The Centre for Talented Youth, Ireland - Parents & Teachers. CTY Ireland is the only dedicated Centre in the country serving the needs of young people with high academic ability. The Centre provides enrichment courses to help stimulate and challenge those students who fall into the top 5th percentile. (The Centre also provides courses for bright and motivated students). Based in DCU, over 35,000 students have accessed CTYI courses since its establishment in 1992. Colm O’Reilly is Director at the Centre for Talented Youth, Ireland. Prevalence When people think of high academic ability, they immediately think of a prodigy like Mozart, or Einstein, Picasso or Bill Gates. At CTYI we are looking for students whose verbal or numerical ability places them in the 95th percentile. Benefits of CTYI Programmes The courses at CTYI allow students to learn at a level that is more appropriate to their academic ability.
CTYI courses for high ability students have many benefits. CTYI gives students greater focus and motivation. How do you get a student involved? Technology. Inclusion in the 21st-century classroom: Differentiating with technology - Reaching every learner: Differentiating instruction in theory and practice. In this video, students in a gifted classroom use the multi-user learning environment Quest Atlantis to explore issues related to the creation of a game reserve in Tanzania.
Interviews with the teacher and students offer perspectives on the value of using virtual worlds in the classroom . About the videoDownload video (Right-click or option-click) The diversity of the 21st-century classroom creates numerous challenges for teachers who may not have known the same diversity themselves as students. Among these, teachers must balance the requirements of high-stakes accountability while meeting the needs of diverse students within their classroom. While many teachers express frustration over high-stakes accountability standards, they acknowledge pressure to “teach to the test,” fearing non-proficient scores, dissatisfaction from school administrators, and in smaller systems, the potential risk of embarrassment when scores are made public.
Differentiation as effective instruction VoiceThread. Gifted and talented education: using technology to engage students | Teacher Network. Here we have collated some highlights and links from our recent live chat, in association with IGGY, that explored the role of technology in gifted education. To read the discussion in full, click here. Jackie Swift (@jactherat), head of English at a London secondary school, was the G&T co-ordinator at her previous school and has blogged for the Guardian Teacher Network on gifted and talented pupils: Just what is gifted and talented? Do gifted and talented pupils need gifted and talented teachers?
I agree that G&T students do need exceptional teachers, ones who don’t feel threatened by them, who are open to being challenged beyond the usual and open to many things. Indeed a multi-subject specialist of some sort would fit the bill. G&T students too often coast and we must push and stretch them. Ian Warwick, senior director, London Gifted and Talented The idea of gifted students being only from middle class or wealthy backgrounds is a classic misconception.
Links, videos and blog posts: Connecting and challenging the world's brightest young minds - IGGY. Front Matter | Minority Students in Special and Gifted Education. Reading teachers. Reid Lyon and Margot Malakoff of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development shared with the committee materials they had pulled together for a study of Head Start. A special thanks to Janet Garton, who provided extensive research assistance and substantial support in attending to the detail required for accuracy throughout the report. Leah Nower spent a productive summer internship at the NRC providing research assistance for the project. The committee also benefited considerably from the research contributions provided to individual committee members by Vicki Marie Nishioka, University of Oregon at Eugene, Elizabeth Cramer, University of Miami, Kathleen Lane, Vanderbilt University, and John Hosp, Vanderbilt University.
Over the course of the two and a half years, the committee’s work was supported by three senior project assistants. The role of technology in gifted and talented education - live chat | Teacher Network. Are you familiar with the ZPD theory? I've just come across it, thanks to the Irish Gifted Education blog by Dazzled and Frazzled (otherwise known as Catherine Riordan and Karen McCarthy). For those as new to the theory as I am, ZPD, aka the zone of proximal development, was coined by Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, famous for his work into the development of cognitive skills in children.
Giving (to me, at least) greater clarity to the saying "in the zone", ZPD is the space between a child's current and potential level of development. It matters here because, according to blogger Karen McCarthy, "the ZPD has particular resonance for highly able learners" and it also highlights the role of differentiation in teaching these students. On the blog, she writes: "All students need to be required to work in their ZPD on a regular basis, including gifted learners. As well as gifted and talented education, there's another area that differentiation comes up a lot: education technology.
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