Abstract:

Our school is pioneering, innovator and inclusive. We know and appreciate specific needs of our students and our goal is to guarantee an individualized and integral educational response to them. To all of them. And being gifted is a form of exceptional nature as well.

The Project we are presenting is born as a set of educational enrichment measures for gifted students, who have cognitive, metacognitive, motivational, of personality and creativity peculiar characteristics. They learn, discover, assimilate, understand, question and create in a quick and effective way. They thus require different strategies for teaching and learning and different measures for developing their abilities, interests and maturing pace.

Definitely, we want to give them the opportunity to learn fostering their skills and avoiding their natural abilities do not get to crystallize due to the lack of opportuneness, practice or motivation. Not doing so would mean a tremendous loss of human potential.

Enrichment purpose is adaptation to the student pace, depth and interests. Having that in mind, amongst the programmatic options available, we have chosen for this project mentorship and grouping by ability and/or interest.

As we are an Intenational Baccalaurate (IB) World School, we designed the mentorship program in the context of a Creativity, Activity, Service (CAS) project, one of the core components of IB Diploma Programme (DP), and in close connection with IB Primary Years Programme (PYP). It implies collaboration between students of different ages and educational stages, with the common denominator of gifted students.

Our mentor, a student that has been enrolled in previous enrichment programs suitable for his own talent (mathematic), acts as an expert in the topic (Math) by creating activities for his younger mates guiding them along the whole process (challenge, explanation, development and problem solving, feedback…).

So learning happens in both directions: students themselves are both creators and (critical) consumers of content. Besides, this interaction helps developing social skills (one aspect in which this group may find difficulties).

This project engages school Math, ICT, Counselling and Library Departments, acting as facilitators and supervisors: we do not control the process, we do evaluate the results.

Technology is a powerful tool to boost learning. This is specially true in the case of students with specific learning needs associated to being gifted: some of their intellectual characteristics are specially relevant for technological learning. Thus, we propone mentorship in a digital environment, through a Microsoft Office365 tool, Teams, which do not require simultaneous presence (neither in the same place, nor at the same time) of the involved students, but combined with physical meetings.

Teams allows self-management of the mentor/mentees team, dynamic communication, sharing of all types of files (activities, challenges, references, presentations…), it has a private (secure) chat, it adapts to every moment and need… without interfering in curricular activity. Because the enriching activities are not meant to broaden content but to give a different approach to Math learning.

And, over all, technology is the best ally to get that essential factor to the learning process, specially with gifted students: motivation. Motivating them is as important as difficult: they need challenges; providing them is our challenge as educators.

Keywords:

Gifted, technology, mentorship, social abilities, communication, collaboration, diversity, Office 365.