Description
For this assignment, you will play the role of an educational psychologist hired by the local school district. You will meet with two well-educated (college or higher) parents of a gifted child to let help them understand how you identified their child’s giftedness. The assignment is to present the transcript of the conversation that you would have with the parents.
As you begin, you will create and present short descriptions, or “snapshot accounts,” of the responses of two students to at least eight events that could occur during a typical 8-hour school day. Identify both students and discuss any relevant aspects of their home life (e.g., single-parent home) and demographics. Be sure to include characteristics that place one student in the “gifted” category, and then describe the other student by identifying characteristics that are neither gifted nor special ed. As you create examples, be sure to identify and describe characteristics of diversity for each child. Then, as you proceed, take the time to acknowledge any issues of diversity that may be pertinent to the assignment.
Create eight “events” that could occur during a typical school day where giftedness would be evident. For instance, upon arrival to the first period, a gifted student might have different items in their backpack. Books in a gifted student’s backpack may be untouched or missing. Other books that are not school books may be present instead. When called upon during class, how might the gifted student differ in their answer to a teacher compared to their non-gifted peers? When at recess, how might the gifted student interact differently or the same? During a difficult test, what differences could be evident between the gifted student and the non-gifted student? During study hall, what is the gifted student likely to do that is the same and/or different from the non-gifted student. Describe the behavior, emotions, thoughts, and/or performance of the non-gifted student, along with the behavior, emotions, thoughts, and/or performance of the gifted student to emphasize any differences in how they might react, feel, behave, or perform.
Length: For each event, or “snapshot account,” you should present one to two paragraphs, with a minimum of 200 words each. Therefore, your entire discussion of the students’ day should have a minimum of 1,600 words (8 paragraphs).
Then, reflect on the day that you have described. Writing two to four paragraphs (a minimum of 400 words) of reflective and evaluative writing, discuss the differences you presented in your snapshot accounts of the students and your reasoning for doing so based on scholarly literature.
For instance, you might document the following:
Robert completed his writing assignment during the class period, successfully addressing every prompt that was included in the assignment guidelines. Sarah seemed to struggle at first with the assignment. She asked the teacher about an idea she had for doing the assignment a little differently than it was presented. When class was almost over, she asked if she could take the assignment home. She said she was still working on it.
I chose to have the gifted child, Sarah, take longer than the non-gifted student, Robert, because Goodin (2019) suggested that gifted students may lose track of time when they are given the freedom and time to tap into their creativity. Goodin said that teachers should provide opportunities for gifted students to be creative and express originality and outside the box thinking. Although the teacher did not initially provide Sarah with the opportunity to “overachieve,” the teacher granted permission to Sarah when she wanted to modify the assignment and take extra time with the assignment. In doing so, the teacher accommodated the intrinsic motivation displayed by Sarah toward the assignment. In fact, the teacher encouraged Sarah’s autonomy by allowing her to modify the assignment slightly, rather than thwarting her creativity by insisting that Sarah do the assignment exactly as it was given.
References: Be sure to cite a minimum of five of the articles from resources.
