Amphitheater Public Schools Lands the Copper Apple Award with Outstanding Gifted Program

Amphitheater Public Schools has done some great work using their Gifted program evaluation to positively impact their gifted program and students in general. Vanessa Hill, the Gifted Education Coordinator, and team has re-imagined the gifted program to be more responsive to the gifted learners serviced. Through program evaluation, she recognized that more gifted learners had general intellectual ability strengths expressed through nonverbal (visual and spatial) reasoning. Many of these learners were having a tough time within the gifted program. They made some small changes to the program that yielded big results. 

With the support of their Associate Superintendent for Elementary Education, Tassi Call, Amphitheater piloted the “Stretch or Support” games for third graders at 5 elementary schools. Based on research by Riverside, students play selected games for 30 minutes per week geared to the relative strengths and weaknesses of students as identified in the CogAT Universal gifted identification test. Students played SOS! Games such as Apples-to-Apples and SET Jr. and saw increased math and ELA scores. Their results led them to expand the program to eight schools the following year.

In high school, they created REACH honors English to increase the number of identified gifted learners taking Honors ELA courses and to meet the needs of the spatially gifted learners by incorporative film and media as literature and instructional strategies. This is a strengths-based approach backed by research. As a result, more identified gifted learners chose to take an Honors level English class. In 2 years, they found that students taking REACH Honors English were achieving on par with or at a higher level than students who took traditional Honors and at a much higher level than students taking on level English as measured on the NWEA ELA MAP and the ACT. 

Amphitheater Public Schools is demonstrating remarkable leadership by using program evaluation results to guide thoughtful risk taking and implement new evidence based practices for gifted students, a population that is frequently overlooked in many systems.

Amphitheater Public Schools is demonstrating remarkable leadership by using program evaluation results to guide thoughtful risk taking and implement new evidence based practices for gifted students, a population that is frequently overlooked in many systems.