Academic Advocacy for Gifted Children: A Parent's Complete Guide

The book is an essential guide to parent advocacy for gifted students. Parents and teachers can learn how to document a child's abilities and how to approach the schools to request reasonable educational options for that child in each academic year. This book also provides information on testing, score interpretation, curriculum, and successful programs for children in grades K-12. It is a practical and helpful guide written by a parent who learned how to advocate for her own son and who now helps other families advocate in their local schools to provide appropriate challenge for their gifted children.

Barbara J. Gilman, M.S., is Associate Director of the Gifted Development Center in Denver, where she has worked since 1991. She holds degrees in Child Development and Psychology and has extensive experience assessing gifted children and making educational recommendations for them. She specializes in highly gifted children and gifted children with learning disabilities, ADHD, and underachievement issues. A mother of highly gifted sons, she is a veteran of gifted committees, helped create an accelerated charter middle school, and is a popular speaker for parents and teachers on advocacy and classroom accommodations for the gifted.

Gilman devotes much of her time to school advocacy consultation, helping parents worldwide to document the unique instructional needs of their gifted child, find curricular options that meet the student's needs, and negotiate with school personnel for programming accommodations. As a member of the National Association for Gifted Children's Task Force on IQ Test Interpretation, Gilman has been writing and speaking extensively on the appropriate use and scoring of current major IQ tests with gifted children, as well as working with test companies to create tests capable of assessing our most highly gifted children. She penned the NAGC position statement Use of the WISC-IV for Gifted Identification.