Slide 6: Providing
Enrichment for Advanced Learners will require:
•
Willingness to focus on
the learning needs of advanced learners.
•
Ability to recognize
advanced learners.
•
Providing teachers with
adequate support.
•
Including the wider
learning community to support teachers, parents, and students.
Slide 7: Is there a
willingness to focus on advanced learners?
It is expected of teachers
to provide each and every student with learning opportunities that fit their
abilities and motivate their learning. Yet, the likelihood of accomplishing
this noble goal is questionable as teachers are teaching classes that are too
big and have challenging compositions.
Also through their own schooling teachers have learned to prioritize supporting
students with low math skills.
Finally, even though math enrichment resources are plentiful they are
disorganized and appear limited.
Slide 8: There could be
other reasons that advanced learners are overlooked. For example Leikin (2011)
claims that people’s views about education of gifted [or advanced learners] is
strongly dependent on their personal experience and histories related to the
education of the gifted. While
Al-Hroub (2010) points that there are students, who are gifted along with having
learning difficulties, whose abilities in mathematics are easily overlooked by
teachers and parents.
Slide 9: This is the first
reflection point. –
Here, teachers will pause
to write about the composition of their present and /or past classes with a
focus on recognizing advanced / gifted students.
What is the composition of
your present and/or past classes?
Can you think of examples
of students who you have known who may have been advanced/gifted? If a teacher
cannot find any advanced learners, maybe it is because of his / her hidden
censor.
Slide 10: “Your hidden
censor: What your mind will not let you see?”
(Keith Payne, 2013)
Is it really possible that
we are constantly failing to notice things right in front of us? Yes, hundreds
of studies have backed up the idea that when attention is occupied with one
thing [e.g. students with low math skills], people often fail to notice other
things. What we do or do not see depends on the biases of the “unconscious
selective attention” of our mind.
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