Gifted children, particularly those of diverse backgrounds (race & culture), may be forced to manage an accelerated level of isolation, confusion, and ultimately disappointment if self-discovery and acceptance are not addressed appropriately by members of the educational and home community.
This session will create an intentional dialogue about diversity and the impact for children within their own circle of influence. The ability to thrive within one's own community is heavily dependent upon the person's ability to feel a sense of belonging. We will explore the challenges one faces during this self-discovery process and how we as teachers, administrators, and community partners can assist along the way.
Participant Outcomes:
The Benchmark Excelling Exceptional Spelling (BEES) program is based on sequential phonics, includes sight words and is correlated to both the PALS Spelling and Words Their Way Spelling Inventory. Learn why this spelling program was developed and how this spelling program truly works to support students to not just memorize a word for Friday's spelling test, but to learn spelling rules that students can apply when writing and reading beyond Friday's spelling test.
BEES has 282 spelling lists so that every learner begins at their "good fit" list based on their score on the PALS Spelling or on the Words Their Way Spelling Inventory. Students then proceed at an individual pace to optimize their personal learning needs.
Spelling tests occur as students learn and apply the spelling rules. No more pretest Monday, spelling test Friday, repeat!
Participant Outcomes:
This presentation will summarize individualized middle school and high school interventions to improve gifted and talented students' executive functioning skills. Specifically, these interventions have targeted G/T students who struggle with social and emotional issues including anxiety, depression, ADHD, and perfectionism. The session will share the strategies taught to students, present outcomes of prior interventions, and discuss potential applications of these strategies.
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:
(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!
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:
The presentation will be an overview of how Jack Young Middle School is addressing the curriculum needs of its advanced learners. Topics of discussion will include, but not be limited to:
Participant Outcomes:
Never have we seen such an explosion of quality young adult literature. Curating a classroom library or choosing new titles for your curriculum, however, can be a daunting task.
Let us help by providing you with an overview of over 30 titles published in the past five years that will captivate and challenge your advanced learners. Specifically, we will feature titles that work well across content areas and titles that feature culturally diverse representation. Everyone deserves a chance to see herself or himself represented in books!
Attendees will be provided with a guide for taking notes as we cycle through over 30 book talks.
Participant Outcomes: Our advanced learners are hungry for challenging and engaging books. Participants will leave empowered to better meet the needs of the adolescents in their life who love to read!
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:
