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:
- Go more deeply into content.
- Explore the complex nature of the content.
- Consciously include thinking skills in daily activities.
- Explore project-based activities.
- Connect to both the world of the student and the teacher.
- Learn strategies more than answers.
- Understand how to ask the right kinds of questions.
- Think creatively with agility.
- Bring adaptable skills to the market.
- Communicate efficiently and effectively through various modalities.
- Access, analyze, and evaluate information.