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1. Case Study/Description of Tabitha & Her Special Need

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1. Case Study/Description of Tabitha & Her Special Need

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Student Name and Background

Tabitha Lee is a highly gifted learner with an IQ of 140.  When she first entered our school, we recommended to her parents that she be promoted, but they have opted to keep her with children of her own age.  Tabitha's maturity level, however, is considerably above that of her peers, which has posed a problem for her every year as she has progressed in our school.  Tabitha has not been challenged, has maintained a perfect score in every subject in every grade, and spends the class days tuned out of the instruction as she reads books in her lap.  Despite this, she completes in-class assignments in less than half the time allotted and also manages to complete and turn in all of her homework before she even goes home.  Not much is known about her home life as she is very reticent on this topic.  Five of her siblings are also here in our school, her mother stays at home and often participates in field trips and other school activities, and her father is a pastor of an obscure church.  Her family appears highly conservative, and her upbringing appears to be very rigid and strict.  Tabitha and her siblings are extremely well-disciplined and well-behaved and seem very afraid of and timid around their father.  It does not appear that her parents value her education as much as they care about her reputation.  Her father has made it clear that he wants any and all disciplinary issues addressed to him.

Details Related to the Student's Special Need

Tabitha is gifted across the board.  She never studies for any test and does not have to put much effort into completing any assignment on her grade level.  She absolutely loves poetry and can perfectly memorize and quote back any short poem after giving it just a couple or so readings.  She demonstrates exceptional memory in all subjects and possesses a large amount of information due to her incessant reading.  She is perfectionist and idealistic to the point of being quixotic, and on the very rare occasions that she misses even one point, she cries in class.  Whenever she is forced to put her book down and listen and participate in the class, she asks incessant questions that though pertaining to the lesson, yet diverge too much from my primary objectives and get the class off track.  Her questions demonstrate that the lessons planned for my general class are too basic for her, that she already possesses much knowledge on the given topics, and often she is questioning me even beyond my ability to answer her.  If I shut her down from asking questions, however, she says, "I'm not learning anything!" and becomes very frustrated and tunes out of class.  Tabitha is desperately in need of avenues that will challenge her, satisfy her curiosity, and keep her engaged with the rest of the class.

Student's Hobbies, Interests, and Passions

Tabitha loves poetry and nature and focuses on religious themes.  She demonstrates a reflective nature very atypical of her age, but she is also super social and loves people.  She also loves to debate and creates uneasiness in the classroom when she agitates controversial topics such as abortion, homosexuality, and government-issues that don't cross the minds of any of my other students.  She keeps a diary and writes a poem a day.  Most of the books she reads are set in prior centuries.  When asked what she would like to do when she graduates school, she insists she wants to live in a cottage deep in a far-away wood, have twenty children, grow and make everything her family needs, and never buy anything from the store except toilet paper and salt.  I have tried to help Tabitha see that she has exceptional gifts and she ought seriously to consider a career such as being a doctor or lawyer, but because of her religious upbringing, it seems, she is adverse to considering this.  She knits, crochets, sews, and gardens, but clearly demonstrates that her greatest passion is for religious or nature-themed poems.  Tabitha also loves to sing.

Student's Preferred Learning Styles and Personality Traits

1. Learning Styles:  Tabitha's learning styles are heavily auditory and also read and write.  She learns best by listening at me lecture, which becomes a problem in the classroom as I am trying to move away from heavy lecturing.  She thrives off copious discussion over topics and likes to demonstrate what she learns through writing.  She is very good at taking and organizing notes and summarizing what she has read or learned.  She likes immediate review of new topics.  Also, she does not work well in groups because other students tend not to understand her,  and she functions on an entirely different level than the rest of the class.

2. Personality Traits: Tabitha is extremely social and exceptionally friendly but poorly received by the rest of the class because of her interests being too unrelatable to the rest of the students.  She is extroverted and extremely talkative until she is silenced or is lost in a book.  She has a domineering and critical nature and is very blunt when she speaks, which sometimes offends, shocks, or hurts the feelings of classmates.  She seems to have some underlying attachment issues possibly due to family situation, but she will not open up about this.

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(Quoted from memory before the class on the first day when asked the question, "What are you passionate about in life?")

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2. Ways for Building Teacher-Student AND Student-Student Connections for This Student

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2. Ways for Building Teacher-Student AND Student-Student Connections for This Student

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How Will I, As the Teacher, Create Personal Connections with This Student?

Since Tabitha lives and breathes poetry, the best way for me to connect with her is to discuss the poems she writes. Tabitha has told me that she writes a poem a day, and she is very passionate about her writing.  I can connect with her by asking her daily if she would like to share with me the poem she wrote the day before.  I will ask her what inspired her to write the particular poem she wrote.  Since she writes extensively on religious topics, I must be sensitive to her highly conservative and sometimes unusual viewpoints.  Depending on the nature of the poem she has written, I will ask her if she would like to share it with the class and will allow her to read it to the class and see if this can open a class discussion.

Example of Tabitha's Poetry (this was truly written by me when I was 11)
O Lord, our Lord, how excellent Thou art!
All nations of earth Thy praise tell in part.
Thy glory is seen in heaven above
And sweetly distills to earth like a dove.

When I consider the moon and stars Thou hast made,
All the lights of the heavens to shine night and day,
What is man, that Thou art mindful of him?
And the sons of men, that Thou visiteth them?

Yet only a little lower than angels are we;
Thou hast crowned us with honor and with glory.
Thou hast given to us dominion on earth
And rule over all that is given into birth:

The sheep and the oxen, the beast of the field,
The fowl of the air, from the crow to the teal,
The fish that swim in the ocean free,
And all other things of the deep, dark sea.

O Lord, our Lord, how excellent Thou art!

Tabitha thrives off class discussions but has far too many questions for me to answer during the allotted time.  She gets discouraged when I have to silence her or tell her that we will be moving on.  Silencing her or ignoring her, however, is not at all helping her learn, especially since much of what I cover in whole group she already knows.  Therefore, I will be creating a "Find the Answer Yourself" system to help Tabitha stay engaged in class discussions and to not discourage her immense curiosity.  Whenever she shoots her hand up to answer a question and I would rather another student answer it or I have no time to answer her or I think her question is too involved for my class objectives, I will hand her a little notebook in which she will write down her question.  After she writes in a question, I will gather the notebook from her until the next question I think appropriate for the book.  Then during class time as Tabitha always finishes her assignments well before the other students, I will hand her back the notebook and allow her to use her Chromebook to research answers herself to her questions.  Then during student work periods when she is free and I am free, I will call her up to my desk to discuss the research she has done.  Tabitha thrives off discussion and benefits from one-on-one mentoring with me, the teacher.

What will I do to help all of my other students make a personal connection with this student?

Because Tabitha is not only gifted but also more mature than her classmates, she is having a hard time making personal connections with her peers. Therefore, I will test two activities to see what I can do to try to build some relationships: I have one child who is dyslexic and another child who has dysgraphia in the class, so I will begin pairing Tabitha with these two when she is finished early with her lesson.  The dyslexic child will benefit from having someone read aloud to her lessons that involve heavy reading, so I will begin pairing Tabitha and Betsy in the reading corner.  My child Alicia who has the dysgraphia cannot complete her writing assignments in a reasonable period of time, so I will allow Alicia to dictate to Tabitha as Tabitha writes Alicia's essay assignments for her.  Tabitha is highly social and loves responsibility, so I know she will rejoice at these special assignments for her.

Another way I will help my other students make a personal connection with Tabitha is that during our seminar times (homework time) at the end of the day, I will begin allowing students to pair up to work together on homework, and I will rotate who they sit with every day.  Just to break down any tension that some students might feel about working with Tabitha since many seem to find her unrelatable, I will let them know that if they sit with her, they will probably get all their homework done before they go home, and they will probably have all correct answers.  I hope to see this encourage relationship-building among all my students as they rotate day by day.

I will be having all the classmates participate in a year-long project that will help them get to know one another better and build relationships with each other while exploring further in the areas in which they are most interested.  For Tabitha, I will assign her the class project of putting together a book of acrostic poems using the names of every one of her classmates.  I will have designated days throughout the year when Tabitha will sit down with each of her classmates individually to allow her classmates to tell her about themselves as Tabitha builds a poem about them using the letters of their name.  I think this year-long project that will force her to work one on one with every single classmate will be an excellent way for them all to get to know one another, helping to break down the walls and build stronger relationships.

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At the beginning of class, I asked each student to write a short little essay about one thing that reflects who they are well.  Tabitha wrote this poem about her new writing table she said her mom had purchased for her from a yard sale:

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At the beginning of class, I asked each student to write a short little essay about one thing that reflects who they are well.  Tabitha wrote this poem about her new writing table she said her mom had purchased for her from a yard sale:

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I always needed a writing table;

Now I’ve got one; happy me!

Laid out across it, I was able

To reflect all that’s happening

Inside my mind, day by day,

The things I love, will love always.

Love for true Christianity,

Commitment to God and to His way,

Spans my table’s full five feet,

And stands on guard day by day

To be the standard of what I pursue,

Of what as I sit at my table I do.

Next behind it: poetry!

It fills every space my table can spare,

Adding color and boundless beauty

To my table everywhere.

Rhyming words my papers fill

With merry chime and happy trill.

Poetry’s most intimate brother:

Prose, next up, composition’s master!

My thoughts’ and ideas’ very mother

Words’ sweet fortune and their disaster.

Words leap forth from my mind in ink,

And on my paper is what I think.

And my very table is paper and books,

And books and papers, God in writing,

And squeezed into my table’s nooks,

Are the thoughts I’m constantly inditing

So running along my table free

Will you find none other than me, yes, me!

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3. Motivation strategies for learning and promoting positive behavior

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3. Motivation strategies for learning and promoting positive behavior

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How will you motivate this student to learn and express himself or herself in a positive manner?

Tabitha is overall a very well-behaved student. However, because of her giftedness, she becomes very bored in class and through her incessant questions can become disruptive when forced to participate on the same level as everyone else. I have decided on four different plans for helping her truly learn and function to her capacity and to improve her social graces and patience with her classmates who she can be critical of when they don't perform the way she thinks they ought:

On days when I have a lot of review for the class in general to prepare them for tests, I will allow Tabitha to sit in with the sixth or even seventh graders in their classes.  I have already spoken with the sixth and seventh grade teachers, and they welcome her to go participate in their classes.  I will coordinate my review classes with the times I know will be suitable for Tabitha to join the other grades so that she can be challenged and occupied while I can focus on information retention with the rest of the class.  I know that Tabitha will enjoy this because of her being so social and always wanting to meet new people.

I have done research on academic competitions that are offered in our area, and I will consult with Tabitha about which ones she will be interested in participating.  As Tabitha is a social butterfly, I know she will welcome this opportunity to get to meet and know other students from other schools.  I have also received permission for Tabitha to join the seventh grade spelling bee this year, so if she finishes her work early in my class, I will allow her to be working on preparing for this.

Gifted children can often come off as snobbish and know-it-all to their peers, and Tabitha sometimes struggles to express herself in a manner that doesn't offend her classmates as she can become argumentative or excessively critical.  To help her with this, I will allow her to participate in a special etiquette class that one of the mothers who used to teach cotillion for years has been asking us teachers if any of our students would be interested in.  I have spoken with this mother about the nature of this class, and she said it will encourage students to explore and return to the gentle manners taught in centuries bygone.  Because Tabitha is so interested in old-fashioned themes, I can imagine that she will be very happy to attend these bi-monthly classes, during which she will get to dress up in the long, old-fashioned dresses that she tells me she loves.  I will be collaborating with this mother to encourage her to incorporate sensitivity training into her etiquette lessons to help teach the children how to display grace instead of snobbery and criticism.  Gifted children benefit from outside mentors and lots  of extra-curriculum activities such as this to help them blossom in all the ways that they can!

Last of all, to keep Tabitha from becoming excessively bored in my classroom, I will introduce vertical enrichment, requiring different outcomes for her than from my other students.  I will give Tabitha a choice of alternate assignments that will be more challenging and interesting whenever I can foresee that the regularly assigned work will be mindless for her.  Giving a gifted child just "more of the same" doesn't encourage them to grow into all they can be.  Instead, I must stretch Tabitha's brain as much as I stretch my other students' brains and be sure that she is reaching high in her academic goals according to her potential. I will certainly try to incorporate her poetry-writing skills as much as she likes in the vertical enrichment projects I find for her.

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4. Teaching AND Assessment methods used specifically for this student in EACH of the listed subject areas below

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4. Teaching AND Assessment methods used specifically for this student in EACH of the listed subject areas below

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How will I change my teaching style AND assessment methods (testing) to accommodate Tabitha's needs?

Math

Teaching Style:  Tabitha is a very auditory learner, so I will be sure to collect as many mnemonic devices as I can to assist with her learning math.  Many of these mneumonic devices are like mini poems, which fits with Tabitha's passion for poetry.  I will encourage her to write her own mneumonic devices.  I also will not require her to sit in on all the extensive reviews we have in class.  Instead, during these times will be when she will be allowed to visit the upper grades to sit in with their classes.
Assessment Method:  Tabitha will be allowed to take her tests early once she has demonstrated mastery of the concepts so that she can leave the class for her extra-curriculum activities such as the etiquette classes and academic competitions.

Language arts (reading and writing)

Teaching Style: Because Tabitha is highly gifted in language arts, I will change my teaching style for her by requiring more of her through vertical enrichment activities.  We will be reading Shakespeare a lot in class this year, and our school texts use modified versions of all of the Shakespeare works that we will be examining.  For Tabitha, however, I will present her with the original works in the original archaic language and challenge her to read this with, of course, notes for explanation for her to refer to as needed.  We will also be reading a lot of abridged versions of classic stories this year in class, but I will require Tabitha to read the full versions as I see her capability to grasp them.
Assessment Method: I will allow Tabitha to present her essays in the form of poems if she so chooses just as long as she can cover all required material in her poem that will be required in her essays.  I am still amazed at her mastery of rhythm and rhyme at such a young age!
Here is another one of Tabitha's poems that she shared with me as she tried one day timidly to talk to me about her faith in God:

My Faith Will Stand

I boast a Faith that firmer stands
Than mighty mountains towering high;
I own a trust securely kept
In heavens beyond the highest sky.
For winds may howl and tempests rage,
And foaming white the billows churn;
And forked lightning rend the air,
And intense fire the elements burn.
The sun may drip away as blood,
And from the sky the moon come tumbling;
The whole vast sea may flee from earth,
And mountains great may fall and crumble...
But 'midst the raging of the earth,
While fierce forces rock the land;
When all is swept away and gone -
Through it all, my Faith shall stand.

Social Studies

Teaching Style:  I will use vertical enrichment in social studies by assigning Tabitha special projects to complete to help our class review what we learn; and as Tabitha loves interacting with her classmates, I will allow her to lead the reviews for the lesson through her projects.  For example, I will be having her put together a poster board display of all of the presidents with a few facts about each under their pictures along with the times that they were president, so when we are reviewing the presidents, she will present her project.  Another big project I will have for her is to put together a colorful timeline that we will hang on our wall that will highlight the most important historical events we will be covering in our class this year.
Testing Methods: I will again allow Tabitha to utilize her love of poetry.  I will give her the option of taking the standard tests that I will be giving to the rest of the class or craft a poem demonstrating her knowledge of the particular topic we will be studying at the time.  I will challenge Tabitha to write narrative poems about such events as the major battles of the Civil War, the events that led up to the Industrial Revolution, and the major figures of the Suffrage movement, for example.  Tabitha's acceptance of this major undertaking for tests will be worth more points than if she just chooses to do the same test as the rest of the class.

Here's yet another one of Tabitha's poems.  I want to set her free to strive as hard as she can to fulfill the dream she expresses in this poem:

Lord, I long for the talent to write
To carry Your Word to the ends of the night,
Give me a pen as sharp as a sword
By which in Your strength I might fight for the Lord.
Ordain my ink to water the earth
To sprout forth blessings out of a curse;
Let me cause by the letters I pen
Flowers to bloom in a desert land.
Make my papers the map and the chart
To guide to God some desperate heart.
Power and strength my words be given
To raise a soul to the heights of heaven.
Let me prick the conscience of man
With paper and ink and a pen in my hand.

Science

Teaching Method: All of my students tune out during science lectures, so I plan to heavily rely on videos for our lessons.  In order to keep Tabitha from tuning out during less than exciting segments, I will require her to take notes on what is happening in the video and then for homework she will type out her notes to tell the story of what she saw in the video and what she learned from this.  This involves Tabitha's love of writing and also will force her to use her critical thinking skills to analyze and examine what she is learning.
A special project I will have going on all year is a small garden outside of my classroom and several potted plants, and I will be assigning every student a particular plant for which they are responsible.  Tabitha absolutely loves gardening, so as I relate lessons we learn in biology to what we are observing about our plants, I will be involving Tabitha's specific love of gardening to help keep her interested in the class.
Assessment Method:  Because Tabitha loves one-on-one time with me and expressing herself verbally, for her testing I will drill her orally on explaining to me such things as the path of blood in the heart and different scientific concepts such as metamorphosis, photosynthesis, the carbon cycle, how the body heals, etc.  I will give her guided study sheets a week before her test to help her know what all I want her to cover in her dialogues to me, and then for her test, I will let her present to me what she has learned verbally just as if she were lecturing before a crowd.  I think this will be very good for Tabitha to hone her public speaking skills and help her put difficult concepts into words fluently.

Other subjects, if relevant (Physical Education, Art, and Music)

Tabitha is a highly musical child who loves to sing.  I will encourage her to join our student choir, and I will encourage her to join the student band.  She also excels in physical education and in art, so my role for her in these areas will be to encourage her to stick with these extra-curricular activities.  I will make it a point to ask her about her music, PE, and art classes and will highly encourage her to incorporate what she is learning in art class into her many essays and poems.  I will award extra credit points for well-illustrated writing assignments.

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Here is another poem written by Tabitha that she shared with me:

The Spring of Truth

Clean, clear water
The truth is like unto,
Flowing through the minds of men,
Purifying what they do;
Bubbling, boiling, sparkling,
Springing from the Fount of God,
Crashing through the mounds of sand,
Demolishing, destroying clod;
Spilling o'er the cliffs and rocks
While eroding the shifting sand
With frightening, glistening power,
The might of the Almighty Hand.
Nay will it mix with the dirt,
The dirt of defiled man,
Standing immaculate at the top
To the bottom floats the sand.
Resisting the change of time,
Though it evaporates into the sky
In a shower it comes pouring down
Onto a land dusty and dry.
Quenching the thirst of the world
Unlike the literal thing,
The water from the Fount of God
Is eternally satisfying.
Lord, drench us with the Spring of Truth,
Bathe us underneath its flow,
Let us stand as the tested rock,
As the truth runs to and fro.