|
|
Young, gifted and talented
An interview with Ian Warwick, Director of Development, London Gifted and Talented
By Kim Thomas |
One of this government's little-sung educational initiatives has been to reach out to pupils who are academically gifted or who have talents in particular areas such as art or sport. Such pupils, especially if they live in deprived areas, often have needs that are ignored in mainstream education. Sometimes English is not their first language, in which case they may underachieve. Sometimes overstretched teachers are so busy trying to meet the needs of the average or lower-ability children in their classes that they don't have time to prepare challenging work for the more academically able.
In order to tackle the problems of schools in deprived urban areas, the government came up with the Excellence in Cities (EiC) initiative. EiC, which was launched in 1999, has several strands, one of which is the Gifted and Talented programme. This programme aims to improve the attainment of gifted and talented pupils, particularly those at risk of underachieving, through partnership with schools and LEAs. The DfES also funds other organisations to support the Gifted and Talented programme. One of these is London Gifted and Talented, founded just over a year ago as part of London Challenge, which addresses the needs of disadvantaged children across London.
London has particular needs when it comes to dealing with gifted and talented children, says Ian Warwick, the organisation's Director of Development. It has huge areas of deprivation, along with a transient population and numerous ethnic communities, for whom English is often an additional language. Ian was until recently a teacher himself at Holland Park Comprehensive, whose students come from 120 nationalities, and where 30% of students are refugees or asylum seekers.
By the time London Gifted and Talented was formed, all London secondary schools, as a result of the EiC initiative, already had a gifted and talented coordinator in place. Gifted and talented children - defined as the 5-10% of children whose needs were not being met in each school - had been identified in every secondary school. Furthermore, each borough had a gifted and talented strand coordinator.
One of the first things the organisation did was to identify areas of good practice. It took a roadshow round the different London boroughs, finding schools with expertise in particular areas, such as working with gifted children for whom English is an additional language. Once the teachers with expertise had been identified, they were brought along to INSET training days, to share their skills and knowledge with other teachers.
The organisation's main job has been to provide resources that will challenge and stretch the 100,000 plus children who have already been identified. These resources take the form of online 'pathways' which enable pupils to engage interactively with different topics. The pathways are usually piloted first, so that they can be refined after feedback from teachers and students.
Expert partners, such as the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Library or the National Film Theatre, have been brought in to help provide content for the pathways. Some of the pathways are used by students for independent study; others have been developed for use by teachers in the classroom through an interactive whiteboard. It's important, says Ian, that they develop the right kind of pathways to challenge students: "We're not just asking students to focus on short-term tasks, we're looking at creation and synthesis and analysis rather than just comprehension and knowledge bases."
One pathway, for example, is on the subject of 'designer babies'. Students see clips of eight scientists giving arguments for and against designer babies, and are invited to analyse and weigh up the arguments, and to make a short documentary about the subject using the clips. Students will either do this under the direction of a teacher, who will then assess their work, or they do it individually and send it to an e-tutor working with the QCA.
The organisation is always looking at ways of making the pathways more interesting and challenging. "You should be making connections across subject areas too," says Ian. "That's our next big one - trying to look at how we make some of the tools we developed for the Victoria and Albert pathway work with the film pathway."
Children from different schools and different boroughs are brought together in two ways: through live events and e-communities, in which children share messages on an online discussion board. Usually, says Ian, the two work best in combination with each other. In one example, a group of 35 pupils met civil engineers and surveyors and designers from the rail company Crossrail, to find out about the challenges of designing an underwater station - a brief that Crossrail had been given for Canary Wharf. After the meeting, the pupils went away and worked on the problem in an e-community. "Every third week they came back to meet live again, shared their ideas with the designers and asked new questions. At the end they did a big presentation to all the Crossrail directors, explaining why they'd done what they'd done. It was a chance for these kids to get a lot of input, but also to work in an e-community to develop a real world solution to a real world problem," says Ian.
One of the organisation's achievements has been to bring together gifted children from very different schools - the Crossrail project enabled children from deprived areas of London to meet, and collaborate with, children from relatively affluent areas. The e-communities have enabled the collaboration to continue after a live event or summer school has finished. In some cases, video-conferences are also used to get children talking to each other. It's a new experience for many of the children, says Ian: "If you're a very able kid in a school where you're one of two or three very able kids in the entire school that's a very isolated feeling."
It's early days yet for London Gifted and Talented, but Ian thinks that the organisation's work has the potential to be hugely influential: "What we do is a guiding measure for what teachers and learners will be doing in the next few years. The whole initiative towards personalising learning has to be done in online environments. You therefore need to understand what is it that makes for an extended, challenging focus for materials online."
Links
London Gifted and Talented: www.londongt.org/homepage/index.php
April 2005
|
|
