How can we measure student growth in our gifted and talented programs? If you’re like many teachers, we share anecdotal evidence along with our sense of how much our students have grown in the academic, creative and psychosocial aspects we seek to develop. But when budgets are feeling pressure, how can we advocate for the efficacy of a gifted program to outsiders or even our own administration?
The NAGC 2019 Gifted Standards recommends, “us[ing] the 2019 Programming Standards to conduct an internal analysis of the comprehensiveness and defensibility of your plans/program at this point in
time.” In short, measure the efficacy of your program against NAGC programming standards. Yet inside of that task remains the need to measure student growth within the gifted program shaped by those standards.
In the latest Texas Association for Gifted & Talented (TAGT) podcast featuring Celeste Sodergren, Director of Advanced Academics in the Waco, Texas, Independent School Distirct (WISD), she explores the need to map specific projects to skill development, with each skill rolling up to a larger skill set. For example, the Texas State Plan focuses on self-directed learning, thinking, research and communication across the curriculum. And to take communication as an example, Sodergren identifies subsets of skills beyond a simple presentation such as the ability to communicate in a group, leadership, verbal acuity, and listening comprehension to inform responses and student dialogue. Just as a baseball player focuses on an effective swing in one practice and stealing bases in another, we need to link projects to each of those specific skills, which then coalesce into the broader “communication” goal.
A key tool in their district is the student rubric for students to self-assess within the specific part of each skill set, “to understand where they are and how they can plan for their future,” Sodergren explains. This also helps the teachers take a high level view of where they need to spend more time and provide a variety of approaches. And finally, this rubric allows the administrators to have data on growth within each skill set.
Sodergren notes that her district is just now rolling out this skill-driven, outcomes-based program, designed to provide details on student growth, strengths and weaknesses. I hope that at the 2024 TAGT conference Waco Independent School District will share their results from this approach.
This TAGT September 20, 2023, podcast is well worth a listen as they discuss Sodergren’s plans for her students’ futures and how we can direct our pedagogical practices to support their growth in concrete ways.
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