School District Shows Creativity in Providing Midwest Talent Search Follow-up Program

The Center for Talent Development (CTD) is always interested in sharing with others information about how school districts use test scores of students who participate in Midwest Talent Search (MTS) to plan local school programs and courses. In this article, we highlight a program developed in the Copper Country Intermediate School District on Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula that was designed to serve the needs of eighth grade students who took the ACT or SAT and who scored at or above the mean for college-bound seniors in the reading or verbal area.

The Copper Country School District has participated in MTS every year since 1981. Each year the district has around 85-100 students who participate in the search, and around half of these students distinguish themselves by scoring above the means for college-bound seniors. The Copper Country Intermediate School District is comprised of thirteen districts, nine of which are K-12. These K-12 districts range in size from 280 students in the smallest one to 1,681 students in the largest. Seven of the nine K-12 districts and one K-8 district had students participate in the Midwest Talent Search last year.

The very small numbers of high scoring students within each district made providing special educational opportunities for them very difficult. The fact that so many autonomous and physically separated districts are involved increased the challenge. This year, in an effort to reward and serve high scoring students with courses that would challenge them appropriately and provide opportunities for social interaction with equally talented youngsters, Jean Ellis, an English teacher and Consultant for Programs for Gifted and Talented at the Copper Country ISD, initiated a special course. The course was designed to be fast-paced, accelerated, interdisciplinary, and to correlate with state level content standards for English. Students who took the course earn credit for eighth grade English. The content consisted of the study of trends in local history to teach students advanced language arts, social studies, and technology.

This pilot course drew sixteen students (two from the smallest district and seven from the largest district) from five small, rural school districts (Adams, Calumet, Dollar Bay, Houghton, and Lake Linden) in the Copper Country Intermediate School District, and connected them by distance learning technologies. The students met in August for a two-day orientation and a visit to some local sites. During the academic year students also participated in field trips to collect data and other material and to share ideas. Parents were invited to the August orientation and encouraged to be involved in the course so that their interest and support would help motivate their children. For the rest of the year, the students connected with one another for 25 minutes a day every day at noon via interactive television. While connected, the students can see, hear and talk to each other and to the teacher. The information students gather on their field trips form the content of their independent projects. These projects will be presented in Power Point, Hyper-Studio, or as a web page. The skills to present the information in one of these ways will also be taught to the students during the year.

By using local history sites as their source material, students are able to incorporate history into their English course while also learning how to do advanced field research and independent study. The local history sites and their archives, local libraries, and local universities all provide sources of information and technologies that the students must master to obtain the information they need for their projects. Students are also encouraged to seek out and talk to experts at the historical sites so as to acquire needed information from them and interviewing skills. Students work to understand the arguments and positions of different individuals on an issue and to synthesize them into a convincing discussion in their own independent project. By learning how to use different computer programs, students are becoming technologically proficient as well. Most importantly, by connecting with other students via interactive television, the students have an opportunity to work at a level that challenges them appropriately without leaving their local, home school. The course also does not conflict with their other classes or disrupt their relationships with peers in their regular classes. In this way, the program has been able to offer gifted learners a wonderful opportunity for intellectual stimulation and social engagement.

CTD looks forward to progress reports from this exciting pilot project throughout the year and welcomes the opportunity to work with Copper Country School District as it initiates further programs of this nature. If your school has used information obtained through participation in the Midwest Talent Search to set in place program options for academically talented students, please share these with us. Teachers, counselors, and parents committed to gifted education have told us that they find these stories encouraging and rewarding.