Keynote: Nick Magriplis

Moderator: Bohdan Balla-Gow  

The Ignite Conference panel brings together deep and broad educational experience and professional wisdom in teaching K-12, educational leadership, educational research and the equity aspects of gifted education now being enacted as high potential and gifted education across NSW Public Schools. The assembled panel will offer advice and practical guidance on understanding the diversity and equity needs of disadvantaged groups of high potential and gifted students, and addressing the excellence gaps that exist across NSW schools.

Three students, Chloe Griffin, Harry Sam Townend and Lyndon Steele, who are excelling in the performing arts world, were interviewed about what had helped them in their school years prior to their tertiary education at Brent Street. Brent Street is an elite performing arts college in Sydney that supports the talent development of passionate and hard-working performers through mentoring, challenge and inspiration - with some very famous performers in their ranks of alumni. Although very early in their tertiary training these Brent Street students, developed this video to showcase their dance talents and excellence in the creative and performing arts space.

For many students, Australian education systems are no longer fit for purpose. Effective differentiation and flexible, emotionally safe learning environments are not always provided in our schools for many gifted learners let alone those with neurodivergence/disability, who have higher levels of anxiety. Gifted students on the autistic spectrum, students with demand avoidance, physical disabilities, students with ADHD, dyslexia, dyscalculia etc fall into this subset of the gifted. Furthermore, within these groups there are often further comorbidities. A common comorbidity within these groups is anxiety, creating long term mental health problems in a country where mental health can never be adequately funded. High/extreme anxiety and trauma are preventing these children from flourishing in Australian classrooms. School refusal is at an all-time high. If Australia is to thrive economically and socially, these issues need to be addressed. The starting point is to understand the nature of this diversity, and possible adjustments.

School Level: Primary, Secondary

Level of Expertise: Novice

This session will explore the factors behind the existing inequity across talent development opportunities for students from underrepresented groups, especially those experiencing disadvantage. These barriers will be addressed with proactive, core strategies to provide evidence-based talent development for high potential and gifted students from all backgrounds, that leading teachers and school leaders can apply to their school settings. It will conclude with advice on how to plan for and evaluate the success of those strategies that participants could apply to their own settings, along with a Q&A opportunity.

School Level: Primary, Secondary

Level of Expertise: Novice, Intermediate, Expert

Role/s of the Audience: Teacher, School leader

The Performance Cliff is a psycho-educational phenomenon that occurs in the gifted population whereas a student will be performing exceptionally well until somewhere between 6th and 9th grade and then suddenly begin to struggle. This presentation will explain why that happens and what can be done to prevent it.

School Level: Primary & Secondary

Level of Expertise: Intermediate

Role/s of the Audience: Teacher, Specialist teacher, School leader, Academic/ researcher & Counsellor/ psychologist

In 2014 Bill Cohen was given a bag of equipment and told to run a weekly ‘recreational sport’ session for 30 students in Years 7 and 8. Faced with non-existent interest levels, a random assortment of gear and an inexplicable rubber chicken, Bill challenged the students to create games using any equipment they wanted with one commandment - “You must use the rubber chicken”. Recreational sport had, completely by accident, turned into a weekly game design class, with students tweaking rules and iterating their ideas based on peer feedback.  

Three schools, one pilot program and several very awkward conversations later, ‘The Art of Game Design’ is now a 100-hour elective with units in everything from creating board games to crafting escape room puzzles to running narrative experiences. But the course is also about learning from feedback, making small improvements, using restraints to unleash creativity, working with lots of different teams, and seeing yourself as someone who can finish things. Bill has made a bunch of mistakes and is ready to make the entire process easy for you to tweak or replicate in your school, from a lunchtime club to a full-blown elective class. Get ready to get your game on!

School Level: Secondary

Level of Expertise: Intermediate

Role/s of Audience: Teacher

The need for universal gifted and talented screening is well supported in the literature. To ensure excellence through equity, a K-12 school implemented universal screening to identify high potential and gifted students. The presenter will share information on the development of the initiative, which was based on research evidence on the identification of gifted and talented students by considering Gagne’s DMGT. In addition, it will also cover the process of gaining support and buy-in from the school leadership team, future steps, and reflect on how the change supported equity and inclusion. 

School Level: Primary, Secondary

Level of Expertise: Novice, Intermediate, Expert

Role/s of the Audience: Specialist teacher, School leader, Counsellor/ psychologist

The number of Gifted Learners with Disability (GLD) being placed in selective high schools is increasing. Currently, selective high schools have varied and limited information about students at the enrolment stage and limited resources at their disposal. Individual schools have often been left to develop their own processes, resulting in a system wide approach that lacks consistency, with limited access to resources at a systems level that could support them. The NSW Department of Education (DoE) High Performing Students Program (HPSP) has reviewed research and consulted extensively with community groups, parents, schools and internal groups to understand how we can best deliver a process that is consistent, evidence based and targeted to support our GLD as they transition from primary school to a selective high school. In this presentation we will outline a pilot program commencing later this year that has students, parents, teachers and schools playing an integral role in the evolution of a best practice model that aims to anticipate and then effectively meet the transition support needs of GLD through the use of evidence-based processes being described in literature and through practices currently employed by schools, with access to shared, quality resources. It will also address ways that we can provide better awareness for students and their families of the ways we support students with complex needs, so that those students and their families have confidence in our ability to set those students up for success. 

School Level: Primary & Secondary

Level of Expertise: All

Role/s of the Audience: All

This workshop explores how to optimise learning for high potential and gifted students with disability. Illustrations of practice will highlight authentic examples of strategies and opportunities across 4 domains of potential: intellectual, creative, physical and social-emotional. Participants will watch a video, hear real stories and have time to pause, reflect and share. A range of resources will be shared, including time for Q&A.

School Level: Primary, Secondary

Level of Expertise: Novice, Intermediate

Role/s of the Audience: Teacher, Specialist teacher, School leader

The NSW Department of Education has recently introduced an equity placement model which is aimed at increasing the representation of equity groups in selective education. The target groups, which were identified in the 2018 Review into Selective Education Access, are students from low-socio-educational backgrounds, Aboriginal students, gifted learners with disability, and students from rural and remote backgrounds. In this presentation you will learn about the research behind the equity placement model and its application in NSW selective schools.


School Level: Primary, Secondary

Level of Expertise: Novice, Intermediate, Expert

Role/s of the Audience: Teacher, Specialist teacher, School leader, Academic/researcher, Counsellor/ psychologist

Differentiation of teaching and assessment is highly beneficial for equitably addressing needs of diverse students, e.g. gifted or high-achieving students. However, overworked and time-poor teachers face various practical difficulties in implementing large-scale differentiation.  

Over the last several years, I developed and differentiated a curriculum teaching artificial intelligence to school students. I delivered adapted versions of this curriculum in 6 quite different extra-curricular or curricular settings, to students aged 9 to 19, face-to-face or online-only. More importantly, I differentiated teaching to the needs, characteristics and interests of diverse students within each delivered program. The majority of students were gifted/high-achieving. I had to prepare differentiation in limited time, after-hours to my unrelated full-time job. While for some programs I was able to learn about students and prepare differentiation before teaching, in some short programs I had to differentiate “on-the-fly” during delivery because I was not able to learn about students beforehand.  

   My main insight is that successful differentiation is made easier by:  

1) a well-defined but adaptable curriculum,  

2) diversity and flexibility of learning resources,  

3) giving students choices that do not make helping and assessment overwhelming,  

4) interactive online learning systems with real-time teacher dashboards,  

5) software automating student data analysis.  

School Level: Primary & Secondary

Level of Expertise: Novice & Intermediate

Role/s of the Audience: Teacher &  Academic/researcher