Teaching Strategies for Teachers of Gifted Children

Teaching a gifted child can come with both its ups and downs in the classroom each and every day. Gifted students are children who will excite you as a teacher and can also cause quite a bit of grief. They have a vastly different personality than many of the other children in your classroom and although they are excellent learners, as a teacher you still need to have a different set of teaching strategies in order to keep the mayhem out of your classroom and the order in it. Here are a few teaching strategies for teachers with gifted students.

The first step is being able to not only identify a gifted student, but also to be able to understand that these types of children, gifted children, come with a whole different set of personality characteristics that can be both positive contributions to your classroom and negative contributions if you let them. In this article Characteristics of a Gifted Student you will find a lot of information on a gifted child’s personality traits.

Conducting informal assessments in the classroom will allow you to know exactly where each student, both gifted children and regular children, is in the subject or lesson you are teaching. To do this simply give the ending test of the lesson plan first. Students who score at an 80% or higher can be given a different alternative to this lesson plan. For instance you can assign them a project that will give them more information on the subject so they are still on course with the rest of the class, but not being forced to re-learn information they already know. This will keep their minds active and help to keep them from being disruptive in the classroom because they are bored.

Many teachers fear that if they allow a child to do higher level and harder work which is meant for grade levels that are above the student, that the child will eventually run out of things to learn in school. This is so untrue because a person can never run out of things to learn. If the child is learning and capable of doing 8^th grade math while in your 6^th grade math class encourage them to do so. Have worksheets handy for the child to work on when he has completed the original assignment. Gifted students love the idea of learning something new and they will soak it up. This will not only help feed the child’s need to learn, but also help to keep their behavior under control.

With these teaching strategy tips for teachers with gifted students, you will be able to help your gifted student excel in your classroom but also help them to show their positive personality traits while keeping the negative ones under control.