Distance Education for Gifted Students: Blending Classroom Instruction with Distance Learning Opportunities

Annual teacher evaluations begin this month in my district. For me, this is my annual period of serious reflection on my teaching. It's a time to gather data over time, work through a checklist of desirable teacher attributes, and prepare to defend my practices against an ever evolving rubric. As part of this process, I must explain and defend my practices for differentiating instruction to meet the needs of my students. Since I teach fifth grade in a magnet program for gifted students, one might think the academic needs of my students are homogeneous, but they are not. In fact, I believe the academic needs of my gifted students are almost as diverse as the "traditional" students taught by my colleague in the classroom across the hall. When I reflect on the tools and strategies I use to meet the needs of my students, one group of learners typically gives me pause. Those are my highly gifted, high achieving students (typically defined as students with IQ scores of 145 or higher and 4.0 grade point averages), which comprise about 25% of my students this year. Though these students report that they enjoy school and find it challenging, data suggests that these students aren't achieving the same learning gains as their peers. I worry that my curriculum based on acceleration and enrichment, doesn't fully meet their needs (particularly in their areas of strength). As I experiment with distance learning tools this year, I realize that online and distance learning technology has the potential and capacity to serve these students and compliment what I do in the classroom.

An interesting article describes programs where distance learning is combined with classroom learning to meet the needs of gifted students. I found it appropriate for this post because it describes programs that reach out to elementary gifted students like mine. The article is called "Distance Learning Opportunities for Academically Gifted Students" and it appeared in the Journal of Secondary Gifted Education in 2000. Authors Cheryll Adams and Tracy Cross studied three distance learning programs designed specifically for gifted children. The authors gathered data on the advantages and disadvantages of distance education for this population of students (Adams, C. & Cross, T., 2000).

The first program, and one I've read about before, is the A. Linwood Holton Governor's School in southwest Virginia. The geography and climate in rural southwest Virginia present challenges for gifted students who need to take advantage of Virginia’s leading state subsidized program for gifted students, Governor’s School. So the local school board developed a supplementary online program that allowed gifted high school students to take advanced courses that weren’t offered in their schools. During the summer months, these gifted students met face-to-face, to further develop learning communities. Interestingly, advanced younger gifted children who are too young for Governor’s School are invited to participate in online courses on a limited basis. The authors wrote, “By allowing them to take one or two specific classes offered by the Governor's School while still spending most of their day with their age mates, the students will receive the intellectual challenge they require to develop their full potential” (Adams, C. & Cross, T., 2000).

The second featured program, The Regional Electronic Magnet School for Re: Math and Science, was a project born from a US Department of Education grant in 1993. The program involved high school juniors from 15 schools in Massachusetts who demonstrated giftedness in the math and science. “The focus of the program was problem solving, logical thinking, and challenging strategies that could be pursued individually or with peers from other districts,” the authors wrote (Adams, C. & Cross, T., 2000). Among the many advantages of the program was that it “had a substantial and continuing impact not only on the region’s high schools, but on the elementary and middle schools as well” (Adams, C. & Cross, T., 2000).

The third program cited in the article, and the most interesting to me, is the Indiana Academy for Science, Mathematics, and Humanities. This state-supported program provides a wide variety of services to gifted high school students (both residential and distance programs), and expanded its services to younger gifted students. Elementary students take distance learning classes in French, German, Spanish, and Japanese at two levels, one day a week for 50 minutes. Electronic field trips are broadcast via satellite from places like the Smithsonian Institute, a dinosaur dig in Colorado, and the Chicago Field Museum (Adams, C. & Cross, T., 2000) for young gifted students.

The authors conclude that despite the technical challenges of distance education (the article was written in 2000, so many such difficulties may be in the past) and the new teacher training needs related to technology tools, distance education provides gifted students with access to “ideas, information, and people otherwise unavailable through conventional means” (Adams, C. & Cross, T., 2000).

As I construct my plan to meet the needs of my highly gifted students in the future, I will undoubtedly search for appropriate distance education options to complement my classroom instruction. This article proves that viable programs for gifted children have existed for almost a decade. Certainly the options offered by our local virtual school and national programs like those described in this blog, are options my district should consider as we try to nurture and develop these extraordinary students.

Adams, C. M., & Cross, T. L. (2000). Distance learning opportunities for academically gifted students. Journal of Secondary Gifted Education, 11 (2).