Definitions

Acceleration: Students are allowed to move through material at a faster pace than age-mates and at a rate equal to their abilities. Examples of acceleration include curriculum compacting, subject level acceleration, grade skipping, early entrance to school, and early exit form school.

Cluster Grouping: Students are placed in regular classrooms with a small group of other students who have similar readiness for the purpose of receiving differentiated instruction.

Collaborative Teaching: The TAG Resource Teacher works in conjunction with the regular classroom teacher to provide direct differentiated services to high potential learners.

Compacting: This is an instructional practice where teachers pre-assess students on content in order to determine what they have already mastered. The focus of study becomes the content that the student does not know. By reducing repetition of content, students are challenged to their full potential.

Consultation Services: Instructional training, materials and other resources are provided to the classroom teacher by the G/T Resource Teacher in order to provide appropriate and adequate services for high potential students.

Differentiation: Teachers make adjustments instructionally to content (what is taught), process (how it is taught), or product (how students show what they have learned) to meet the needs of individual students.

Enrichment: Students are given learning activities that are more in-depth or from an additional discipline used to supplement their educational experience.

Flexible Grouping: A differentiation strategy where teachers arrange students in groups according to their readiness level, interests, or learning profile for a period of time. Group members change frequently based on instructional needs determined by the teacher.

Gifted and Talented Identification and Placement Committee: This committee is commonly called the G/T Committee. It is a school or district committee made up of the gifted education coordinator or a gifted education teacher and representatives from classroom teachers, administrators, counselors, special education teachers, and other appropriate personnel who follow district policies and procedures to formally identify and determine level and type of service options. 

Heterogeneous Grouping: Students placed together in a classroom based on their age or grade levels.

Homogeneous Grouping: Students placed together based on academic ability, special needs, interests, or other common characteristics relating to instruction.

High Potential Learners: Students in the top twenty-five percent of the primary student population who learn and comprehend at a faster pace and more complex level than their peers. These students demonstrate the need for differentiated instruction as a part of the Primary Talent Pool.

Independent Study: A self-directed course or a study of a selected topic under the supervision of a teacher.

Learning Centers: A learning center is a self-contained section of the classroom in which students engage in independent and self-directed learning activities.

Local Norms: Local norms compare a student’s performance to grade level peers in the same district or school.

Mentorships: Adults and older students can serve as mentors for primary talent pool students by sharing their common interests and expertise.

Nonverbal Assessment: A type of assessment characterized by the way it is administered and then completed by the one taking the test. Items/tasks are presented by showing or pointing and the test taker can understand and answer without spoken language proficiency. There are no written or spoken instructions. The test taker is presented with a few completed items and the test administrator gestors of points to show what to do.

Pre-assessment: Instructional method used by teachers to determine what students do and do not know prior to starting a new unit of study. Results are used to plan for each student’s level of readiness.

Primary Talent Pool: The primary students selected as having characteristics and behaviors of high-potential learners and diagnosed using a combination of informal and formal measures to determine differentiated service delivery needs throughout their primary experience.

Pull-Out Service: A pull-out service is when a talent pool student is taken out of the regular classroom for one or more hours a week and provided with enrichment activities and instruction among other high-potential students.

Resource Room: A resource room is a setting outside of the general classroom. Content and pacing are differentiated to the degree that activities are clearly intended for students evidencing a need beyond the general curriculum. Resource Rooms and Pull-out services allow high-potential students to meet with intellectual peers to work on critical thinking and problem-solving skills, to address community problems or to work on challenging programs.

Seminars: Sessions on specific topics focusing on advanced content and high-level process skills.

Special Considerations: School personnel shall take into consideration environmental, cultural, and disabling conditions which may mask a child’s true abilities that lead to exclusion of otherwise eligible students, such as a student who qualifies for special education, is disadvantaged, or underachieving.

Subject Level Acceleration: This is a form of acceleration where a student does subject-specific work on a grade level higher than the one in which he or she is enrolled. The decision to subject-area accelerate is a collaborative one by the teacher, the gifted resource teacher, and the parent and is based on defined data.

Talent Development Plans: Although it is not required by law, some schools choose to write Talent Development Plans for students in the Primary Talent Pool. These plans show areas of high potential, describe how students in the PTP are served, and are shared with parents.

Tiered Assignments: Tiered assignments are used by teachers within a heterogeneous classroom in order to meet the diverse needs of the students within the class. Teachers implement varied levels of activities to ensure that students explore ideas at a level that builds on their prior knowledge and prompts continued growth.

Underachievement: A significant gap between a student’s potential ability and demonstrated achievement to a degree that there is an overall diminished ability to achieve at the expected level of performance.

Universal Screening: Whatever tests or processes are used to identify talented students are given to an entire population as opposed to only those students who pass an earlier screening phase such as being nominated by their teachers.