Training the Teachers

This month the principals of the seven schools in the San Bruno Park School District were all offered an opportunity to have training for their teachers in meeting the needs of gifted students. The training would be funded through a grant so would come at no cost to the schools. Not one principal jumped at the chance.

The same offer was going to be made to the principals in the Burlingame School District but no one there responded to letters and e-mails.

A principal of a school near Menlo Park attended a meeting with the parent of a highly gifted child. The principal told the parent that the teacher had direct orders from him not to modify the curriculum one bit for the child.



A traditional career path for a principal is a few years in the classroom, then an administrative position, then perhaps a move to a supervisory role (such as assistant superintendent) at the district office. When we consider that 61% of public school teachers have had no training in gifted education, then it comes as no surprise that principals are putting up barriers for gifted students.

It is very clear that teacher education programs need to include classes in gifted education. I have heard so often that we need to train teachers to work with inner city kids, not with “easy” gifted students. What this does not take into account is that there are gifted students in every school. Joy Oatman from Tilman High School in Chicago Illinois states, “People need to know that there are children with talents here. People who live in the inner city in the barrio, or on the reservation need to know that their children are smart. There’s too much raw ability going through the cracks. If a child we might lose had the ability to cure cancer but ends up joining a gang or dealing dope, that’s a double loss to the country.”

Yes, teacher education programs need to change but one area that we can start to change right now is to educate our teachers who are already in the classrooms. The parents of gifted students can do this. All parents of gifted students need to learn to advocate for their children. We need to start teaching the teachers that the needs of gifted students are different. We need to ask for enrichment programs, depth and complexity in the curriculum, and practice with critical thinking skills. We need to go into the classrooms and share our talents with the students and through our modeling, hopefully change the thinking of the teachers, a little bit at a time.

I recently suggested the idea of “compacting” to a teacher. This is a method often used to meet the needs of gifted students. She hadn’t heard of the term so I explained that she would give the post-test to her class before teaching the next unit. If any of her students scored 90% or above on the test, then they already know those skills and should be given the opportunity to move ahead with their learning rather than required to do the work as outlined in the textbook. She followed through with my idea and was surprised to realize that half of her class scored 90% or above on the post test before she even taught the unit. Wow!

What would it be like if we changed our goal from “high test scores for all” to “continuous academic progress for each student”? Many of our students are already performing well on the tests. How can we really say our students are “learning” when they are just doing work that they already know how to do? What could they do if we made sure that each day they learned something?

The San Bruno Park School District spends a huge portion of its budget on special education funding and roughly 1/15 of that amount on education for gifted students. Is it fair that all of these resources are being poured into some populations of students and not others? Let’s make “continuous academic progress for each student” our mantra and work together with our teachers make this a reality for our students. A few years down the line, this may pay off as one of these teachers becomes a principal and searches out programs for the gifted students, as well as the other populations in his/her school.