Suchergebnisse

In the last decades, interest in instructional process has drawn the attention of linguists to classroomdiscourse studies (Lee, 2007; Chen, 2007; Hall, 2007; Macbeth, 2004). Such growing attention hasbeen attributed to the importance associated with verbal discourse in meaning making (Chin, 2006).Chin further notes that a common ground available in the literature on pedagogical discourse is thethree-turn sequence interaction called "triadic dialogue" (Lemke, 1990 cited in Macbeth, 2004), orInitiation Response Evaluation (IRE) (Menham ,1979 cited in Chin, 2006), or Initiation ResponseFeedback (IRF) (Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975 cited in Macbeth, 2004). In other words, a classroominteraction primarily comprise of three actions: the teacher's initiation of questions, learners'responses', and the teacher's feedback on the correctness of the responses. The three-part move in aclassroom discourse provides teachers the opportunity to ask questions which require predeterminedlow- order cognitive level short answers (Chin, 2006).

Six experienced teachers in the regular classroom, who happen to have one, or more students that wasidentified by the school as having gifted characteristics or students that teachers felt should have beenidentified as a gifted student, develop their way of helping students overcome personal challenges. It isour hope that a research documented approach will catch the eye of other teachers and motivate themto do the same. Each teacher documented research as it relates to his/her student(s). In the absence ofa school identification process, other researched identification processes served as benchmark forteacher support. Following are case study reports as developed by each teacher…

Gifted students continue to struggle in class because they are restricted to learning the standardcurriculum (Clark, 2002). Gifted learners cannot be confined to a proficient level of education andtherefore the need to advocate on their behalf continues. Not only can the need be recognized by thosein the classroom, but also by those outside of the classroom with an interest in gifted and talentededucation.(Douglas, 2004) (Kaplan, Summer 2004) Each year the students that are enrolled in giftedand talented programs are asked to do an advocacy for gifted and talented education. They take ondifferent approaches with the majority of them building on a personal teaching experience (Grant,2002). While writing from three different approaches, three teacher-students captured the totality of theneeds of gifted students as you will see in the following examples.

The National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) and the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC)have jointly developed standards for the review of NAGC. These standards will be presented to theNCATE for adoption. If you are interested in reviewing the program standards and offering suggestionsbefore they are presented for adoption, please click on the URL below.The standards may be accessed at: http://www.nagc.org/index.aspx?id=1512 .These standards were evaluated by teachers enrolled in summer University graduate in the area ofgifted education scheduled at the University of Houston. Comments are modified verbatim text.Teachers were asked to select one or more standards and give their professional reaction to theselected standard (s). Some teachers made recommendations such as additions or deletions thatwould strengthen the standards. Some teacher respondents selected more than one standard in theirresponses.

The majority of regular classroom teachers (i.e. those with no experience teaching gifted and talented students) have had little or no exposure to gifted education in college courses or in-service training. With this in mind, a thirty-clock hour, community-based ethnic in-service was developed to teach research-based theory and practices skills in five gifted student needs areas. The teacher skill areas were: (a) nature and needs of gifted and talented students, (b) identification and assessment of gifted and talented students, (c) social and emotional needs, (d) differentiated curriculum, and (e) creativity and instructional strategies for gifted and talented students. A pre/post teacher self-evaluation was used to identify skills needed and skills achieved. The reading for this in-service focused on twenty research articles advocating the above skills for gifted and talented students. Two literature searches were completed. Ten articles focused on the research participants who were students in the general population and ten of the research participants were Hispanic-American students. Ethnic group identity was an important factor to this in-service process…..because the authors felt that teachers and students in the school felt a closer relationship to research when research participants were of the same ethnic group as the in-service participants. Another identify factor to this in-service was that one of the three presenters spoke their language. A verbal pre-post self evaluation helped each teacher identify skills needed and skills achieved. A paper/pencil pre-post picture of each teacher's classroom helped teachers see how they accommodated for different learning rates differences before and after the in-service. Each six-hour, working-lunch, day teachers discussed one of the skill areas and constantly referred to their research for answers to their questions. The in-service facilitators served as guides-on-the-side. Teachers discussed their pre-post feeling and cited pre-post classroom examples for each of the five skill areas as they happened in their classroom and compared what they did with in the research.