Description of SAGE Services

All children possess gifts and talents. The Framingham Public Schools defines giftedness as a combination of high academic aptitude, high curiosity and innovative thinking skills, and a high curiosity and high need for cognitively demanding tasks. Since the goal is for every student to maximize their learning potential, it becomes necessary for children who possess needs associated with giftedness to receive adjustments in the teaching and learning environment.  The responsibility for adapting to these student needs may be met in the classroom or through a pull-out service, dependent upon individual needs. Therefore, the services of the Sage Department are three-fold based on student needs: pull-out services, intervention, remediation, and collaborative enrichment through collaboration between classroom and Sage teachers as determined by the multi-tiered support system (MTSS) team at each school.

The Sage pull-out services will provide support for creating project-based learning opportunities with a culminating project to allow students time to present their work to the larger school community. Projects that are completed will be based on Massachusetts frameworks and aligned with the student’s classroom content to support them in making classroom connections while fostering their academic discourse and growth on the student-selected topic. 

Students identified as needing intervention and remediation will receive targeted, goal-driven, small-group instruction in or out of their classroom depending on the specific foci which are determined by each school’s MTSS team through the analysis of specific data. Interventions run on an established 6-8 week cycle, are goal-driven, and involve an ongoing process of progress monitoring and refinement.

It is important that all students have access to a highly engaging grade level, standards-aligned curriculum throughout the day that meets the needs of the individual learner. This often requires adapting and modifying the curriculum to include tasks that are highly cognitively demanding, allowing for student autonomy, and allowing for students to use their creativity and innovative thinking. Sage teachers will provide support to classroom teachers to help provide standards-aligned depth and complexity to learning tasks that push the thinking of all students but especially Sage students.