On 10/06/09, curious wrote:
> How is "gifted" designation determined at your school,
> especially at the primary level. Is a test used and is
> there a program in place? Can a class arbitrarily be
> labeled "gifted"?

It's determined by testing - usually here the Stanford Binet.
There is a pullout program in place.

Anything's possible - I suppose a class could arbitrarily be
labeled gifted - I had so many gifted kids in my homeroom
once that it would have been largely accurate to call them
gifted and alter their instruction accordingly.

That's a big part of it - gifted education has two things
going for it when it's real. One - the kids. A room full of
gifted kids will be different and a child in that room will
get a LOT of intellectual stimulation from the other kids in
the class - a teacher can almost sit back and let the class
be - gifted kids teach themselves pretty well.

But ideally there should be a different curriculum or
certainly a very different approach to the curriculum for
gifted kids. But also - that's not always the case by any
means. Some gifted programs are simply the regular program
with more work thrown in. Some gifted programs are simply the
regular program but moved along at a faster pace.

Gifted education doesn't really have any commonly agreed upon
definition of what it should be and school are fairly free to
do pretty much anything - or nothing - and call it 'gifted'.

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