GIFTEDNESS

AND
TALENTS
Prepared: Maria Rizalyn Flores
 Giftedness and Talents
Gifted
 referred only to students with unusually high verbal skills.
 Their skills were demonstrated especially well
 Recently the meaning of gifted has broadened to include
unusual talents in a range of activities, such as music,
creative writing, or the arts (G. Davis & Rimm, 2004).
 to indicate the change, educators often use the dual
term gifted and talented.
 Giftedness and Talents
• Students with gifts and talents perform—or have the capability to
perform—at higher levels compared to others of the same age,
experience, and environment in one or more domains.
• They require modification(s) to their educational experience(s) to
learn and realize their potential.
• Student with gifts and talents come from all racial, ethnic, and
cultural populations, as well as all economic strata.
• They require sufficient access to appropriate learning
opportunities to realize their potential.
• They are the students that can have learning and processing
disorders that require specialized intervention and
accommodation.
• They need support and guidance to develop socially and
emotionally as well as in their areas of talent.
 Giftedness and Talents
Gifted students include gifted students with
disabilities (i.e. twice-exceptional) and students with
exceptional abilities for potential from all socio-
economic and ethnic, cultural populations. Gifted
students are capable of high performance,
exceptional production, or exceptional learning
behavior.
 Giftedness and Talents
• Gifted and talented students often languish in
school unless teachers can provide them with
more than the challenges of the usual curriculum.
• Without accommodation to their unusual level of
skill or knowledge, students who are gifted or
talented can become bored by school, and
eventually the boredom can even turn into
behavior problems.
 Giftedness and Talents
• students who are gifted or talented have sometimes been
regarded as the responsibility of special education, along
with students with other sorts of disabilities.
• There is some logic to this way of thinking about their needs;
after all, they are quite exceptional, and they do require
modifications of the usual school programs in order to reach
their full potential.
• it is also misleading to ignore obvious differences between
exceptional giftedness and exceptional disabilities of other
kinds. The key difference is in students’ potential.
 Giftedness and Talents
• students with gifts or talents are capable of creative,
committed work at levels that often approach talented
adults. Other students—including students with disabilities—
may reach these levels, but not as soon and not as
frequently.
• Many educators therefore think of the gifted and talented
not as examples of students with disabilities, but as
examples of diversity. As such they are not so much the
responsibility of special education specialists, as the
responsibility of all teachers to differentiate their instruction.
 Characteristics of Gifted and
Talented Children
• They learn more quickly and independently than
most students their own age.
• They often have well-developed vocabulary, as
well as advanced reading and writing skills.
• They are very motivated, especially on tasks that
are challenging or difficult.
• They hold themselves to higher than usual
standards of achievement.
Supporting Students who are Gifted
and Talented
Supporting the gifted and talented
usually involves a mixture
of acceleration and enrichment of the
usual curriculum
(Schiever & Maker, 2003). 
 Supporting Students who are Gifted
and Talented
Acceleration 
• involves either a child’s skipping a grade, or else the
teacher’s redesigning the curriculum within a particular
grade or classroom so that more material is covered faster.
• Redesigning the curriculum is also beneficial to the student,
but impractical to do on a widespread basis; even if
teachers had the time to redesign their programs, many
non-gifted students would be left behind as a result.
 Supporting Students who are Gifted
and Talented
Enrichment
• involves providing additional or different instruction added on to the
usual curriculum goals and activities.
• Instead of books at more advanced reading levels, for example, a
student might read a wider variety of types of literature at the
student’s current reading level, or try writing additional types of
literature himself. Instead of moving ahead to more difficult kinds of
math programs, the student might work on unusual logic problems
not assigned to the rest of the class.
 Supporting Students who are Gifted
and Talented
Enrichment
• Like acceleration, enrichment works well up to a point. Enrichment
curricula exist to help classroom teachers working with gifted
students (and save teachers the time and work of creating
enrichment materials themselves).
• however, there is a risk that it will be perceived as busywork rather
than as intellectual stimulation, particularly if the teacher herself is
not familiar with the enrichment material or is otherwise unable to
involve herself in the material fully.
 Supporting Students who are Gifted
and Talented
Acceleration and enrichment can sometimes be combined.
A student can skip a grade and also be introduced to interesting “extra”
material at the new grade level. A teacher can move a student to the next unit
of study faster than she moves the rest of the class, while at the same time
offering additional activities not related to the unit of study directly. For a
teacher with a student who is gifted or talented, however, the real challenge is
not simply to choose between acceleration and enrichment, but to observe the
student, get to know him or her as a unique individual, and offer activities and
supports based on that knowledge. This is essentially the challenge of
differentiating instruction, something needed not just by the gifted and talented,
but by students of all sorts. As you might suspect, differentiating instruction
poses challenges about managing instruction