As the West Windsor-Plainsboro school district looks to improve and expand programs it offers to its exceptionally-able learners, two of the people directly involved in making some recommendations are neither teachers nor administrators.##M:[more]##
The district has included two West Windsor parents, Amy Frankel and Theresa Chao-Bergman, as part of the review committee charged with examining current programs and recommending what can be done to improve them.
Frankel, the parent of a college junior, a high school senior, and a high school freshman, got involved in the committee last year and says she and Chao-Bergman can bring a different perspective to the table. “We’re on the other side, as parents,” she says. “We see what the children’s experiences are like. When they come home at the end of the day, we see how do they feel about what they’ve done in class.”
Frankel — whose mother was a teacher and whose father was an accountant — grew up in Clark, and later met her husband, an attorney, in New York. The couple first lived in Secaucus and later moved to the area, where they have been living for the past 18 years, first in Plainsboro, when their oldest child began preschool, and then West Windsor.
Frankel, a part-time student herself, says she got involved as part of the review committee after she was approached by Joan Ruddiman, a PRISM teacher at Grover Middle School, as two of her own children were in the math and PRISM programs there. “The math program and the PRISM program are, I felt, good starting points,” Frankel says. “At the high school, I think students have many different options. These children have the chance to participate in different clubs; they have a chance to take AP courses and honors classes. There’s a lot of different variations and different things they can open their brains to.”
The review committee’s focus is on the curriculum at the middle school level to “revamp and capture some of these kids who may not necessarily be known by their classroom activity,” Frankel says. “These children don’t always volunteer. They’re the ones you would not normally look to” when thinking about the exceptionally able learner, she explains. “It’s trying to figure out what these kids need and what these teachers can bring to the table.”
Chao-Bergman became involved with the exceptionality program when her oldest son was in seventh grade and entered PRISM’s Future Problem Solvers program at Community Middle School.
Because of her involvement with the program there, she met Karen Rosnick, a PRISM teacher, who encouraged her to help out on a higher level. Chao-Bergman began going for training four weekends a year and currently does evaluations for the New Jersey Future Problem Solvers of America program. Her responsibilities include evaluating the booklets the students send in from different divisions. “I usually evaluated in the division my son was not in,” she explains. Even so, “it’s a blind evaluation. We don’t know which schools students were from. We see all of the booklets so that we try to keep it as consistent as possible.”
Chao-Bergman’s daughter, who is currently in middle school at Community, is also in the PRISM’s Cognetics program. When the district was forming the review committee to evaluate the exceptionality program two years ago, she joined as well. “I think it’s been great for the kids,” she says. “What I like about the program is you get some smart kids, but in most of these programs, they have to work together as a team. I thought it was really important for gifted kids. They tend to be loners. I can see both sides of what we need for gifted kids, and what we need for really bright kids.”
Chao-Bergman grew up in Anchorage, Alaska. Both of her parents were physicians — her father, who was in the public service, the equivalent of the military, worked with infectious diseases. She met her husband, who is originally from Chicago, while the two attended UC Berkeley in California. They moved to West Windsor in 1999. Her husband is currently the vice president of engineering at Kenwood USA, and she stays at home with her four children – Chris, a junior at High School north, Melissa, an eighth grader at Community, Matthew, a second-grader at Dutch Neck, and Nicholas, who is 11 months old.
Chao-Bergman says most of what the committee hopes to implement will help all of the district’s students. One option is to have a parallel curriculum, in which all students follow the same coursework, and study certain topics, but there are materials available to students who want to go further in depth to what they are studying. “What’s nice about it is they can opt into it,” Chao-Bergman says. “People say, ‘You have everything for the gifted students and nothing for the basic skills students,’ but it helps everybody because if you do a parallel curriculum, you can have different materials to help those kids come up” and also have something for the exceptionally-able students, she explained.
She says exceptionally-able students sometimes are bored in regular classes, and this way they can be challenged. And some students are gifted in one area, and not in another. And for some, even sitting in a classroom with PRISM is not enough, so they embark on research projects. “It’s not like they’re getting out of classwork,” she says. “The idea is there will still be someone to help guide them at a higher level. If there’s more than one, ideally they can even do it as a group.”
Like Frankel, Chao-Bergman says she hopes to strengthen the middle school program discussed at the school board’s April 22 meeting (see story below). Chao-Bergman says she hopes to see some aspects of the program pushed down into the lower grade levels. For example, the Future Problem Solvers of America begins in sixth grade, but Chao-Bergman believes it can begin as early as fourth. This way, by the time those students hit middle school, “they’re up and running.”
“It takes a long time to learn the process,” she says, but “it’s something that we can do.” She points to the Cognetics program that runs all the way down to the kindergarten level. She says some critics may say that nothing for the exceptionally-able learners will help all the kids, especially in the younger levels, but “it could be offered to whichever kids would like to do it,” and those who are really interested in the program will stick with it.
Regarding her own children’s experiences, she recalls that her oldest son was bored while he was in middle school. “He wasn’t challenged in some of the things, and some teachers noticed and challenged him some more. Now, he’s involved more.”
She says that now that he is in high school, he takes advantage of the AP and honors classes. “I tell my kids they get out what they put in,” she says. “You can always learn something.”
But, in some cases with exceptionally-able learners, it’s hard to motivate them, and it’s hard to get them to do the homework if they feel it’s redundant, she says. “It’s hit or miss,” she says. “The idea is hopefully, this way, the whole day will be a better experience.”
