Transitioning to the Vanguard Model

Welcome to Vanguard Gifted Academy’s blog. I'm Shannon Holub, the Intermediate Level master teacher here at Vanguard, and I would like to talk to you today about how we transitioned into the Vanguard Model. Did you know it's possible to offer more opportunities to gifted learners by taking things away?

The Vanguard model strips away non-essential practices and maximizes the use of approaches that really appeal to the gifted learner.

So, it's out with bell schedules, out with constrained spaces, goodbye to same-age classes, and goodbye to separate subject areas.

Let's slow down a little bit and take a look at each of these claims. The first thing we laid to the side as we developed the Vanguard Model was the use of traditional student groupings. What we did instead was we blended groups of students. Our Band 1 is made up of kindergarten through second graders, and our Band 2 is made up of third graders to fifth graders. When we blend students together, that allows us to administer readiness-based lessons, but we also set the students up to find peers who have similar interests as well as peers who are intellectually stimulating to be around, so it's a winning situation all around for that gifted child.

As a teacher, I marvel at the influences these students have on each other within a band. When the younger students come up into Band 2 for the first time, my veteran Band 2 students take them under their wing. It's just a natural activity; it's not an assignment of leadership. They just know that they were there before. So there's a very natural, unforced leadership and mentoring that happens within a band, in addition to making social and intellectual connections.

The second thing we laid aside was the use of traditional floor plans. No more desks, no more lockers, and no more grade-level classrooms. What we have here is an open space that we can imagine and re-imagine time and time again, both teachers and students, to use in the manner we need. So if we need to set up a geodesic dome for the next month, we do that, and others work around it. If we would like to tape a rough outline of the entire map of the world onto our floor, and it's going to take us a few weeks, so be it! In the meantime, math classes might be held in South America. This kind of flexibility is both fascinating and inspiring for the gifted mind.

We don't actually have desks. So where do we keep our things? Well, we have numerous resource rooms, and in these resource rooms, there are a lot of reference posters and book resources and tangible objects—hands-on resources for the students to go and collect for themselves when they need to use them for their independent assignments. At the same time, many lessons might be going on in those resource rooms. We have a math room, a language arts room, a science room, and a geography/history room. And it's okay for students to let themselves in and out of those rooms while lessons are going on because it's just an understood and accepted quality in this community that learning is supreme, that we respect the learning going on, that learning is supported by resources (both human and material-based), and we always want to allow access to that for any student whenever he or she needs it.

So, the habits of being community-minded are a key element of the experience of being a student within the Vanguard Model, and that appeals to the gifted learner because there's a sense of belonging and common mission. 

Because gifted learners can think that way, this is a very settling idea and concept for them to experience every day in their school life.

The third thing we set aside when we started the Vanguard Model was laying aside the traditional schedule. This was the most appealing thing of all to me. To me, needing to plan a whole year's worth of 42-minute math lessons didn't make any sense whatsoever. Gifted children are often quicker-picker-uppers, so their learning might happen very quickly with few repetitions. So then, what happens in the rest of that time period for them? Either they have some wait time until the next period starts, or they're asked to just do more activities during that time. What happens is there is increasing pressure to finish things in the remaining time. The question becomes “How much can I do?” instead of “How well can I learn?”, and that creates cynicism in the mind of a gifted learner.

Another result of setting aside the more traditional schedule is that teachers of all subject areas can integrate their specialties in real-time. At Vanguard, if we want to combine music and science, we can do that. We don't need to teach pitch in music classes two times a week and then teach sound waves in science classes on the opposite days and just hope that the students can make the connection by toggling back and forth between those two classes. Instead, we set aside the time and the space to do this together, and the teachers can bring their expertise together in real-time so that the students can take in the new concepts in a broad, conceptual way.

I hope you will agree with me that with the right kind of less, you can actually do more for gifted children.

Thank you for reading. We hope you'll tune in next time when Stacy Spears talks about some of the challenges of teaching gifted children.