The book is an essential guide to parent advocacy for gifted students. Parents and teachers can learn how to document a child’s abilities and how to approach the schools to request reasonable educational options for that child in each academic year. This book also provides information on testing, score interpretation, curriculum, and successful programs for children in grades K-12. It is a practical and helpful guide written by a parent who learned how to advocate for her own son and who now helps other families advocate in their local schools to provide appropriate challenge for their gifted children.
Barbara J. Gilman, M.S., is Associate Director of the Gifted Development Center in Denver, where she has worked since 1991. She holds degrees in Child Development and Psychology and has extensive experience assessing gifted children and making educational recommendations for them. She specializes in highly gifted children and gifted children with learning disabilities, ADHD, and underachievement issues. A mother of highly gifted sons, she is a veteran of gifted committees, helped create an accelerated charter middle school, and is a popular speaker for parents and teachers on advocacy and classroom accommodations for the gifted.
Gilman devotes much of her time to school advocacy consultation, helping parents worldwide to document the unique instructional needs of their gifted child, find curricular options that meet the student's needs, and negotiate with school personnel for programming accommodations. As a member of the National Association for Gifted Children's Task Force on IQ Test Interpretation, Gilman has been writing and speaking extensively on the appropriate use and scoring of current major IQ tests with gifted children, as well as working with test companies to create tests capable of assessing our most highly gifted children. She penned the NAGC position statement Use of the WISC-IV for Gifted Identification.
A student whose observations enrich the chapters. He's a free lance writer in Denver.
Chapter 1. The Experience of Giftedness Chapter 2. What Do We Mean by Gifted? Chapter 3. Testing Considerations Chapter 4. Curriculum and Instruction Chapter 5. Underachievement: When a Child Is Too Advanced for the Educational Program Chapter 6. Underachievement: Gifted Children with Learning Disabilities or Other Deficits Chapter 7. Successful Programs for Gifted Students Chapter 8. Models of Advocacy for Parents Chapter 9. Teachers of the Gifted Chapter 10. Charter Schools-In Principle and Practice Chapter 11. Planning Your Child's Program-Year by Year
Afterword: The Call to Arms Essential Resources References Endnotes Index About the Author
What People are Saying About This
Karen Rogers
"This book is a treasure. It provides the advice parents need...based upon Gilman's professional training, as well as her own experiences as a parent of highly gifted boys. The chapter devoted to teachers is among the best I have seen. If the advice in this book is followed, one could almost guarantee rewarding education experiences for a gifted child."--(Karen Rogers, Ph.D, Professor of Gifted Studies, University of St. Thomas, Author of Re-forming Gifted Education: How Parents and Teachers Can Match the Program to the Child)
Paula J. Hillmann
" . . . here are some great, research-based ideas for parents who are navigating through the maze of giftedness, schooling, and parent engagement in a talented child's pathway to learning . . . As a former teacher, school principal, and K-12 gifted education services coordinator - and now in private practice as an educational psychologist and gifted & talented consultant in Milwaukee, Wisconsin - I am thrilled to have this book as part of the growing collection to our field of literature on parenting for high potential! I am already using it with families I work with and recommending it to parents as a 'must-have' in their quest for ideas and information on becoming an 'engaged' parent advocate. In the future I hope to use it as a foundation for one of my parent book study groups, too."--(Paula J. Hillmann, Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of Educational Psychology, President and Executive director, Advanced Learning Resources, Milwaukee, Wisconsin)
Jacquelyn Drummer
"This book-a rare combination of intimate frustrations and joys, and the step-by-step action guide with many specific examples, is a much-needed resource for parents and for educators. As advocates for gifted students, we can no longer hope and wait. We must act."--(Jacquelyn Drummer, President, WI Association for Talented and Gifted)
Christine Ohtani-Chang
"(Academic Advocacy for Gifted Children) has an acute sense of the gifted child's emotional sense of being. And as the introduction mentions, a parent's perspective lends a more in-depth and emotional tie to the child and their growth pattern. The social issues and emotional cues were good prompts to pay attention to, not only in a youth, but also in the adult."--(Christine Ohtani-Chang, Board Member, Hawaii Gifted Association)
