A development of Quality Indicators for Gifted and Talented Education in Slovenia Abstract
In Slovenia the Council of the Republic of Slovenia for General Education approved The Concept of Recognizing and Education the G/T students for the primary and secondary schools (1999; 2007). From 2002 onward the Expert Commission for Educational provisions for gifted and talented students is appointed at The National Educational Institute of Republic of Slovenia (NEI) and consists of representatives of academics, counsellors of NEI and proficient practitioners. One of the main goals of the Expert Commission is to provide a deliberately and systematic professional support for implementation of the Concept in schools. Among other tasks the Expert Commission developed original rating scales for teachers’ identification of students’ talents.
To encourage schools’ self-evaluation and raising more autonomous improvement of G/T education, the Expert
Commission developed the Quality Indicators (QI) for G/T Education. Although we used the Quality Standards of NAGC/USA (2000) as a basic resource, our first QI from 2010 has been developed in collaboration with 10 secondary schools’ project teams. In 2011 71% of schools’ coordinators for G/T education rated them as very beneficial for the improvement of a quality of G/T education. Based on this acknowledgment we decided in 2013 to adapt them for primary schools. We invited schools from Maribor and Murska Sobota region and 62 of them joined us on voluntary base (about 2/3 of invited schools).
In a workshop we are going to demonstrate some important steps in a process of co-creating quality indicators and we will present the results of a survey about how headmasters and teachers see the influence QI on schools’ developmental planning, schools’ action plans and on every day classroom work with the gifted and talented. In the near future the plan is to convert a “paper version” of QI to an online self-evaluation tool.