Vertical Enrichment

There are several strategies on how to teach gifted students floating around in today’s educational theory. Grouping, using gifted classrooms, and enrichment are all options that are presented. While traditional high schools have the ability to design classrooms specifically for the gifted population, Carolina Academy does not have the means to create a class only for the gifted students. Due to placing students into inclusion, gifted students are not pulled into Honors classes. Instead of an Honors class, gifted students are provided opportunities of vertical enrichment, or access to the honors rubric. The honors rubric is designed for students to research independently on the same content that the other students are working off of. Towards the end of the project, the students are required to present the same content, however, with a deeper knowledge basis. The following strategies should be used at Carolina High School: Independent projects, vertical enrichment, mentors, and bloom’s taxonomy.

An independent project should be provided to gifted students that have already completed the classroom project, or the unit plan. This sort of project, or assignment, is not just an “early finishers” assignment. Several teachers have tried to provide early finisher worksheets that go back over the content from the day’s lesson plan; however, this alone, is not an independent project. A project should allow students to develop their creativity through researching in their area of interest that also relates to the topic at hand. An example that relates to Carolina at the moment is in the Digital Literacy class, they will finish the reading comprehension assignment before the 90 minutes are up. Providing the students an in depth look at magical realism and how it relates to surrealism would greatly allow gifted students an idea of another realm of writing and art, while staying on