In today's high-pressured atmosphere to "get the scores up," teachers and students find themselves faced with more and more highly-structured, prescripted lessons that allow for little creativity and exploration. However, both students and teachers deserve a balanced education that includes exciting opportunities to delve into areas of strong interest. An Enrichment Cluster Program presents a framework for offering these opportunities during the regular school week.
Authors Joseph Renzulli, Marcia Gentry, and Sally Reis present teachers and administrators with all the information and materials they need to develop a successful Enrichment Cluster Program. Seven simple steps show program leaders how to schedule and implement a program, and eight easy-to-follow guidelines help cluster facilitators create engaging and challenging enrichment clusters. This guidebook also includes over 50 pages of reproducible planning forms, surveys, assessment instruments, and staff development handouts; 11 ready-to-use staff development activities; a week-by-week timeline for implementation; a resource guide of how-to books appropriate for a program, and dozens of example cluster descriptions on topics ranging from flight to children's rights to web site design.
Dr. Joseph S. Renzulli is a professor of educational psychology at the University of Connecticut, where he also serves as director of The National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented. His research has focused on the identification and development of creativity and giftedness in young people, and on organizational models and curricular strategies for total school improvement. A focus of his work has been on applying the strategies of gifted education to the improvement of learning for all students.
Dr. Renzulli is Fellow in the American Psychological Association and he was a consultant to the White House Task Force on Education of the Gifted and Talented. He was recently designated a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor at the University of Connecticut. Although Dr. Renzulli has obtained more than $20 million in research grants, he lists as his proudest professional accomplishments the UConn Mentor Connection program for gifted young students and the summer Confratute program at UConn, which began in 1978, and has served thousands of teachers and administrators from around the world.
Dr. Sally M. Reis is Department Head and a Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Connecticut where she also serves as Principal Investigator of The National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented. She was a teacher for 15 years, 11 of which were spent working with gifted students at the elementary, junior high, and high school levels. She has authored more than 100 articles, eight books, 30 book chapters, and numerous monographs and technical reports. She has traveled extensively across the country conducting workshops and providing professional development for school districts on enrichment programs and gender equity programs. She is co-author of The Schoolwide Enrichment Model, The Secondary Triad Model, Dilemmas in Talent Development in the Middle Years, and a new book published in 1998 about talent development in females entitled Work Left Undone: Choices and Compromises of Talented Females. Dr. Reis serves on the editorial board of the Gifted Child Quarterly, and is the past-president of The National Association for Gifted Children
