During the revision process for Tahoe Truckee Unified School District's (TTUSD) Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) Plan, input was gathered from stakeholders including teachers, administration, parents, and students. As a result of this process a pilot program for Accelerated Learning Services was created for Glenshire and Alder Creek Middle School for the 2014-15 school year.
The purpose of this pilot program is to provide services for accelerated learners that support their continuous academic progress and healthy social and emotional development. TTUSD recognizes that in order to achieve continuous academic progress, some students need extra or more intensive support. This pilot program is based on the RtI model of serving individual student’s needs. (See diagram below)
1. Services for accelerated learners require strong systemic support within the district, additional personnel with expertise in gifted education, and sufficient resources.
2. Accelerated learners need differentiated curriculum that addresses their unique learning needs through acceleration, novelty, increased depth and complexity of content, flexible instructional grouping practices, social/emotional support, and advanced enrichment opportunities to systematically develop their creative productive capacities.
3. Since accelerated learners spend most of their time in general education classrooms, general education teachers need to participate in professional development in gifted education that enables them to recognize the characteristics of giftedness in diverse populations and develop an array of high-quality, research–based differentiation strategies that challenge students.
4. Formative and summative evaluations will be used to measure the efficacy of the pilot program.