The "University/Local Education Agency Gifted Education Collaborative"

• In Event: 25.058 - Challenging All Advanced Learners: Research Insights From Projects Funded by the Jacob K. Javits Program

Abstract

The “University/LEA Gifted Education Collaborative” (blinded) study was designed to evaluate a collaboration model for establishing comprehensive gifted education program services in a school district in the Midwest. A collaborative team composed of university researchers, talent development specialists, and district administrators have met regularly for the past two years to engage in a number of program development activities. As part of this collaboration, the team developed an identification protocol for mainstream gifted learners for cluster classrooms as well as for twice exceptional (2E), culturally diverse (CD), English learners, and economically disadvantaged learners with high intellectual or academic potential, students known as Rising Scholars. The team also designed comprehensive professional development experiences for teachers and principals and designed differentiated curriculum and program management systems to address the needs of at-risk, Rising Scholars learners and district “mainstream” gifted learners. This study focused on the impact a collaborative approach to finding and supporting underrepresented populations might effect. It is clear that neither university researchers, armed with research, nor a LEA, armed with local and state policy guidelines, are sufficient in developing defensible systems unless the two institutions work together to resolve theoretical and practical issues.
Quantitative and qualitative data from a several stakeholders are being collected and analyzed for this study. This paper focuses on the outcomes from professional development (PD) with teachers. A questionnaire for assessing teachers’ attitudes about giftedness, disadvantaged gifted learners, and general teaching philosophy, My Perceptions of Teaching, was developed and administered to teachers three times during the project. This group of professionals (n = 30) were engaged in graduate level coursework in gifted and underserved gifted education certificates. The same instrument was used to measure perceptions of a larger group of teachers (n = 66) who received regular in-service training. The instrument consisted of four constructs: (1) current philosophy of teaching; (2) perceptions of current students taught; (3) frequency for using evidence-based instructional differentiation strategies in teaching; and (4) perceptions of gifted learners and giftedness. An additional survey was administered to the latter group of teachers for each in-service workshop they attended. For in-service teacher participants, the Professional Development Questionnaire was administered at the end of each workshop session, providing six rounds of data. This instrument asks participants to describe: (1) the contents and activities that “should” occur in an ideal PD session, and (2) the contents and activities that actually did occur in the PD session just completed. For the Perceptions of Teaching inventory, there were marked differences in growth rate or positive perceptions of gifted learners and giftedness between the certificate participants and the workshop participants. Growth, as measured by effect size and non-parametric statistical analyses, was consistently more positive from course to course for certificate participants than for workshop participants, who tended to remain fairly even across each administration. For the Professional Development Questionnaire, the results across the six administrations suggested a positive trend toward teacher realization that the theoretical, ideal PD session might prove helpful as their knowledge via individual PD sessions increased.

Authors

• Karen L. Westberg, University of Saint Thomas

• Karen Beckstead Rogers, University of Saint Thomas