Heartland Gifted and Talented News

January 2023

Mark your calendars: ITAG Virtual Spring Workshop on April 19

ITAG will be holding its annual virtual spring workshop for educators on Wednesday, April 19th (9 a.m.-3 p.m.). Dr. Amy Graefe, author of Seeing & Serving Underserved Gifted Students will be presenting on strategies that teachers can use to identify and serve twice-exceptional, economically-disadvantaged, and linguistically/culturally-diverse gifted learners. We will be recording this workshop for participants who can't attend. Registration for this event will open on February 1st. Early bird rates will be the same as last year ($99 for members or $150 for non-members).

Registrations are not yet live, but will be shortly at this link.

Book Study, anyone?

Whether you can attend this workshop or not, if this book piques your interest, we would love to schedule a Zoom-based book study of Graefe's book in February and March. Please respond to this brief survey by FRIDAY, JANUARY 13 if you are interested. With at least 10 participants, we can make this happen!

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Iowa Department of Education Gifted and Talented Updates

You may not have heard that our long-time gifted and talented consultant, Rosanne Malek, will be retiring this month. Rosanne has been a tireless advocate for gifted programs, teachers, and students in Iowa for many years. For those of you who may wish to send well wishes, you can email her at rosanne.malek@iowa.gov

In other DE news, here are two links to bookmark:

Advanced Learner MTSS Guide—If you are a veteran GT teacher, you likely already know about this guide, but if you have joined the ranks of gifted educators in the past few years, this may be news! The guide came out in 2018, but has been unavailable on the DE site for the past two years and we are delighted to have it back up and available for use.
Gifted Resources Links—When you’re looking for resources, the DE site might not be your first thought, but now it can be! If you are looking for quality resources on big ideas in gifted education, this is a great place to begin your search. With resources in Instruction (like how to ask higher order questions), Assessment (like how to get started with pre-assessments), and Professional Development (like setting the record straight about ability grouping), this site has much to offer. This issue’s teacher links are all from this site!

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What is Kyra reading?

Kyra is taking copious notes on this book in an effort to pull together more practical resources for teaching advanced readers. She is enjoying the way that Caruana organized the book with strategies for Creative, Critical, and Inquiry reading at all grade levels.

(Also, it is a short book, so I may actually finish the whole thing in a timely fashion!)

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What is Kate reading?

"Sometimes, when we think we're measuring ability or potential, we're really measuring the impact of access and opportunity disparities."

The scope of this article in Educational Leadership isn't limited to gifted and talented services, but I found many passages salient to our work. How can we reduce the impact of poverty on students’ chance to demonstrate their ability?

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One your students might like!

While Amazon suggests a reading age of 9-10 years for this title, Kate adapted portions up through 8th grade and it could easily go younger as well. Chapters are 3-4 pages long and paired with mini-biographies of great thinkers. Students would enjoy reading on their own, or teachers can build a lesson around one of the big ideas. Begin with Big Idea #14: Weakness of Strength Theory, and you’ve got a great starter for a small group discussion/lesson on perfectionism!