California Association for the Gifted 58th Annual Conference

There are many factors to consider when implementing a gifted program at your school. From deciding who to serve, and how to identify them, to determining how to communicate the program to your whole school community. This session provides industry-proven strategies to help you design and implement your own customized gifted program, and tips on how to leverage change management techniques such that your good idea becomes a reality that is embraced by all.

Do you conduct observations in classrooms? Do you have Look-for forms to use? Not sure what to look for in GATE classrooms? You will walk away from this session with a Look-for form to use with your GATE classroom teachers, and also a template upon which you can build your own with your staff. Warning: seeing this form may initiate the need for more professional development for your faculty, but we will cover that too.

Learn how to support social and emotional learning (SEL) for gifted students by intentionally incorporating the Four Domains of Global Competence into daily lessons and overall school culture. Review the California Global Education Project’s indicators and benchmarks of global competence; learn about the CDE’s 2016 California Global Education Summit, the 2018 Global Education Exemplary Awards Competition, and new SEL resources; and hear about how an award recipient’s model program sets them apart.

To mobilize your school community toward continuous improvement, it’s not enough to ask for or demand buy-in. To build an effective and affective comprehensive campus with collective efficacy, a school leader must offer explicit opportunities for students, parents, teachers, and staff to lead. Discover things that work (and don’t work) to maximize divergent thinking and human resources, include and invite all shareholders in decision-making, and share responsibility of school-wide initiatives and programs.

This interactive workshop will take participants on a journey through the seven Quality Professional Learning Standards (QPLS) to support educators in meeting the unique needs of their gifted students. The standards detail the characteristics of high-quality professional learning that build individual and collective educator capacity to meet professional, school, and student performance expectations unique to their own contexts. Participants will also hear the QPLS story of one California school and gain resources for future implementation.

When a parent requests their child to be placed with an effective teacher, school leaders throughout the nation would love to say “every teacher is remarkable!” Unfortunately because of the nature of human performance, every adult is NOT equal when it comes to increasing student academic results. Adults in our system certainly determine just how high the rigor of adult performance will be. Participants will not only hear what instructional strategies are key to implement in order to close the achievement gap but also how they as a leader sustains the level of competence in adult delivery. Increasing student achievement is NOT “rocket science”, but it does take high levels of accountability to create a high performing district.

Foothill Knolls is on its way to not only exceeding the needs of our Gifted Students but also to authentically meet the need of ALL LEARNERS. Come hear the journey they are taking from being a Traditional to Transitional and then hopefully being Transformational School. Implementing STEM, Argumentative Constructed Responses, Depth of Complexity Prompts, Social Emotional Learning Actions and believing that ALL students CAN and WILL learn is our core.