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| Winter 2001 | Page 1 | Volume VI, Number 1 |
Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4
| President's Message By Laura K. Rose Greetings fellow advocates of gifted education! I hope 2001 has brought many new blessings and new opportunities your way. Although currently teaching in a school system deeply affected by cutbacks due to state intervention. I have nevertheless found many things to be thankful for this year. My gifted students have a lot to do with that discovery. Their enthusiasm for learning, creative ways of solving (and sometimes creating) problems, gives me renewed energy every day. All of us know the feeling you get when you watch the lightbulb go on inside a childís mind, the expression on their face when they exclaim, ìI get it!î What frustration, and at the same time, joy I feel at being in a classroom where I actually have to tell some students to put their hands down because we just do not have the time for everyone to share their wonderful ideas. Along the lines of sharing great ideas, I hope many of you were able to attend our Annual Conference on July 17-18, 2000, and the NAGC Conference in Atlanta, GA November 4-6. This was the first time that I was able to attend the National Conference and I loved it. What a wonderful experience. You can read more about it in another section of this newsletter. In addition to the pursuit of the above goals, let us begin this new year with a renewed emphasis on advocacy. With the use of a Multiple Criteria Identification System for identifying gifted students, gifted education is undergoing some changes in Alabama. AAGC members need to be on the forefront of ensuring that those changes positively affect the education of gifted students. Stay informed, get involved and do your part to see that the needs of the gifted are being met and that ideas are being shared which increase the quality of education for all students. Our own conference, held at the Alabama School of Fine Arts this year was a tremendous success. Other than the usual minor difficulties such as air conditioning and technology, the conference went off without a hitch. We expanded the conference this year to include a day of preconference extended sessions and field trips. We had about sixty participants and received many good comments about this day on evaluations. | We had about two hundred twenty participants in the actual conference, almost too many for the auditorium/ concert hall. We had Nancy Weber, a nationally recognized speaker for Susan Weinbrennerís Organization, was our keynote speaker. The most frequently occuring evaluation comment about Nancy was to bring her back. We may indeed want to do that in future years, but we have already began planning a new conference for this summer with a keynote speaker that will energize and inspire us for the coming school year. Our keynote speaker for this year is someone some of us (AAGC Officers) heard at the NAGC Convention, and we were completely convinced that she needed to visit Alabama to share with our members on a more personal level. Read on to find out more. Your current executive board members will be working with our new AAGC officers from the Huntsville area:
| University Of AlabamaGifted Program Update by Judy Davison Its been a pleasure to join the faculty in the UA Programs in Special Education. I arrived in Fall 1999 and am thankful for the time to work with Dr. Carol Schlichter before her retirement last summer. For those of you whom I have not met, I come here from University of Northern Iowa where I received my doctorate and taught in the Masters in Gifted Education Program. Prior to that I spent 4 years of developing and teaching K-12 gifted programs and 3 years leading the Iowa Talented and Gifted Association‹district 7. This fall, Dr. Carol Tieso joined our faculty. She worked in California 7-12 gifted education programs before beginning her doctoral work at University of Connecticut. We are very pleased to have her join us after her summer graduation. Carol and I believe that our diverse experiences will benefit our Alabama students who we have found to be most enjoyable (intellectually and personally) in weekend college. We hope to eventually add another GT faculty member who would enable us to expand our course offerings. For those of you new to GT, UA offers certification and graduate programs in gifted education. For individuals currently holding a Class A Professional Certificate, 18 credit hours are required for GT certification. A masters degree with gifted emphasis requires 30 hours. The Ed.S. Degree, which leads to an AA certification, requires 33 hours. Doctoral degrees are also offered. All courses are taught through the popular weekend college and meet 4 weekends per semester. For more specific information on these options, contact the Special Education Department at (205) 348-6092. We are currently working on a website for those who prefer that option to the "old fashioned" human contact. |
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