Motivating bored-but-gifted students using some fiery competition – and technology.
GUEST COLUMN | by Christopher Godshall
There’s a lot of both media and academic attention paid to students with learning difficulties acting as barriers to acquiring knowledge, and rightly so. But teaching gifted and talented students poses its own set of challenges. Higher-achieving students can get bored easily or become impatient if they’re not given material that engages them academically. They can get frustrated if they find the pace in the classroom too slow. They also might yearn for a classroom that is more competitive than the one they’re in. Plus, not meeting these students’ needs for more challenging studies could squander the opportunity to push those students to new, exceptional heights.
As someone who has taught gifted and talented students for 16 years, I’m constantly on the lookout for ways to meet the needs of these pupils in a way that keeps them engaged, their parents informed, and me, as their teacher, at least a few steps ahead of them!
This summer, I turned to an edtech platform for the solution. The lessons I learned from our successes seemed worth sharing as a new school year gets underway.