Why Gifted Education Needs Champions - podcast

This podcast for Pushing Boundaries pretty much sums up my educational philosophies and the changes I would like to see happen in our schools.

Todd Talks are professional development tutorials that are designed for teachers to gain an understanding of the topic as well as practical ways it can be used in the classroom. They are organized by topic with new ones being added all of the time.

Guidance for Parents of Gifted Children

My Child is Gifted…Now What? - what does it mean when your child is identified as gifted? What are your next steps?

5 Ways to Work With Your Gifted Child's Teacher - for parents of gifted children, teachers should have the same goal about a child which is ensure he or she is growing as a learner. This would seemingly put both of them on the same page but there are times parents and teachers find themselves at odds with one another.

What are some good books to read about raising gifted children? - as a parent of a gifted child you are probably discovering there are some different behaviors than might be in a typical child that parent books don't discuss.

5 Things Never to Say to Your Gifted Child - here are 5 of the things you should avoid saying to your gifted child and the reason you should not say them.

Over-excitabilities - some gifted students come with hypersensitivities. Learn what some of these might be.

Asynchronous Development - your child’s emotional and academic intelligence might not match up. Find out why.

5 things administrators should know about gifted - like a lot of people in education, many administrators have not had a lot of training in working with gifted students so have some preconceived notions about them.

Executive Functioning Skills

Overview of Executive Functioning Skills - Executive functioning skills are the things that successful people do on a daily basis which leads to their achievement. It includes skills such as task initiation, planning, attention, and time management.

Self Control/Regulation (Executive Functioning Skills) - are you unable to keep your emotions in check? Can you not resist the urge to do something when it tempts you? Do you find yourself blurting out answers the second they pop into your head? If the answer is yes to any of these you might have a self-control/self-regulation issues.

Perseverance/Grit (Executive Functioning Skills) - perseverance is the ability to follow through or to push through when faced with obstacles.

Flexibility (Executive Functioning Skills) - all of the other executive functioning skills do not really work if you are not flexible with your thinking. Your plans change, the time management is wrecked by an assembly, and trying to keep your focus might be affected by circumstances beyond your control.

Working Memory (Executive Functioning Skills) - in order to learn, we have to hold something in our minds at least long enough for us to apply it.

Focus (Executive Functioning Skills) - none of the other executive functioning skills work effectively if a student is not able to focus.

Metacognition (Executive Functioning Skills) - metacognition is an awareness of your own thoughts. But how do you teach students to be aware of this? You provide them structure to be able to think about their thinking.

Task initiation (Executive Functioning Skills) - you can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink. Similarly, you can give a student a task, but it doesn't mean they are going to get started on it.

Time Management (Executive Functioning Skills) - you can plan and organize yourself all you want, but if you are unable to manage the time you are allotted, nothing is going to get done.

Organization (Executive Functioning Skills) - there are many aspects to organization for a student at school. There is their schoolwork, their materials, their personal belongings, their time, and their thoughts.

Planning (Executive Functioning Skills) - We always expect students to have a plan, but do we always show them how to do it? What if we were more deliberate about teaching students how you plan out a long term project, or a study schedule for an upcoming test, or even their workload for the current day?

Depth and Complexity

Introduction to Depth and Complexity Framework - this is a learning platform developed at the California Department of Education that centers around 11 icons designed to push the thinking of students to the next level.

Trends (Depth and Complexity icon) - Trends are patterns over time. Why does something become popular? Why does it become unpopular? What causes some things to stand the test of time while others become outdated in weeks? We can try our best to predict these trends and anticipate what is going to happen.

Multiple Perspectives (Depth and Complexity icon) - It is often said that there are two sides to every story. In reality, there are as many sides to the story as there were people present. Yet the story is usually only told from one of these perspectives.

Unanswered Questions (Depth and Complexity icon) - Often in school, students are presented with questions that they are expected to find a correct answer to. This could be a math problem, how to spell a word, the name of a figure, event, or date in history, or how sounds waves work.

Ethics (Depth and Complexity icon) - ethics are the gray areas we encounter when looking at a situation. For example, it is wrong to shout in the classroom. In fact, it is a rule. But what if someone injured themselves and you needed to yell for help? Wouldn't that make you action justified?

Rules (Depth and Complexity icon) - rules are fairly simple aren't they? You either can do something or you can't. And if you break a rule, there are consequences or punishments that might follow. But it is not that simple.

Big Idea (Depth and Complexity icon) - what's the big idea? We often ask this question. The big idea is what you are supposed to get or be learning from something. These are sometimes called essential questions or learning objectives, but ultimately the big idea is what it all boils down to.

Patterns (Depth and Complexity icons) - in this video we will discuss how students can look for patterns in academics, in sports, and in their own lives in order to try and predict the most probable outcome.

Details - the devil is in the details and this couldn't be more true. Details are what allow people to fully understand something and without them, something may get lost.

Over Time - 1 of the 11 icons in the Depth and Complexity thinking framework, this is a complexity icon that takes a look at how things change (and sometimes do not) change over a given period of time.

Language of the Discipline - 1 of the 11 icons in the Depth and Complexity thinking framework, Language of the Discipline means helping students to understand the context of the language being used. What might mean one thing in one discipline might change in another.

Using Higher-Level Questions to Challenge Student Thinking

Creating a Culture for Higher-Level Questioning in the Classroom: if you want to challenge students with higher-level questioning in your classroom, you have to set the proper culture.

How to ask higher level questions - if you want to raise the rigor in your classroom and ensure that you are teaching to the level of the standard, you need to be able to ask higher level questions of your students.

Bloom's Taxonomy - Benjamin Bloom created a taxonomy for the various levels of questioning and thinking back in 1953. Now, 70 years later his taxonomy still very much resonates in the classrooms of the 21st century.

Probing or Follow-Up Questions - Asking a good question is essential, but even more important is the question you follow it up with. This is a good way to raise the rigor in your classroom and get students thinking beyond just the most obvious answer or the surface level one.

Authentic Learning Strategies

Inquiry-Based Learning - What if we let the students be responsible for most of the learning in class? That is the basic premise behind inquiry-based learning where the content is not given to the kids by the teacher but rather generated and discovered on their own.

Problem-Based Learning - One of the strategies under the inquiry-based learning umbrella, problem-based learning seeks to make the learning authentic for students and to help them see the context of what it is they are learning.

Case-Based Learning - Concluding the theme of inquiry learning, this Todd Talk looks at case-based learning, a method used widely in the medical and law professions but not used very commonly in US primary schools.

Steps to Project-Based Learning - Projects put students in a real-world setting and ask them to complete a task meeting the requirements as laid out by the project. Projects teach students how to learn for themselves.

Collaboration/Successful Group Work

Student Collaboration - When working in groups, students can create wonderful things, things they would not have been able to produce on their own. But working in groups can also be a pain. How do you get students to successfully collaborate while working in groups?
Forming Group Norms - It is essential that everyone is one the same page and has the same expectations while working together in a group. One way to ensure this is to have the class or group form norms. Norms are the expected behavior of people in the groups.
Roles in Group Work - When students are tasked to work in groups and accomplish a task, we often worry more about equity rather than fairness. Equity would be that everyone in the group does the same type of work and the same amount of work.

Self/Peer Evaluations - How can you get a better idea of a student's contributions to his group when collaborating? Ask those who are working with him to tell you.

Measure What Matters

Teachers provide you with a rubric and you tuck it away in your folder never to see the light of day. You are missing a prime opportunity because the teacher has given you a blueprint for how to be successful. All you have to do is the answer the rubric.

Teaching is a lot of work and sometimes we want to take the easy way out. This usually does not result in quality learning. Same goes when making rubrics. You should not rely on an on-line program such as Rubistar if you want to have meaningful, personalized, objective rubrics.

Creating Rubrics - Rubrics are a valuable way for teachers to assess students in non-traditional, performance-based assessments, many of which require students to employ 21st century skills.

Measure What Matters with your WEPs - in the state of Ohio we are required to write Written Education Plans (WEPs) for any student receiving gifted services. Part of this plan is setting goals. But how do you measure skills? This is possible and this video shows you how you can write WEP goals that allow you to measure what matters.

Common Gifted Terms Explained

Acceleration versus Enrichment - these are two terms you will often hear in relation to gifted students and how we challenge them. Acceleration is about pace and moving through the material more quickly because the understanding is happening faster. Enrichment is the about depth.

Overexcitabilities - Overexcitabilities are when someone becomes overwhelmed with their social and emotional needs. This may present itself in psychomotor, sensual, intellectual, imaginational, and emotional. This can lead to all sorts of difficulties when it comes to learning.

Asynchronous development means that a child's academic levels are moving at a different pace than his maturity levels. This happens often with gifted children who can think of a complex solution but don't know how to hold the pencil to write down the idea.

Differentiation in Gifted - differentiation is one of those educational terms we throw around and believe it to be the solution to all of our problems. If we have students of varying abilities in our classroom, simply differentiate.

Raising the Rigor

Raising the Rigor - We often talk about raising the rigor in the classroom but do you really know what that looks like? This Todd Talk will help you to distinguish between a hard question and a rigorous one as well as providing a framework for how to raise the rigor for your students.
Teaching to the Level of the Standard - As teachers we are charged with teaching students the content standards as determined by Common Core, Next Generation Science, or state created standards.

Raising the rigor of your tests, worksheets, and homework - This Todd Talk will provide tips, examples, and ideas for taking assessments, worksheets, homework, or virtual tasks, and raising the rigor of the questions by adapting them to higher order thinking.

Often times we know how to differentiate down to meet the needs of a student who is struggling, but what about differentiating up for a student who needs challenged?

Meaningful Assessment

Grading the Process - We traditionally grade students at the end of learning, usually in a summative assessment designed to determine whether students have mastered what it is we wanted them to have learned.

Students as Teachers - What can make an assessment meaningful? By having students involved in the process. The more you include them in the learning process the better change students will reach an enduring understanding.

Performance Assessment - When it comes to measuring what students have learned, there are more choices than the traditional assessments of multiple choice.

Capstones - Capstones are an excellent way to assess students meaningfully by reflecting on what they have learned. They can be set up various ways but are typically long-term projects that encapsulate what was learned.

Ways of Grouping Gifted Students for Service

Magnet Programs - There are lots of different ways to group gifted students. One of these is through a magnet program where students are pulled from all over to one location.

Push-In or Co-Teaching Gifted - Another strategy for the grouping of gifted students is the use of the gifted specialist as a co-teaching where they push into the regular education classroom, providing specialized services for gifted students.
Gifted Pull Out - Another method of grouping gifted students is the use of a gifted pullout or resource room. This is when you take a group of students identified as gifted in a certain area and pull them from the regular classroom in order to work with a gifted specialist.
Cluster Grouping - Cluster grouping is a method for gifted services where you cluster all of the gifted students in a particular subject area into one classroom. You then fill the rest of the classroom with above average and average students.

Social and Emotional Needs

Social and Emotional Learning - Sure, schools do a pretty decent job of addressing the academic needs of their students, but how much attention is paid to helping these children meet their social and emotional needs?

Developing Grit in Gifted Children - Grit is the ability for someone to push through when things get difficult or challenging. This can be a skill that is particularly difficult to develop in gifted students because early in their lives, things aren't that difficult.

Teaching Empathy - How do you teach empathy in your classroom? That is the question for this week's Todd Talk. Strategies as complex as community service projects and reading books about sympathy, to more simple ones such as having students work in groups or modeling kind behavior yourself, can be used to help students understand what empathy is and to practice using it.
Advisory Groups - Sometimes the best way to discuss the social and emotional needs of students is to actually sit down and talk about their social and emotional needs. This requires carving out some time in the school day/week to do this.

21st Century Skills

Teaching Leadership - With many 21st century skills, we provide students with engaging lessons and hope for the best. We need to be more purposeful about the teaching of 21st century skills.

Teaching Creativity - We ask students to be creative all of the time but are we explicitly teaching our students how to be creative by giving them assignments that lets them access their creative thinking?

Teaching Public Speaking - A valuable 21st century skill for any student to possess. How do you teach public speaking though? 1) You provide exemplar speeches to learn from as well as poor ones. 2) You provide students with the space.

Teaching Problem Solving - The ability to problem solve is a skill that is greatly valued in the real-world because that is what life is, a series of problems that must be solved.

Underachievement

Underachievement - Underachievement is when a student is not working to their potential. This affects 10 to 50% of our gifted students, the ones with the highest potential, and can have long-term affects on their lives.

Goal Valuation - The best way to combat student underachievement is to have a good understanding of what goal valuation is. Goal valuation is the value a student puts on three goals to determine whether they are going to achieve at the level they are capable of.
Strategies for Reversing Underachievement - Once you identify the cause of a student's underachievement, what can you do to help with it? This Todd Talk discusses several strategies that can be used in the classroom to allow students to reach their potential.
The Caring Factor - In this Todd Talk I talk about one of the most important things teachers can do to make an impact on their students and that is to show you care. I call this the caring factor and it displays itself not only in academics, but in social/emotional needs as well.

Academic Extra-Curricular Competitions

Academic Extra-Curricular Competitions - Athletes are not the only group of students who can compete using their skills. There are academic extra-curricular competitions where students use their academic skills.

Model United Nations - A great academic extra curricular activity, Model United Nations involves taking part in a simulation where you represent a country and discuss and debate global issues.

Invention League - this Todd Talk discusses Invention League (also known as Invention Convention). In this, a student takes a problem and tries to invent something that will help with it.

Destination Imagination - Academic extra-curriculars allows students to not only display their cognitive abilities, but their creativity as well. One such program is Destination Imagination.

Keeping Students Focused

Creating an Effective Syllabus - Often on long term projects it can be a challenge to keep students focused on what it is they are supposed to be learning. One tool to help with this is the use of a well written syllabus.

Student contracts - Student contracts can be useful for a few reasons. It keeps students organized, it makes them part of the learning process, and it helps them to maintain focus, especially on long-term projects.

Using Calendars to Maintain Focus - It can be difficult for students to maintain focus, especially on long-term projects. One of the tools you can use to help keep students on-task is the use of a calendar.

Graphic Organizers - if you are seeking to focus your students, look no further than a good graphic organizer. As its name states, this is a graphic that helps students to organize their thoughts as well as helping them see connections and relationships.

How Intelligence Works

What is Intelligence and Does It Matter? - How do we determine a person's intelligence? For better or worse we give someone a test and assign them a number. These tests attempt to determine how well a person reasons or thinks logically.

Exercising the Brain - The brain is just like a muscle that needs exercised regularly if it is going to develop and get stronger. How you can exercise the brain is by cognitively challenging it using puzzles. Puzzles such as SuDoku, brainteasers, logic puzzles, cryptograms, and riddles can cause one to think and thus exercise the brain.

Zone of Proximal Development - just like Goldilocks, there are things that are too easy to learn and others that are too hard. And you want students where things are just right, where they need a little guidance because they are learning something that is challenging. This is known as the zone of proximal development.

Mindset in the Classroom - We often talk about changing our mindsets, but what exactly does that mean? What is the difference between a fixed and growth mindset? How do you encourage students to have a growth mindset in the classroom?

Creating a Suitable Learning Environment

Classroom setup - Are you being purposeful about the way you physically set up your classroom? Is this setup conducive to your students being able to best learn?

It's OK to Fail - Some of life's biggest lessons comes from the mistakes we make. We do something, it does not work, and we learn what to do differently the next time.

Reflection in the Classroom - The traditional method of teaching is introduce something, have students practice it, and assess whether they have gotten it. What is missing here is the additional layer or step of reflecting upon what was learned.

Organized Chaos - Which classroom do you think has the most learning going on; the one where students are compliantly sitting in rows, being talked to by the teacher, or the one where they are involved in the learning process but are loud and it seems like chaos?

When Students Go On Breaks

1st Days of School - The 1st day of school is the one day of the year where all students are excited to be there. We should be taking advantage of this by doing activities with them that are engaging, fun, and help them to foster their love of learning.
5 Things to Do Before Holiday Break that are Better than Showing a Movie - That last day before the holiday break is usually a throwaway day where no teaching or learning takes place. Typically students are shown movies and sit passively for the day.
Helping Students Have a Meaningful Spring Break - Unlike the day before winter or summer break, the final day before spring break is usually a typical day. Are there things you could be suggesting to students though to make their experience of spring break more meaningful?
The Last Week of School - Schools are places where learning is supposed to happen, and yet often times with a week left to go before summer break, many classrooms choose not to teach any more. We should be taking advantage of this captive audience to try and get some learning in before they aren't doing it for three months.

Teaching in a Virtual Setting

Enrichment in a Virtual Setting - How do you challenge or enrich students in a virtual setting? What strategies can be used to best meet the needs of student...
Differentiation in a Virtual Setting - Differentiation, which is offering students different assignments/questions/assessments/etc. depending on their abilit...
Connections in a Virtual Classroom - it can be difficult in a virtual classroom to make those personal connections with students that are so valuable to the ...
SEL in a Virtual Environment - The emotional intelligence of your students can be just as, if not more important, than the academic intelligence they possess...
PBL in a Virtual Setting - With some districts switching to a hybrid version of school or even a full-time virtual setting, the logical question is how to de...