2012 Summer Scholarship Recipients

Go! Go! Go!

As the 2011/2012 school year winds down, some CISD educators are getting ready to GO! GO! GO! to summer workshops and conferences, hoping to return in Fall 2012 to start the new year armed with fresh knowledge on how best to reach and educate our GT students.

Once again, CGA has awarded over $5,000 in summer scholarships to 5 lucky applicants.

Stacey Harris and Torrin Garrison, both kindergartner teachers at Cottonwood Creek, will be attending a Brain Based Learning workshop on “Tools for Maximum Engagement”. Ms. Harris believes that GT students will benefit from the new research based activities geared toward engaging memory, exerting energy, and using their imagination. Ms. Garrison believes that “ … it is important for me to learn ways to reach these students as they do not come to me labeled “GT””.

Kimberly Pope, a CMS North History teacher, will be attending the “Innovation by Design: Turning Research and New Technologies into Classroom Practice” workshop at Harvard. She hopes that this conference will help her use current technology in the new flipped classroom model to be implemented in the fall. She is also hoping to learn ways to ‘engage my GT learners in a global capacity using technology’.

Kolby Kerr, AP Literature and Creative Writing at NTH@Coppell, will be attending the AP Summer Institute class on AP Literature. She will be teaching this class for the first time in the fall and is looking forward to exploring the rigors of AP curriculum within the PBL classroom parameters.

Laura Furr, a CMS North Language Arts teacher, will be attending Confratute at the University of Connecticut. Being a Language Arts teacher, she will be attending a strand that focuses on how to use books to meet the needs of talented readers but she is also attending strands to help learn about meeting the social and emotional needs of gifted kids.

Please be sure to share your congratulations and thanks to these dedicated educators if you see them out and about the city.

We are looking forward to reading about their experiences as they share what they have learned in our blog – stay tuned in to our website over the summer.

The fall TAGT conference is in Dallas this November – please look for more opportunities to stay on top of the best practices in GT education when our fall scholarship application comes online.