Collaboration, Coteaching, and Coaching in Gifted Education

Sharing Strategies to Support Gifted Learners

Emily Mofield, Vicki Phelps

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000491128
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Winner of NAGC's 2021 Book of the Year Award

This must-have resource:

• Provides gifted educators with methods and strategies for successful coplanning, coteaching, coaching, and collaboration.
• Enables effective management of differentiation.
• Increases educators' understanding of gifted students' needs.
• Features the tools and how to steps for facilitating and maintaining collaborative work in order to challenge and support gifted students all day, every day.
• Encourages professional learning and a focus on shared responsibility and reflection.

The book also includes considerations for working with special populations, including twice-exceptional students, underachievers, and culturally, linguistically, and economically diverse learners, as well as meeting students' social-emotional needs, collaborating with families and communities, and advocating for gifted education.

Chapter 1
The Why, What, and How of Collaboration

DOI:10.4324/9781003233671-2

Collaboration is the action of working with an individual to produce or create something. The aim, then, is not to simply impart information to a fellow colleague, but to produce ideas together, taking on shared decision making and responsibility for student learning. In the context of this book, we use the term collaboration as it relates to the action of a gifted education teacher working with many different professionals to create contexts to identify and nurture students’ gifts and talents. We use collaboration as an umbrella term encompassing consultation, coplanning, coteaching, and instructional coaching. Collaboration involves working with not only classroom teachers, but also specialists, guidance counselors, parents, community members, advocacy groups, and others. We also recognize that successful collaboration can take place through in-person meetings or online virtual meeting spaces (e.g., Zoom). Regardless of how the collaboration takes place, the principles of strong collaborative practice still hold true.

We view collaboration as a means for capacity building in which other educators and professionals develop skills and knowledge for supporting and challenging gifted learners. Rooted in social constructivist theories, collaboration is a means for individuals to come together in a reflective process and construct new knowledge (Shakenova, 2017). The social interaction and exchange of ideas in the decision-making processes of collaboration lead to new learning and new possibilities. Similarly, through the lens of transformational leadership, collaboration is a way to influence others. In terms of gifted education, this involves influencing educators and others to improve their practices around identifying, teaching, and providing opportunities for students to develop their talents.

Through a variety of models, collaboration can directly facilitate the evidence-based practices tied to the NAGC (2019) Gifted Programming Standards:

• + 6.4.1. Educators regularly reflect on and assess their instructional practices, develop professional learning plans, and improve their practices by participating in continuing education opportunities.
• + 6.4.2. Educators participate in professional learning that is sustained over time, incorporates collaboration and reflection, is goal-aligned and data-driven, is coherent, embedded and transferable, includes regular follow-up, and seeks evidence of positive impact on teacher practice and on increased student learning.

We emphasize that collaboration is an approach that allows two or more individuals to come together to contribute individual expertise to develop shared expertise. The gifted education teacher can share expertise related to understanding and addressing the needs of gifted learners, while a classroom teacher can offer expertise in a content area, which can potentially strengthen links between gifted services and core academic content. These interactions pave the way for opportunities to combine the knowledge, skills, and wisdom of each party to positively affect student learning.

The word strategies within the title of this book (Collaboration, Coteaching, and Coaching in Gifted Education: Sharing Strategies to Support Gifted Learners) means “a plan of action designed to achieve an overall aim.” This is not just a book with instructional approaches for differentiation, but strategies that empower a wide variety of personnel to implement “plans for action” that help develop the strengths and talents of gifted students.

Why Is Collaboration Needed?

Gifted students are gifted all day every day, but often their needs are only addressed for a few hours a week when they attend a gifted enrichment class. Many gifted students spend the majority of their time in the regular classroom, where there is a wide range of academic abilities. Teachers are asked to address the diversity in their classrooms by differentiating for students, which is easier said than done. Collaboration at the classroom level can help alleviate some of the challenges in managing differentiation. Gifted education teachers can collaborate with the classroom teacher to select or develop resources, materials, ideas, and strategies that the classroom teacher can use both now and in the future so that gifted students can learn more advanced content.

Beyond the classroom context, collaboration allows for building understanding about the nature and needs of gifted students among various personnel who are part of a student’s education. Through collaboration, some of the issues related to underrepresented populations in gifted programs can be addressed. For example, gifted education teachers may work with administrators, instructional leaders, and ESL (English as a second language) teachers to promote equitable access to gifted programming. Gifted education teachers may work with a guidance counselor to discuss the needs of a gifted student who is chronically underachieving. Collaboration can also occur through community partnerships, opening doors for mentorship possibilities for students who show high potential and interest in a specific domain. As called for by the NAGC (2019) Gifted Programming Standards, gifted educators “regularly engage families and community members for planning, programming, evaluating, and advocating.” This can also involve helping families locate community based resources.

We want to emphasize that collaboration is one type of service within a comprehensive coordinated service model. It should exist in conjunction with other types of models, including direct services and specialized programs within a spectrum of services. Landrum (2001) noted, “Collaboration should enhance, rather than diminish, existing school efforts regarding student intervention services. The collaborative process does not eliminate specialized intervention for gifted learners, but rather redefines the roles and responsibilities of school staff in the provision of services” (p. 2). Ultimately, collaboration involves promoting connections between services in multiple areas and can harness the strengths of what each party brings.

Collaboration in Gifted Education: Borrowed From Other Fields

Consultation and collaborative services are models that have been used in other fields, such as special education and ESL programs, for quite some time. In these contexts, collaboration is a means to provide more inclusive services in the general classroom that allow all students access to the regular curriculum. As such, collaboration is a method for closing achievement gaps, but in gifted education, collaboration is a means to develop student strengths and talents by accelerating, enriching, or extending the curriculum. Collaboration in gifted education is based on the idea that all students can make continual progress to the next level of learning, even those who have already mastered grade-level content. Unlike the use of collaboration in other related fields, it is not a means for students to access curriculum, but it is a way to ensure that students continue to be in a stage of learning when interacting with the curriculum. From a talent development perspective, collaboration can also facilitate identifying and strengthening specific talent domains through providing learning opportunities that expose students to “thinking as an expert” within enriched curriculum.

Pull-out programs are a popular model for serving gifted students, but they can be isolated and disconnected from core academics (Landrum, 2001; Treffinger & Selby, 2009). Some districts are incorporating push-in services (to supplement pull-out programs) in which a gifted education teacher provides instruction in the regular education classroom. Doing so allows services to be extended into the regular classroom with more focus on advanced content. It also allows for capacity building for both teachers. Through collaborative teaching, the classroom teacher has opportunities to learn advanced instructional strategies to use with gifted learners, and the gifted education teacher can learn more about the core academic content, incorporating this content within pull-out instruction (Siegle et al., 2019).

What Are the Types of Collaboration?

Collaboration can encompass many different types of interactions between professionals. Throughout this book, we emphasize that these interactions are tools for capacity building, empowering others to better serve gifted students. Collaboration has been defined in gifted education as:

a style of interaction that includes dialogue, planning, shared and creative decision-making, and follow-up between at least two coequal professionals with diverse expertise, in which the goal of the interaction is to provide appropriate services for students, including high-achieving and gifted students. (Hughes & Murawski, 2001, p. 196)

We define various types of collaboration here:

• + Consultation: Consultation is a collaborative effort between the gifted education teacher and other educator where the “consultant” (i.e., gifted education teacher) provides direct guidance to the collaboration partner. In consultation, there is a shift in services from directly working with students to directly working with others who support students.
• + Coplanning: Coplanning involves collaboratively developing differentiated instruction, which may or may not lead to coteaching. Coplanning may involve working together to develop assessments, review assessment data, make decisions for flexible grouping, design tiered assignments, and make other curriculum adaptations.
• + Coteaching: Based on Friend and Cook’s (2017) conceptualization, co-teaching occurs when two or more professionals share in the responsibility of teaching students within a shared classroom or workplace. It is not a one-teacher classroom with help, but a two-teacher classroom where two individuals are actually teaching. Coteaching involves both professionals taking on meaningful roles and usually includes multiple activities taking place within the same space.
• + Coaching: Coaching is an ongoing, purposeful collaborative approach to improve teaching and learning through the process of guided reflection.

Benefits of Collaboration

Collaboration brings many benefits for both gifted students and individuals involved in the collaboration process. At the classroom level these benefits include the following (Landrum, 2001; Masso, 2004; Mofield, 2020b):

• + Teaching and recognizing gifted students become shared responsibilities, not just the responsibility of the gifted education teacher.
• + Collaboration allows for harnessing the strengths of each teacher to address students’ needs.
• + Classroom teachers learn a repertoire of strategies that they can use with a variety of students.
• + The more knowledge classroom teachers have, the more likely they will use the knowledge to differentiate for students.
• + Gifted education teachers gain opportunities to learn about the regular classroom context and curriculum.
• + Strategies shared by the gifted education teacher can benefit many students in the classroom, not just identified gifted students.
• + Gifted pull-out programs can feel isolated; collaboration allows for more direct links to the regular curriculum (i.e., pull-out instruction can tie in content from the regular classroom).
• + Collaboration enhances trust and facilitates communication about the needs of gifted students.
• + Working with others is a way to ignite advocacy efforts.
• + Collaboration allows for various points of view that both parties bring to “enable instruction to be richer, deeper, and tailored to each student’s needs” (Friend, 2016, p. 6).
• + Increased teacher skills can translate to better student outcomes.
• + When two or more come together, combined efforts create innovative ways to help all learners.

Barriers

+ Although there are many benefits to collaboration, a number of barriers prevent it from being successful and sustainable (Haberlin, 2016; Mofield, 2020b; Scruggs et al., 2007). In understanding barriers, you may proactively work to consider how to address them through sy...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The Why, What, and How of Collaboration
• Chapter 2 Preparing a Path for Successful Collaboration
• Chapter 3 Basic Principles for Coplanning Differentiated Instruction
• Chapter 4 Coplanning in Practice
• Chapter 5 Coteaching Models Adapted for Gifted Education
• Chapter 6 Strategies for Vertical Differentiation
• Chapter 7 Strategies for Deeper Inquiry
• Chapter 8 Instructional Coaching in Gifted Education
• Chapter 9 Collaborative Consultation: Developing Specialized Supports for Gifted Students
• Chapter 10 Collaborating to Support Gifted Students From Diverse Backgrounds
• Chapter 11 Collaboration Beyond the School
• References
• About the Authors