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INTEGRATING Gifted Education into the Total School Curriculum

School Administrator, April, 1995 by Carolyn R. Cooper

Why is gifted education such a thorny issue for school administrators? Nearly a century of research has established the critical need for services especially designed to develop the gifts of bright and talented youngsters, but this research is often misinterpreted or misapplied.

Too frequently, for example, well-intentioned but misinformed teachers pull bright students out of their classrooms only to give them activities most children would enjoy and likely could do well. Why offer special services for some students when every student could benefit if given the opportunity? Inequity such as this breeds elitism, which American taxpayers don't tolerate willingly.

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But gifted education needn't be elitist--and isn't when it is integrated into the total school curriculum. My experience in integrating gifted and talented education into the Parkway School District in Missouri for the past nine years prompts me to offer these suggestions.

First, clarify five points: (1) your district's beliefs about who gifted students are and what you want them to achieve; (2) how to identify their gifts and talents; (3) which specially designed services will be offered students with the potential to achieve the objectives you have set; (4) who will deliver these services and how; and

(5) how the continuum of services is organized and operated.

These factors illustrate how you can weave gifted education into the very fabric of the total school curriculum and build client ownership of it at the same time.

Setting Objectives

The purpose of the services you offer must be determined at the outset. As a program evaluator, I often find that students have been identified for "the gifted program" but why they're identified is not clear. I use the analogy of a group of individuals holding tickets for a bus that never shows up. Another way of thinking about a program without clearly defined outcomes is by invoking the familiar expression, "If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there!"

What are the roles your school or district thinks bright and talented students should play, and which specific aspects of those roles do you want to help them achieve? This process of setting performance objectives is already familiar to you. Does your community want bright and talented students to be effective leaders? Does it want to advance them all two or more years in math, science, or some other discipline?

Beware: every student's gift or talent does not lend itself to leadership any more than all of your talented students need to be advanced in a given discipline. Cautiously use the word all as you and representatives of each affected client group define your district's philosophy and performance objectives. For bright students, as with any others, what you must define is a belief about individual talents and how far they can reach if stretched by caring teachers.

A belief I hold about the role of bright individuals is that they are truly the movers and shakers of our world. They do what others only talk about doing. Bright and talented persons frequently become the creative producers on whom we all depend for technological innovations, for example.

Do we really believe the process skills creative producers need just suddenly "appear" to them when they reach adulthood? Or is there value in teaching the skills of creative production to all youngsters with the same potential to contribute to society?

Identifying Talent

Once your philosophy of the roles of bright and talented students is defined, along with the behavioral results (performance objectives) your community wants them to achieve, then and only then do you develop a plan for identifying their talents. This procedure must be tied directly to the student outcomes you have defined in step one. For example, if you want to develop artistic talent in students, don't try to indentify it by means of the traditional IQ test! Think inclusive, not exclusive.

An illustration may clarify. Let's say the consensus of your planning team is that bright and talented youngsters in your district should learn to become creative producers whose work makes the world a better place. It follows that these students' talents must be identified, which requires that we know which intellectual behaviors, work habits, and personality styles characterize creative producers.

Keep in mind that when educational researchers looked at highly successful creative producers, they discovered many of these "movers and shakers" came from a much wider band of intellectual ability than previously thought. In fact, their IQs ranged between the 85th and 99th percentiles.

Finding and nurturing the talents of students in this range of intellectual ability represents a far more inclusive approach to working with talented students than the traditional IQ cutoff technique, which identifies only a few students, mostly those who are good test takers. How arrogant of us as school leaders to make decisions about students' development that were expeditious but not necessarily good for kids!

INTEGRATING Gifted Education into the Total School Curriculum

School Administrator, April, 1995 by Carolyn R. Cooper

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