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For Educators: Parent/Teacher Interaction

• Guidebooks: Davidson Institute Guidebooks

  Mentoring Guidebook

  This guidebook from the Davidson Institute team is specifically designed to help parents and students interested in developing a mentorship. The guidebook will help you answer such questions as: Is a mentoring partnership appropriate? How do I locate a mentor? What kind of relationship is most beneficial? Use as an information guide to help establish, maintain, and conclude a mentorship.

• Organizations: National

  Gifted Conference Planners: Beyond IQ

  This group plans conferences and other gatherings for highly and profoundly gifted children, their families, and the professionals who work with them. GCP also arranges smaller events, depending on the needs or interests of families, groups, or schools.

• Organizations: Regional

  Prodigy Northwest (Spokane, WA)

  The goals of this organization are to provide the highest level of academic and enrichment opportunities for gifted students by: providing an assortment of enrichment opportunities; working in conjunction with regional K-12 school districts to assist in their efforts to effectively serve gifted students; and assisting in the process of what can be an overwhelming journey for many families.

• Printed Materials: Books

  A Fine Young Man: What Parents, Mentors, and Educators Can Do to Shape Adolescent Boys into Exceptional Men

  Michael Gurian the author of "The Wonder of Boys" addresses the challenges of male adolescence. Gurian explores the biological and emotional landscape of male adolescence from cross disciplinary perspectives--culling research from medical science, psychology, anthropology and his own personal observation.

  A Teacher’s Guide to Flexible Grouping and Collaborative Learning

  Grouping learners purposefully throughout the school day based on their needs and the curriculum remains the single best way to differentiate instruction. This guide will help teachers expertly use flexible grouping and differentiation strategies to respond to students’ diverse learning needs, abilities, and interests. Included are methods for creating groups based on assessment data, planning group lessons and tiered assignments, engaging learners at all levels, supporting personalized learning, grading collaborative work, and communicating with parents about the benefits of group work and productive struggle. Digital content contains all forms from the book and a PDF presentation.

  Academic Competitions for Gifted Students: A Resource Book for Teachers and Parents

  Here is a resource book that will help you make more informed choices to help gifted students experience the joys of competing. Not only do the authors help teachers and parents find out about many academic competitions for gifted students, but they also offer tips on how to evaluate, enroll in, and implement the programs. The authors' primary focus is achieving the greatest benefit for gifted students in light of their strengths and weaknesses.

  Children and Bullying: How Parents and Educators Can Reduce Bullying at School

  Many books have recently been written about bullying in schools, but few, if any, have attempted to combine what has been learned from research with what it would be useful for parents to know about peer victimization in schools. This book by Dr. Ken Rigby attempts to show how parents and educators, principally teachers and school counsellors, can work together to reduce bullying and the associated distress which many children experience from bullying at school.

  Cues & Clues To Children's Behaviors: A Guide To Raising A Happy, Well-Adjusted Child
  

  This comprehensive and informative book, written by Salma Bhalla, Ph.D. is a guide to recognizing the ways children express their emotional and social problems through their behaviors. The book, written in a reader friendly style with examples, first makes the parents aware of causes of these behaviors. Then, it provides effective ways to help their child cope with anger, anxiety, stress, low self-esteem, and divorce. Available in paperback and as an ebook.

  Dreamers, Discoverers & Dynamos: How to Help the Child Who Is Bright, Bored and Having Problems in School (Formerly Titled 'The Edison Trait')

  Written by psychologist Lucy Jo Palladino, this book offers advice for parents struggling to raise children who are clearly bright, but also maddeningly unfocused. The author calls such children "Edison-trait" who exhibit divergent thinking, focusing on many ideas simultaneously.

  Emotional Intensity in Gifted Students: Helping Kids Cope with Explosive Feelings

  This book by Christine Fonseca provides readers with helpful, specific information about this population, as well as helpful interventions to attempt that are easy to implement and supported by research. Click here to read a review of this book.

  Expert Approaches to Support Gifted Learners:
  Professional Perspectives, Best Practices, and Positive Solutions

  Educators and parents need practical information they can use now to help them best understand and support the gifted learners in their lives. Because of the unique social and emotional needs faced by gifted learners—not to mention the unique academic needs—teaching and parenting them can be as demanding as it is rewarding. These 36 articles provide much-needed help. They are a “best of” from the last seven years of the Gifted Education Communicator, the national publication of the California Association for the Gifted.

  Gifted and Talented Children: A Planning Guide

  This book is for teachers and parents who have children of special ability/gifted. This resource takes an accessible, practical and inclusive approach to ways of working with highly gifted children.

  Gifted Children: A Guide for Parents and Professionals

  Author Kate Distin aims to help children and their families learn more about what is typical or normal for gifted and talented children and to shatter some of the myths about these children and their parents.

  Guiding the Gifted Child: A Practical Source for Parents and Teachers

  This award-winning practical source for parents and teachers discusses the unique social and emotional needs and concerns of gifted students. Includes chapters on motivation, discipline, peer relationships, sibling relationships, stress management, depression, and many other issues that parents and teachers encounter daily. See also A Parent's Guide to Gifted Children for an updated version of this book.

  Handling Difficult Parents: Successful Strategies for Educators

  It is possible to prevent problems with parents who are upset, angry, defensive, argumentative, or otherwise hard to deal with. Tried-and-true methods offered in this sensible guide will not only help you defuse stressful and counterproductive interactions, they will teach you ways to gain the parental cooperation you need to help children succeed.

  Helping Gifted Children Soar: A Practical Guide for Parents and Teachers (2nd Edition)

  This updated, user-friendly guidebook educates parents and teachers about important issues facing gifted children and the adults who guide them, such as selecting appropriate schools, expanding and differentiating the curriculum for gifted learners, and supporting children who experience stress, depression, perfectionism, friendship issues, and more. The information and useful advice contained in this book make it an ideal resource for those just starting to learn about gifted children, as well as seasoned veterans. The second edition includes the concepts of misdiagnosis and a discussion of Dabrowski’s Theory of Disintegration.

  Infinity & Zebra Stripes: Life with Gifted Children

  Wendy Skinner shares her family’s story of struggle and eventual success in working with the school system to meet her children’s needs. Enlightening anecdotes of the author’s experience demonstrate strategies for minimizing parent-school conflict. Learn how to build trusting relationships with teachers and administrators, and how your voice can change your child’s life. Click here to read a review of this book.

  Intelligent Life in the Classroom: Smart Kids & Their Teachers

  Karen Isaacson and Tamara Fisher share comical stories of children and teenagers in order for the reader to understand and appreciate the intellectual and emotional lives of gifted students. They cover key concepts such as: Curiosity is a powerful motivator for learning; Excellent teachers noth follow and lead their students; Learning happens when learners are inspired, not when they are admonished; and, Good teachers help students develop disciplined minds without overcoming students with discipline.

  Managing the Social and Emotional Needs of the Gifted: A Teacher's Survival Guide

  This book offers teachers numerous concrete, easy-to-use teaching strategies to help gifted students develop socially, emotionally, as well as intellectually. Topics include resolving conflicts at school and at home, managing stress, and handling feelings of "differentness." Teachers will also find helpful guidelines in dealing with parents, administrators, and attitudes about gifted education.

  Mindsets in the Classroom: Building a Culture of Success and Student Achievement in School

  Inspired by the popular mindset idea that hard work and effort can lead to success, the author of Mindsets in the Classroom, Mary Cay Ricci, provides educators with ideas for ways to build a growth mindset school culture, wherein students are challenged to change their thinking about their abilities and potential. This book includes a planning template, step-by-step description of a growth mindset culture, and “look-fors” for adopting a differentiated, responsive instruction model teachers can use immediately in their classrooms. It also highlights the importance of critical thinking and teaching students to learn from failure. The book includes a sample professional development plan and ideas for communicating the mindset concept to parents.

  Teaching Gifted Children in Today’s Preschool to Primary Classrooms: Identifying, Nurturing, and Challenging Children Ages 4–9

  These proven, practical early childhood teaching strategies help teachers identify young gifted children, differentiate curriculum, assess and document students’ development, and build partnerships with parents. Chapters focus on early identification, curriculum compacting, social studies, language arts, math and science, cluster grouping, social-emotional development, and giftedness in diverse populations. Includes real-life scenarios and extensive annotated resources. Digital content includes customizable forms from the book.

  The Challenges of Educating the Gifted in Rural Areas (The Practical Strategies Series in Gifted Education)

  It is only natural to ask how best to maintain a quality educational program in remote areas where funding is limited by lower population numbers and recruiting experienced teachers is problematic. This book by Joan D. Lewis, Ph.D. addresses the challenges and benefits of rural schools, shares how to adapt traditional gifted education programs for rural settings, and identifies and examines the components of a workable, successful collaboration among school administrators, teachers, students, parents, and other supporters from the community.

  The Homework Solution: Getting Kids to Do Their Homework

  This text, by Linda Agler Sonna, Ph.D., gives parents and educators great ideas on how to make sure students complete their homework. She covers several topics, including how to recognize homework problems, making a commitment, giving praise and avoiding conflict.
  

  The Twice-Exceptional Dilemma

  The National Education Association (NEA) published this book to assist educators, school districts and parents who are working to meet the needs of children who are both gifted and have special needs or learning disabilities. Developed by a workgroup of experts in gifted education and special education, this compilation illustrates the importance of awareness, knowledge and proper identification guidelines.

  Up from Underachievement: How Teachers, Students, and Parents Can Work Together to Promote Student Success

  This book by author Diane Heacox provides a step-by-step program proven successful in schools to remedy underachievement, including what to do to break the failure chain. This program works for students of all ages, with all kinds of school problems - from the good student whose grades start slipping, to the seemingly incorrigible underachiever with a history of poor school performance. Click here to read a review of this book.

  When Gifted Kids Don’t Have All The Answers: How to Meet Their Social and Emotional Needs

  In this book, authors Jim Delisle and Judy Galbraith explain what giftedness means, how gifted kids are identified, and how we might improve the identification process. Then they take a close-up look at gifted kids from the inside out—their social and emotional needs. Topics include self-image and self-esteem, perfectionism, multipotential, depression, feelings of “differentness,” and stress. The authors suggest ways to help gifted underachievers and those who are bored in school, and ways to encourage healthy relationships with friends, family and other adults. Click here to read a review of this book (previous 2002 edition).

  When Gifted Students Underachieve: What You Can Do About It (The Practical Strategies Series in Gifted Education)

  Sylvia Rimm, Ph.D., one of the leading experts in the underachievement of gifted students, looks at the various causes of underachievement, discusses the characteristics of gifted underachievers, and provides educators with solid advice on combating underachievement in this population. This guide offers guidance for understanding the pressures students face in school and at home, motivating students for success, adjusting curriculum to engage these students, improving the self-concept of students, and working with parents to reverse the patterns of underperformance.
  

  Why Bright Kids Get Poor Grades: And What You Can Do About It

  Dr. Sylvia Rimm offers help for parents of underachieving children. Drawing on both clinical research and years of experience counseling families, she has developed a “Trifocal Model” to help parents and teachers work together to get students back on track. Previously published in an earlier edition as Underachievement Syndrome: Causes and Cures.

  Yardsticks: Children in the Classroom Ages 4-14

  Written by Chip Wood, this is a guide for anyone working or living with children ages 4-14. Written for teachers and parents, it offers clear and concise descriptions of children's development. A comprehensive, "user-friendly" reference that helps translate knowledge of child development into schooling that helps all children succeed. Yardsticks includes charts summarizing physical, social, language, and cognitive growth patterns, suggestions for curricular areas, thematic units, and favorite books for different ages.

• Websites & Other Media: Informational

  Learn In Freedom!

  Karl Bunday, creator of this informative website on homeschooling, outlines the steps of getting started with independant education and how to use schools and teachers only when they are helpful to you. Also found are great references on this subject including socialization and homeschooling resource guides.

  PickyParent Guide

  Based on the book, Picky Parent Guide, Choose Your Child’s School with Confidence, this companion website helps parents choose the best learning environment that fits their child and family. The author's goals include keeping parents informed about the latest research and happenings in the education arena and how these trends impact your children, and generating a productive dialogue among all the adults who play roles in educating children.

  Strategy, Assessment, and Tactics

  The beginning of a new school year is a good time to think about what direction you want your child's education to take. Before that first parent-teacher conference, before the first IEP meeting, before the first call from the principal, plan your strategy, assess the situation and your child's abilities, and learn some new tactics for obtaining what your intellectually gifted child needs for a successful school year.

  The Blame Game: Are school problems the kid's fault?

  This article, by Pamela Darr Wright, M.A., discusses the frustrations parents of special ed kids feel when their children are blamed for certain problems that arise in school.