Promoting PLACE in Rural Schools

• In Event: Federally Funded Projects in Gifted and Talented Education: Findings, Challenges, and Lessons Learned

Abstract

As we sought to implement an innovative identification and curricular option for historically under-represented students from low-income rural schools, we encountered a series of challenges stemming from four sources. The first was a “firm” set of beliefs about “giftedness” and how students should be selected. This presented a major challenge in obtaining agreement to use alternative strategies (i.e., local norms) for identifying and placing students in gifted services. The second was the reality of poorly resourced schools, some with only one teacher of the gifted serving seven or eight sites and/or teachers in the general education classrooms being tasked with instruction without having been privileged the resources to understand the learning characteristics of those students or the pedagogical skills to address their learning needs. Without adequate resources for gifted education, general education teachers were unfamiliar with enrichment strategies designed for the gifted learning; thus leading to the third challenge: low expectations teachers held of their students which created a challenge in getting teachers to implement the curriculum with fidelity. The final challenge was also related to fidelity: the oppressive influence of state assessments and their influence in dictating curriculum and instruction across classrooms.
To address the first challenge, we cultivated trusting relationships with those responsible for gifted education programming and the administrators who led instructional decision-making. We also used pilot data as evidence to demonstrate the effectiveness in identifying alternative pools of students who were successful in the classroom where the curriculum was being offered and used teacher-testimony to increase credibility about the quality of the curriculum. In addition, in preparing teachers for their role in the identification process, we used multiple examples and elicited the teachers’ first-hand accounts of the ways giftedness might manifest in rural communities. For the second challenge, we did not have the funds to address personnel shortages nor the access to develop content expertise directly through extended staff development; therefore, we built extensive direction for implementation (e.g. ways to group based on formative assessments included in the curricular documents, explanations of concepts) to ensure their understanding of the curriculum was complete and made implementation viable. We also adapted each unit to the specific community in which the curriculum was being implemented by varying literature and resources used to teach concepts and to make activities relevant to the students in the project. To increase fidelity, we used data from the pilot district (e.g., examples of student products) to raise teacher expectations of what the students might accomplish as a result of participation in the project. Finally, we included the specific standards from the state language arts requirements with each lesson so teachers could feel comfortable that their students would be learning the skills and content necessary for success on the state assessments. In this presentation we will elaborate on the challenges to implementation and the approaches we used in addressing those challenges in conjunction with the results of the implementation (fidelity and student outcomes).

Authors

• Carolyn M. Callahan, University of Virginia

• Amy Price Azano, Virginia Tech