Teller is a Highly Gifted and Talented Magnet School. About 1/3 of our population is identified as Gifted (GT), Highly Gifted (HGT), or Magnet Eligible (ME). All of Teller’s teachers are either certified in Gifted and Talented education or in the process of getting GT certified, making our school ready and able to meet the needs of our diverse learners in the general classroom as well as during gifted pull-out time. We work hard to ensure all our students, gifted or otherwise, have access to rigorous content and are challenged to think critically about the world around them.
Our magnet program is integrated into our general education classrooms, meaning Gifted and Highly Gifted students are in classes with students of varying abilities. This differs from some magnet programs in which HGT students are in self-contained classrooms where they learn and interact with only other Highly Gifted students. All classrooms have a cluster of GT and HGT students to ensure they always have intellectual peers, but Teller values the benefits of heterogeneous classrooms.
Students are identified as GT or HGT using a body of evidence that includes scores from cognitive assessments, academic assessments, and teacher observations. Qualifying academic data must be in the 95th percentile for a student to be identified as GT, and a student identified as HGT must have a cognitive score in the 95th percentile or above in addition to multiple pieces of qualifying academic and/or observational data. ME students only have qualifying cognitive data in the 95th percentile or above, and have no other qualifying data yet. While the identification process can be overwhelming and confusing, the GT teachers monitor all of the data for every single student in the school and keep track of all qualifying data in order to identify students the minute they have the required body of evidence.
Our Gifted students receive services from both classroom teachers and the GT teachers. Many differentiation services are provided by classroom teachers in the form of small group instruction, project based learning, independent studies, and flexible groupings. Students identified as Gifted or Highly Gifted receive pull-out services from our GT teacher in addition to the rigorous instruction that they receive in the classroom. Magnet Eligible students who previously received GT pull-out services will continue; newly ME students or ME students new to Teller will not.
Pull-out services are when the GT teacher takes small groups of identified students from the classroom 2 times per week per subject area for approximately 30 minutes/session to engage in enrichment and higher level thinking inquiries and units. The pull-out servicing that students receive is based in Literacy or Math primarily, but may often cross multiple subject areas and often will incorporate social-emotional learning as well.
For a more in-depth look at our programming, please see our Info Night linked below and our Teller Gifted and Talented FAQ’s.
Here’s the GT Info Night Slideshow:
Here’s the GT FAQ’s: