Teaching the gifted amid budget cuts

Teaching the gifted amid budget cuts

By Shari Rudavsky, Globe Correspondent, 12/1/2002

FRAMINGHAM - The Dixie cup half-filled with water sitting on the classroom table tantalizes Shelly Pires. Peering into it, the second-grader announces repeatedly, ''I'm very curious about what we're going to do.''

In another classroom, Shelly's desire to know might be construed as childish impatience. But in teacher Eileen MacQueen's classroom - where gifted and talented children like Shelly spend three hours a week - such curiosity is fostered.

Across the state, programs for gifted and talented children have become the victim of state budget cuts. And while conventional wisdom may hold that these children will succeed with no special services - after all, aren't they gifted? - educators insist such students need as much tailored curricula as special education students.

Without sufficient challenge in class, educators said, gifted students may grow bored and they don't always earn the best grades.

''If you have an athlete, the athlete is very well funded but if you have a mathlete, you don't have funding for that child,'' said Carole Ruth Harris, director of Gifted and Talented Educational Services, a private evaluation and counseling service in Winchester.

Since gifted education programs have been criticized as elitist, educators are advocating ability grouping or differentiation, in which the gifted student stays in a regular classroom while other means to challenge him or her are provided.

Take, for example, MacQueen's class at Woodrow Wilson Elementary School in Framingham. On a recent afternoon, she read aloud a Santa mystery for her four students to solve.

When third-grader Schnardein Duffaut blurted out in the middle that the culprit was one of the elves, Shelly corrected him: ''Good detectives don't jump to conclusions.''

MacQueen interjected gently, ''He's not jumping to conclusions. He's making a hypothesis.''

The class then tested the hypothesis, performing chromatography on a note left by the bad guy to match his penmanship to that of the suspects, including some elves. ''Most of us are very curious, we're very smart, and we discuss things,'' said Schnardein, 8, extolling the program's virtues. ''When I step into the door I never know what's going to be going on.''

It might sound like fun and games, but the program tries to offer a framework through which its students can learn, said Diane Modest, director of Sage, Framingham's gifted program, which services about 700 students.

''Gifted and talented education is not your goody for eating your vegetable,'' she said. ''There's a very big difference between complexity of content and the cognitive complexity. What this service focuses on is the cognitive complexity that sparks learning.''

Educational specialists say that teaching learning skills and encouraging natural curiosity is what gifted education is all about. While such tactics can work well with all students, gifted students will particularly thrive on it.

''This inductive learning is much more oriented toward providing young people with the kinds of skills that are used to generate new knowledge,'' said Joseph Renzulli, director of the National Research Center for the Gifted and Talented at the University of Connecticut. ''That, to me, is where gifted programs are qualitatively different.''

Such learning can, however, go on within the context of the regular classroom. After consulting with gifted education specialists, a classroom teacher can amend a lesson plan to accommodate several levels of learning, specialists say.

Accelerating the lesson alone will not do the trick. Instead, a teacher may give students who have mastered a math lesson a more challenging set of questions on the same topic while their peers learn the basics. Or such students may read a more advanced book on a topic being covered in class while the rest of the class tackles a simpler book.

However, this model requires having a specialist, or ''traffic director'' as Renzulli says, to guide the classroom teacher and identify other ways to challenge the student. In Massachusetts, such trained specialists are becoming rarer, advocates of gifted education fear. Even in Framingham, a town committed to gifted education, the program has been scaled back to start in second grade rather than kindergarten.

''The problem is that they're cutting them back altogether and the classroom teacher is left to fend for herself. She's already drowning so much that this is the one thing she doesn't get to,'' said Beverly Quilty-Dunn, director of Plymouth's gifted program and organizer of the recent New England Conference on Gifted and Talented Education.

While the adults worry over the future of gifted education, Woodrow Wilson third-grader Nathan Alvord, 8, relishes the hours he spends each week with MacQueen. ''I like everything we do here because it has a lot of skills with creative thinking and I have a lot of creative thinking,'' he said. ''We don't do much creative thinking in class.''