So one of the things that is keeping me busy these days is reading Comprehensive Curriculum of Gifted Learners by Joyce VanTassel-Baska.
This is an over 400 page book and I am only 40 pages into it. But since nothing much happened with Z and homeschooling today (except that she had almost finished Pinocchio, which she just started this morning) I thought I would share some of my notes from this books.
More able learners do better with less structure and less able learners do better with more. Structure here refers to the level of prior cognitive organization by the teacher and the degree of explanation and description of concepts during the instruction process. The teacher can predigest and present new material with didactic finality, or the teacher can do less predigesting and leave much of the structure and organization of new content to be organized by students. Gifted and talented children thrive with the latter approach.
This made me wonder about a highly able PG kid who is who is radically accelerated. Would they, at that point, still be considered "more able learners" given that the materials they are working on are at an appropriately challenging level?
and
Curriculum for the gifted should stress the importance of developing large and well -organized knowledge bases gained from reading, lectures, and discussion, as well as direct observational experience in research and analysis. The teacher should encourage analyzing, conceptualizing, and synthesizing activities to facilitate the development of well-organized knowledge bases.
Additional lessons are derived from the emphasis on problem - solving experiences. On aspect of such experiences is deriving skill in analyzing and classifying problem situations, especially as in case study analysis, laboratory experiments, and inquiry- discovery encounters with complex and abstract phenomena.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Sarah
They actually address those things very well.
Regarding a "large organized knowledge base":
What they are meaning by that is that gifted students have an ability to pull information together from different domain and "synthesis" it and come up with new ideas.
They are also talking about the idea of the "great conversation" or the great ideas of mankind and how it is good for gifted kids to be introduced to that "conversation" because they, of all people maybe able to understand it and add to it.
There is more I could say on it, but that will have to be at a later time.
Post a Comment