Educational Practices For Students With Gifts and Talents (page 2)

Academic Interventions

For students with gifts and talents, academic interventions center on six dimensions: content, complexity, abstraction, pacing, documenting achievement, and choice and independence (Maker & Nielson, 1996).

Content  Students who are identified as gifted require advanced content instruction either because they have generally mastered content at earlier ages or because they can master content at a faster pace. Perhaps the most easily identifiable characteristic of such students is their vast store of information. It is critical that a teacher offer greater and more varied academic content to such learners.

Complexity  The content for students with gifts and talents should be more complex. It should include multiple perspectives, multiple implications, and advanced demands on the learner to see interactions with other areas of study. Compared to students with more typical academic capacities, students with gifts and talents are capable of considering more variables as they contemplate problems. They are also capable of understanding abstractions to a greater degree than other children of the same chronological age. In fact, most gifted children relish this capacity. Unlike children with cognitive deficits, they are capable of intuitive leaps. However, without providing gifted students with access to opportunities to demonstrate their capacities, their teachers will not be able to observe the facility with which they can learn. Limits to opportunities will be repaid with limits in achievement.

Abstraction  For many children with exceptionalities, a major challenge for educators is to provide concrete instruction that avoids ambiguities and abstractions. With children who have gifts, differentiation of instruction requires efforts to allow increased abstraction of principles, ideas, and examples. These students ask a great many more questions, such as

What if the events in history did not happen?

Why were the outcomes of the War of 1812 so beneficial to the status quo?

What would have occurred if steam had become the predominant motorcar fuel in the 1920s?

Pacing  If the most apparent trait of children identified as gifted is their ability to learn quickly and easily, then the most important implication is that they should be provided a rapid or accelerated pace of instruction. Teachers must be aware of the need to quickly and efficiently assess the current state of learning for their students. They also need to adequately assess this learning and to document it for the next levels of instruction.

Documenting Achievement  The teacher has to prove that the student has met achievement criteria. In our age of accountability, this is difficult. In order for a third-grade teacher to assure a fourth-grade teacher (or a fifth- or sixth-grade teacher) that a student is truly competent, he must provide very thorough documentation of curriculum compacting and must participate in consultations during the process. It can sometimes be a challenge to collaborate and to document achievement across grade levels.

Choice and Independence  Nearly every theorist in gifted education suggests that student choice is extremely important. Four variables are key in exercising choice (Treffinger & Barton, 1988):

• Content, or the area of interest to be studied
• Process, or the way one should pursue the investigation
• Product, or the way one will show the results of the investigation
• Evaluation, or the way one will view the success of the investigation

Treffinger and Barton (1988) note that students are not generally encouraged to make choices. Teachers generally provide the content to be studied, the media for learning, and the product to be delivered. Students with gifts and talents, however, should be given these choices.