PVSchools' gifted education curriculum complies with District curriculum guides and with state standards mandated by the Arizona State Board of Education.
Gifted Education staff use the following guidelines for instruction of gifted students.
Gifted students receive instruction that is differentiated in content, process, product, learning environment, and assessment.
Gifted students require a mathematics curriculum that not only challenges their current abilities but also pushes them into new realms of understanding. This type of differentiation is best provided through an acceleration model that allows students to demonstrate mastery of grade-level standards and move through the curriculum receiving instruction at their challenge levels.
Students in grades K-4 are provided this challenge through the Gifted Cluster Grouping model. This setting allows the gifted cluster teachers to pretest mastery of grade-level mathematics standards and instruct students at the level appropriate to their learning needs.
Through the Gifted Content Replacement model, gifted students in grades 4-6 are provided the opportunity to engage with a challenging curriculum that is one or more years beyond their current grade, as needed.
Language is not just the expression; it is the essence of understanding. The Gifted Literature curriculum consists of four key components:
These four components allow gifted students to extend their understanding of language beyond the literal and inferential into the realm of evaluative analysis. Students in grades 4-6 are given the opportunity to expand and enhance their understanding through Content Replacement. Students in grades K-4 are presented with challenging vocabulary and text through the Schoolwide Cluster Grouping Model.
The adoption of the Arizona Career and Readiness Standards significantly impacts the education of all students, including gifted and high-potential learners. For decades, best practices in education have evolved from gifted education.
This has occurred because in gifted education, we are continually seeking methods for challenging students to go beyond the basic understandings and move into deeper levels of understanding. The move toward Common Core standards reflects this practice on a large scale as they derive from instructional practices and strategies educators have been using in gifted education for decades.
Gifted education in PVSchools focuses on interdisciplinary concepts, critical thinking skills, and problem-solving across domains. With implementation of Common Core, we will continue to differentiate for gifted learners within a set of standards that are reasonably rigorous in each subject.
We recognize the importance of continuing to accommodate the needs of gifted learners and provide the additional rigor and challenge these students require for making continual progress. The standards also encourage us to move beyond acceleration methods to provide enrichment and critical thinking throughout all of the content areas. We address this by ensuring that there are open-ended opportunities to meet the standards through multiple pathways, more complex thinking applications, and real-world problem-solving contexts. New assessments will drive the instructional process. Gifted learners will be assessed through performance-based and portfolio techniques that are based on higher-level learning outcomes.
Rigorous curriculum demands that the students:
