Are you concerned about the gifted and talented students in your school? There are so many ways to cater for gifted students that schools are often unsure where to start. To help schools identify what’s needed and know how to implement Gifted Education changes, Thinking Outside The Box professional education services is introducing a Free Gifted Education Health Check™.
How the Free Gifted Education Health Check™ works
You can contact Penny Willoughby to arrange for a one-hour school visit or Skype meeting with her in which this service will be provided. The school’s primary decision-makers and staff responsible for Gifted Education will need to be present at the consultation.
If you wish to book Penny for longer consultancy assignments, the Free Gifted Education Health Check™ can be used for the first hour.
Consulting Style
Penny’s style of consulting is to ‘Listen; first and foremost’. This means that before Penny begins to make recommendations about how to proceed, she will be keen to hear your thoughts and perception of what’s needed. Here is how the process usually works:
- Penny will ask you a range of questions to establish where the school is at and what your goals are.
- She will then discuss some suggestions about how to address your goals.
- You will then be in the position to make a decision about which ideas best suit your school.
Goals
Here are some of the goals that schools often state when they approach Penny about reinvigorating their Gifted Education activities:
- Develop staff skills to identify high-ability students
- Increase staff awareness of gifted students’ learning needs
- Know how to and actively cater for gifted students in mixed-ability classrooms
- Set up a targeted program for gifted students
- Plan for and implement school-wide Gifted Education
- Evaluate how well we cater for our gifted students and plan for improvements
Examples
Here are some examples of how schools have used Thinking Outside The Box professional education services for Gifted Education:
- A medium primary school in the outer Melbourne suburbs consulted with Penny to identify the best approaches for the school to cater for its gifted students. After the initial consultation, the school invited Penny back to present to staff on identifying and differentiating for gifted students in the classroom. At a later date, Penny returned to train a small group of staff how to design and run extension programs for gifted students.
- A secondary school with a small budget available, met with Penny to outline a broad range of approaches to improve the school’s provision for gifted students. The school began by having Penny run an introductory seminar about how to differentiate for a whole class in a way that catered for the gifted students. After this session the school implemented the remaining initiatives independently.
- An inner-city primary school consulted with Penny to focus on their high-ability students whose NAPLAN results were not progressing according to their abilities. The leadership team used the free consultation to work with Penny to design a series of hands-on workshops to be run by Penny. These workshops built staff skills in identifying, assessing and catering for highly-able students. This school focused on using open-ended questions and using Blooms’ Taxonomy to plan differentiated Maths programs for whole classes, and built in challenges that would extend their highly able children.
- A small inner-city primary school wished to implement school-wide Gifted Education consulted with Penny to audit the school’s current capabilities and gaps. They then worked with Penny to plan an intensive school-wide project that would grow into an example of best practice in Gifted Education.
Further Information
If you would like to enquire about the Free Gifted Education Health Check™, please contact Penny.