Active Research Lessons Learned

Our elementary is in the process of changing the method of placing students in classes in the first and second grades.  Currently, we have one teacher designated in grades K-4 as the “Challenge” teacher.  The students in this classroom are the students who are labeled as Gifted and Talented.  These students make up about five or six students in the class. There are also high achievers in these teachers’ classrooms, which account for the other 16 or 17 students.  The high achievers usually attain this label because they have attended pre-kindergarten or their parents work with them quite a bit at home to help them advance quicker than the students who have no help at home.  These students are usually teachers’ kids and usually come from middle to high income families.  These students are also pretty well behaved, are clean, and have parents who are highly involved at the school.  Our plan is to maintain the Challenge classes beginning in third grade.  This will mean that all students in first and second grades will be heterogeneously placed into one of six or seven classrooms (depending upon class and grade level size).  The plan is for the G/T students in grades K-2 to have a pull-out program during RtI time.  We will begin this program with the first grade students the first year, and will then implement it in the second grade classrooms the following year.  We will do this so the students who have already been placed in a challenge class in the first grade won’t go to a regular classroom in the second grade and then back to a challenge class in the third grade.  The process of planning and implementing change at a campus level has been very time consuming.  I have learned that much thought and planning goes into making any change.  In reworking the program, we will have to look at how we group students during RtI time so the designated G/T teacher can work with just G/T students during that time.  This means that the other teachers in the grade level will be splitting the rest of the G/T teacher’s students during this RtI time as some of the grade level go to the RtI lab.  This could lead to confusion in the beginning until procedures are practiced and reinforced.  Ideally, we would hire a separate teacher solely for the purpose of servicing our G/T students.  In reality, this is not a possibility for our school at this time.  Because of the logistics and the concerns with budgetary issues, we decided not to change our G/T program at this time.  We do believe that reworking this program to better fit the needs of this group of often overlooked students will benefit them and hope to be able to implement a similar program in the future.