To meet this challenge, we draw on our work throughout New Zealand, with small schools and with large, in primary and secondary, and in early childhood and tertiary, with teachers in classrooms and in management and with other resource  professionals. We link what we do to research so that we may constantly evaluate and extend the knowledge base we share with you.

On this page you will find out more about how we can help you as a teacher of gifted children.

QUICKLINKS

What does this mean in practice for you?
Support you can access - professional development, workshops, seminars and conferences
Individual support - visits, meeting attendance, information/advice, research support
Resources - ideas and publications
Linking to One Day School and GO - professional partnerships
Supporting you in working with parents

 

Are you looking for answers to questions like these?

Classroom  teachers

How do I know if a pupil is gifted?
What's the difference between gifted and bright?
What am I supposed to do in the classroom for this child?
How can I cater for this one different child when I've  got 30 others as well?
Shouldn't we fix his (her) behaviour (social skills) first?
How do I know if what I'm doing is working?
Where can I go for help?

Management
Is what we're doing now okay? If we think we've got it covered, how can we check this out?
 If we haven't yet started, where should we start?
What should be in our school policy?
 What can we do to make sure this is genuinely working schoolwide?
What does this mean for planning, for resources, for teacher  appraisal?
What does it mean for classroom programmes?
Do we need other measures, like acceleration or withdrawal?
When should we identify giftedness? How should we identify giftedness?
How do we deal with parents who say their child is gifted?
How can we evaluate what we do?

Gifted Education Centre staff can help with these and many other related questions.

Professional development
The Gifted Education Centre is New Zealand's most widely experienced provider of professional development in gifted education. It has delivered workshops and seminars to teachers at every level from early childhood to secondary and from pre-service trainees to principals and senior management. Its emphasis is always on providing thoroughly practical advice, firmly grounded in its own extensive experience, internationally recognised best practice and research findings. See our Professional Development page for more information.

Workshops and seminars
The Centre offers a range of workshops and seminars. See our Professional Development page for more information.

Conferences
Approximately every second year, the Centre organises a major national conference featuring leading practitioners and researchers in the field of gifted education. These are advertised in the Gazette and elsewhere, and provide an invaluable professional development opportunity for all teachers interested in this field.

Conferences previously held have focussed on giftedness in early childhood, teaching gifted students at secondary level, and understanding the gifted child. See our Conferences page for more information.

The Centre is able to support individual teachers and small groups of teachers in a number of different ways:

Observation visits
The Centre's One Day School venues are open to visits by teachers wishing to observe a gifted programme in action. Such visits can give you a valuable insight into the real learning behaviour of gifted children when they are working together in an appropriate environment, and this can be helpful to your thinking about what you need to do and what you can do in your own context. We are happy to arrange such visits and see them as an extension of our provision of professional development.

They are especially useful for you if one of your own pupils attends One Day School. We warmly welcome such visits, and the children themselves are often very touched to find that their classroom teacher takes the trouble to do this. For you, it's rather like putting a face to a name: those homesheets and what your pupil may tell you (or forget to tell you!) take on reality and you can see for yourself what he or she gets up to on "ODS" day. For us it's a chance to share, learn from you what you think about the child, and build a closer working relationship with you.

Obviously we do need to manage visits in terms of duration and frequency so that our classes and teachers are not overwhelmed, and sometimes there are times when visits are not appropriate, for example when we ourselves have a new teacher still in training. Therefore we ask that you contact head office if you are in Auckland or your local coordinator to organise a suitable time (see our Contact us page), and we ask that visits do not exceed 1 to 2 hours in length. You will be given an information sheet to help you make the most of your visit.

Meeting attendance
Wherever possible, Centre staff will make themselves available to attend case meetings discussing individual children where the information they can give would assist in planning for that child and support school and parents in decision-making.

Information and advice
Centre staff answer many "on the spot" queries from teachers and indeed from many other professionals and from students and from parents which come to us by phone or email. We are happy to do this and there is no charge.

When more complex issues are involved, eg planning a staff presentation or reviewing a policy, senior staff are happy to meet with you or work vith you via phone and email to assist you with appropriate practical advice and information.

Research support
If you are undertaking research in gifted education as part of your post-graduate work, we would very much like to hear about this and will do whatever we can to support such research. See our Supporting Research page.
 
Costs
Visits are free if you are the teacher of a One Day School child; a koha is requested from all other visiting educators in recognition of this as a professional development opportunity.
Meeting attendance is generally free of charge when One Day School children are involved, unless extended or repeated attendance is required, in which case a modest fee is set to cover our staff member's time. A similarly modest fee applies to other meeting attendance.
More extended information and advisory support may incur a modest fee, negotiated with you.
Research support is free of charge.

The Centre is able to advise on:
specific book resources for your staff professional development library
the types of resources it is useful to have for pupil use in the classroom or in a withdrawal group
useful contacts in some fields.

We also recommend Rosemary Cathcart's They're Not Bringing My Brain Out, a comprehensive and highly practical teacher's manual. See our Articles and Publications Page for details.

"All teachers can benefit from the expertise developed in the one-day schools"
- Hon. Trevor Mallard, opening our Wellington One Day School, April 2004

If you've thought about One Day School, you've probably thought about it primarily in relation to your gifted pupil.

But both One Day School and its online version, GO, have the potential to offer real benefits for you too. As the classroom teacher of an ODS or GO child:

you are linked directly to New Zealand's centre of expertise in this field
you have a continuous opportunity to talk with a colleague who is working specifically in this field and who knows your pupil, not just someone coming in from outside
you receive a weekly homesheet and semester reports, each of which can give you both added insight into your pupil AND ideas you may be able to use in your own teaching with this and other pupils
you are entitled to a significant discount (generally about one third) on most of the workshops and seminars we present.

If you're not already familiar with either of these programmes and would like to know what they involve, read our One Day School and GO pages to find out more.

Teachers often express concern about parents' attitudes towards giftedness. For example:
Sometimes, in some areas, the fear is that, if the school says it's about to offer a gifted programme, every parent will be on the principal's doorstep demanding to know why their child hasn't been included
In other areas, teachers are sometimes worried about parents' reluctance to have children recognised as gifted
In individual instances, teachers may feel doubtful about a parent's claim that a child is gifted and unsure how to deal with the parent's insistence that steps should be taken to provide for the child's alleged needs.

Centre staff are often able to help you with issues like these.

Parent forums
If we have a base in your area or if we are visiting your area, we can arrange to run an "open forum" to help educate your wider parent community towards a better understanding of what giftedness really is and acceptance of the need to make specific provision for these children.

Our experience is that forums like this are popular with parents and that they go a long way towards de-mystifying a topic often sensationalised and misrepresented in the media and towards clarifying perceptions of who the gifted are and what their needs are. Parents are reassured by meeting with experts in the field in an open question-and-answer situation.

Your support for events like this helps show parents that you do have a genuine commitment to children in this category, and better informed parents are likely to be more responsive to what you put in place for gifted pupils.

Individual cases
Wherever possible, Centre staff will make themselves available for consultation on individual cases. Sometimes a phone call is all it takes. Sometimes more in-depth discussion and review of material is needed. We'll talk this through with you.

Costs
Costs incurred in running parent forums may be covered by a small entry charge or a modest fee may be negotiated with the school or in some circumstances a fee may be waived. Consultations which necessitate more in-depth work incur a fee; phone calls remain free of charge.