What it Involves: / Thinking about your own thinking. Knowing when you get it and when you don’t-AND having a plan to deal with it. Developing a repertoire of self-regulatory behaviors. Able to set personal goals for learning.
How it Looks for Gifted Kids: / Because gifted children tend to be decontextualists in their learning, they often don’t know how they “got” something. They learn complex concepts quickly and can understand the parts of the concept without the ability to show their work or explain why. On the other hand, their ability to think on higher levels often equips them to analyze situations and dissect their learning.
How To Differentiate the Principle: / Give gifted kids multiple opportunities to engage with content and processes complex enough that they struggle, and, therefore, must develop a plan. This forces them to be aware of their thinking. Easier material and concepts do not require the same level of cognitive awareness or an intentionally strategic approach.
Strategies: / Modify pace, process and/or product. Whole-to-part learning-let them view the big picture and then break it into parts. Encourage them to exam a concept from different perspectives.
CRISS Principle: Background Knowledge/Activating Prior Knowledge
What it Involves: / Students are more likely to pay attention to new information when they have some previous knowledge or “mental priming” about the topic. Newlearning is more likely to take hold when they can hook it to prior knowledge.
How it Looks for Gifted Kids: / Gifted children often come to the learning experience knowing much of what is to be taught. In fact, gifted elementary students often know from 30%-50% of the material to be taught before school starts in the fall. High school students report that they get high grades without working hard. (National Excellence: A Case for Developing America’s Talent, 1994).
How To Differentiate the Principle: / Pretest and compact the curriculum. Use the KWL “K” column to determine readiness for learning and the ‘”W” column to match that to a student’s interests. Use the student’s level of background knowledge as the basis for enrichment, acceleration, and grouping opportunities.
Strategies: / KWL-modify with more questions. Use one-sentence summaries to condense understanding.
Anticipation Guides. Concept maps.
CRISS Principle: Purpose Setting
What it Involves: / When students have a specific purpose for their learning, they know where to focus their attention and this has a positive effect on comprehension. Purpose setting is essentially setting a comprehension goal through selective reading, listening, and viewing.
How it Looks for Gifted Kids: / The gifted student’s need for depth and complexity in learning, the ability to think on higher levels, and intense curiosity, make meaningful purpose especially important. If they perceive the purpose of a learning situation as “lame”, they will check out from the beginning. Underachievement may result.
How To Differentiate the Principle: / Purpose setting might involve a more complex and/or abstract approach to the task. If the g/t students already understand the concept, adding greater complexity and/or abstraction to the task helps align the lesson with the gifted students learning needs. More independent students will be successful setting their own purposes for learning, which may drive independent, enriched learning situations.
Strategies: / Anticipation Guides, Compare and Contrast, Concept mapping
CRISS Principle: Active Learning-Active Reading, Listening and Learning
What it Involves: / New neural connections are forged when we actively process new information through discussion, writing, and transforming through organizational strategies.
How it Looks for Gifted Kids: / It is difficult for a student to be actively engaged with information he/she already knows, that lacks cognitive complexity consistent with ability, or that represents minimal challenge to the individual. Engagement goes up when students see a meaningful, authentic purpose for the activity.
How To Differentiate the Principle: / Ask gifted students to use the same strategies with different, more complex material. Relate classroom activities to authentic real world situations driven by student interests and needs. The gifted brain works faster and with greater intensity, so avoid unnecessary repetition and allow kids to work at a pace consistent with abilities and readiness.
Strategies: / Out of level textbooks, use materials with advanced vocabulary and complex organization
CRISS Principle: Discussion
What it Involves: / Students need opportunities for social interactions to create meaning in their learning. Discussion helps to transform information and build personal connections. Discussion is essential to these constructive processes. (Moth and Alverman,1999 as cited in Project CRISS™ p. 9)
How it Looks for Gifted Kids: / For gifted students, these discussions often occur on a higher level of thought and employ more sophisticated vocabulary. Because background knowledge is potentially more highly developed, different kinds of connections are made.
How To Differentiate the Principle: / Consider grouping gifted students together for discussion. The potential for them to push one another’s thinking is enormous. The level of questioning, sophistication of vocabulary and the ideas exchanged increase when grouped with students of similar ability.
Strategies: / Help students create seed discussions that are based on evaluation and synthesis of information.
Compare/contrast, discussions based on exploration of issues or problems rather than recall of factual information.
CRISS Principle: Writing
What it Involves: / Writing forces organization and requires a deeper understanding of learning. We truly know what we think when we commit those thoughts to paper.
How it Looks for Gifted Kids: / Gifted students are not always the most gifted of writers. Sometimes their thinking is far beyond their ability to put those thoughts on paper. On the other hand, those who write well do not want or need to be held back by dictated structures of written expression. They are more likely to read like writers and write like readers.
How To Differentiate the Principle: / As you pre-assess for student readiness and interest, give students opportunities to write in different forms about a variety of topics. When they are presented with models of good writing, be sure to include examples that model complex structures and high level content.
Strategies: / Vocabulary development, story plans, learning logs, perspective writing,
CRISS Principle: Author’s Craft / Text Structure
What it Involves: / Knowledge of text structure, both expository and narrative, is crucial to comprehension. ( Goldman & Rakestraw, 2000). Good readers are able to “get inside the author’s head” to understand how he/she uses text structures, vocabulary and features to aid the reader in understanding.
How it Looks for Gifted Kids: / Gifted students often just “get“ grade level text without always understanding the intricacies of the structure or the print clues. For example, they might understand text types such as cause/effect or compare/contrast without knowing why.
How To Differentiate the Principle: / Give gifted students text that is above grade level and in which the complexity and sophistication of the text structure will cause them to consciously focus on the thinking and problem solving skills they will use to make meaning.
Strategies: / compare and contrast, cause and effect
CRISS Principle: Organization
What it Involves: / Our ability to remember is dependent upon our ability to transform learned information through categorizing, developing hierarchical relationships, and putting that information into another format: e.g., charts and graphs. The better organized this information is, the better our chances of remembering it.
How it Looks for Gifted Kids: / Gifted students often have their own effective methods for organizing information and learning. What works for most students might be too simplistic an approach for rapid, complex, and abstract thinkers.
How To Differentiate the Principle: / Give students multiple organizational strategies from which to choose and move them toward independence. Allow students to use their own organizational methods in place of what the class is using or ask them to use the same strategy on a more complex text in which the organization/ transformation of learning requires higher levels of thinking and complex connections.
Strategies:
CRISS Principle: Explanation and Modeling
What it Involves: / Demonstration and modeling of concepts and processes help students to think strategically about learning. Teacher modeling and guided practice can lead to improvement in reading comprehension and performance on standardized tests ( Duffy, 2002). Teachers introduce, model and encourage reflection on the CRISS strategies. Then provide support and extensions.How it Looks for Gifted Kids: / Many gifted students are already effective readers and do well on standardized tests. They intuitively understand how learning and understanding takes place. While sometimes an appropriate strategy, over emphasis on modeling may encourage “ tuning out” and underachievement. Use when necessary.
How To Differentiate the Principle: / Compact instruction so that students are in class for necessary information and have opportunities to do research or do independent study with extra time. Have gifted students spend more time on reflection and higher order CRISS strategy extensions. Have the student explain a concept or task from a different point of view.
Strategies: / Creative problem solving, produce more than one idea or answer, double entry reflective journals, concept maps
CRISS Principle: Teaching For Understanding
What it Involves: / Teaching involves explaining, finding examples, producing evidence, generalizing, and representing topics in new ways. CRISS strategies engage students in the “big ideas” of the curriculum, foster connections with past learning, and engage students in the learning process.How it Looks for Gifted Kids: / Gifted students often seek real world connections to their learning. They are concerned with fairness and ethics.
How To Differentiate the Principle: / Provide learners with a problem or situation to solve that is relevant to their own lives. Allow them to explore many possible solutions, evaluating all possibilities for the best answer.
Strategies: / Problem analysis, Problem-Solution-Graphic Structure,
Written by Mary Schmidt, Heartland AEA,
Modified by Jayne Staniforth and Cappie Dobyns. 3/ 06