Civil Rights Educational Equity Reporting tool as a way for districts to review their own gifted and talented racial / ethnic representation rates. National and state data will be shared (briefly) and then recommendations will be shared for what district and building-level educators can do about this pervasive problem.
Participant Outcomes:
