INTEGRATING Gifted Education into the Total School Curriculum
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.
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!
Offering specialized services to more students in your district goes a long way toward integrating
gifted education into the total curriculum. It also minimizes elitism charges from your clients.
While the more successful creative producers in the above study varied widely in IQ they
possessed similar strength in their level of creativity and task commitment. One landmark study of
scientists with these characteristics found task commitment, or "dogged determination." to be the
one factor that distinguished unequivocally the more successful scientists from their less successful
colleagues.
Careful Measures
In looking for indicators of unusual intellectual ability, creativity, and task commitment, your
planning team needs to understand two fundamental differences from traditional, score-driven
identification procedures.
First, while these characteristics are necessary for creative production, their presence alone is not
sufficient for making what Joseph Renzulli, director of the National Research Center on the Gifted
and Talented, calls "gifted behavior." Instead, clusters of these characteristics overlap, Renzulli
maintains, for creative production to occur. Teachers of bright and talented youngsters, then,
should provide a continuum of services to bring about this overlap of intellectual ability, creativity,
and task commitment that gives rise to gifted behavior.
Second, since school-related tasks seldom call for students to apply these characteristics in
extraordinary or remarkable ways, the planning team must examine what youngsters do inside of
and outside of school. They should be on the lookout for behaviors including the following: Does the
student connect ideas in unusual ways? Know an extraordinary amount of information about a
particular topic? Become consumed by that topic morning, noon, and night? Spot glitches in the
system and get excited about correcting them.
Staff Input
Involve teachers in this process. As many administrators are painfully aware, the identification
process is the "red flag" classroom teachers often associate with bright children. To avoid this
internal struggle, integrate identification into your overall school operation by making all certified
personnel a firsthand part of the process.
To do this, form a school identification team in each building. On this team of five or seven, three
persons are "fixed" members who know every student in the school (e.g., principal or assistant
principal; physical education, art, or music teacher; or librarian). Be sure every teacher in the
building understands he or she may be called on to serve as a "variable" team member whenever
student talents are being reviewed for the grade level or discipline he or she teaches or supervises.
In this way the staff becomes involved personally with the identification of talents.
This step did more than any other to integrate gifted education into Parkway schools. As a result,
because in staff members had helped identify student talents, their understanding of bright
students' educational needs was greater, as was their ownership in the services offered to develop
those talents.
Which indicators does the school identification team look for in a student? Remember, keep it
simple. Know your state guidelines as you begin. How current are hey with respect to the evolving
direction of talent development? Are hey mandatory or simply advisory? If you receive categorical
funding for gifted education services, know which line items in your district budget you are funded
for. How much of your program budget is supported by local funds?
Be creative, and with in your state guidelines you likely will discover you can use the multiple
criteria approach to detect student talent that many school districts give only lip service to. Then,
direct your team to eliminate meaningless checklists and interview students instead. (Why don't we
talk to kids when we want to find out what interests them?)
A Fitting Curriculum
With your philosophy and performance objectives clear to all clients and an identification team
established in every building, your planning team needs to determine which special services each
student needs to become a creative producer and how these services will be provided as part of his
or her total curriculum.
Curricular services for bright and talented students differ from the regular curriculum in four
respects.
First, in appropriately differentiated curriculum, knowledge is highly specialized, tied to a real-world
problem quite unlike what most students experience through the regular curriculum, and of
particular interest to a given student. Bright and talented students conduct bona fide research--not
report writing--and hone their process skills of interviewing, conducting a survey, and analyzing
data statistically.
Second, the student actually produces knowledge, instead of simply consuming it. For example,
three 10-year-old students in Parkway met regularly with corporate CEOs they had contacted
initially to learn more about polystyrene in an attempt to recommend to the board of education a
viable alternative to the lunch trays children were discarding by the thousands throughout the
district on a daily basis. The sophisticated vocabulary and concepts exchanged far exceeded what
was found in the fifth-grade curriculum guides or could be mastered by all students.
Third, the teacher must be at once a manager, helping the student find the specialized resources
he or she needs; a guide who asks the tough questions that help the student discover knowledge
instead of being presented it in the traditional didactic manner; and a broker who cares enough
about a creative producer's work to help that student find highly specialized audiences who share
his or her level of interest and knowledge of the topic.
Finally, creativity, a key ingredient in the creative production process, is genuine, not "canned" in
cutesy activities that bear no relevance to the real world. Students are encouraged to generate as
many novel ideas as they can about the issue they are studying.
These principles of differentiated curriculum carry with them a high degree of self-evaluation and
accountability by teachers and students alike. They also challenge the elitism caused by the
"grab-bag approach" to gifted education. Activities imposed on highly capable students that have
no theoretical rationale are insultingly simplistic for this type of youngster and might well be enjoyed
by all students.
Application of these principles and instructional strategies is not accidental. Central-office
administrators must ensure that all teachers are trained in these specialized methods--not only as
they are used with bright and talented students but with all students to the degree they can
integrate them into their daily curriculum. Too often we assume teachers are proficient at using the
open-ended tasks bright students need to strengthen their tolerance for ambiguity, to synthesize
information, and to forecast.
Yet few teachers are comfortable with either open-ended instruction or genuine inquiry, both of
which require more time than conventional didactic methods and are being encouraged by the
school reform movement. In the perceived race to cover material in curriculum guides, teachers
maintain that the crowded curriculum prevents them from differentiating the curriculum for bright
students. Hence, staff development is vital. It must be planned carefully over the long term,
scheduled frequently, and mandatory for teachers.
Allowing Differences
Creating a differentiated curriculum requires looking at each student's talents individually. For
instance, let's say your goal for most of your targeted students is to become creative producers.
You also have a few students with extraordinary ability in math and a few with advanced writing
skills. Two types of service will accommodate these three groups of students:
* the advanced-ability students must be accelerated in the content areas of their respective ability,
and
* the larger group must be provided services especially designed to develop their gifts and talents
as budding creative producers.
Within the latter group, opportunities must be provided for individual talents to emerge. Some
students may display artistic talent; others may demonstrate a talent for engineering. Once their
talents are recognized and nurtured, these students will be taught to apply their respective talents
to the creative production process.
This type of differentiated curriculum generates more accountability than activities best described
euphemistically as an "eclectic curriculum." The acid test for appropriate curriculum for bright
students is "Could or would every student at this age commit to this type of study that is long-range,
rigorous, filled with trial and error, and has the potential to contribute significantly to extant
knowledge in a given field?"
When the answer to the defensibility test is yes, the curriculum is unequivocally defensible; it meets
all the criteria for creative production, our performance objective. Moreover, we know this is how
bright and talented persons work on topics that consume their interest. Staff members generally
respect academic rigor, also.
Teachers' Roles
Another tip for integrating gifted education into the total curriculum is to broaden the role of the
teacher of the gifted and talented. Hire only a specialist with appropriate credentials in gifted
education; he or she must have credibility with the rest of the staff.
Traditionally, teachers of the gifted have been considered creative individuals but not always good
teachers. Gifted education specialists can share their expertise with other teachers by teaching
creativity or process skill lessons to their classes--but only if they are credible as fellow teachers.
The entire school can benefit from the right kind of expertise.
Most teachers have bright and talented students in their classes who need qualitatively different
curricular materials from those used by other students. The gifted education specialist can share
specialized materials not generally found in regular classrooms. Ideally, the gifted education
specialist plays the roles of catalyst, arranger, facilitator, manager, and instructor for bright and
talented students, so use this resource as a mentor to other staff.
Especially critical is that gifted education specialists be integrated into the overall school staff and
held accountable for their roles as staff members. The first step I took in Parkway was to restore
service to the schools five full days a week; for years the specialists had met at the program office
on Fridays to work on curriculum. Meeting for professional work is needed, but never on Friday!
The political backlash isn't worth it.
Also, I encouraged principals to assign specialists the same duties as other staff were responsible
for. Thus Parkway's gifted education specialists (we called them "enrichment specialists" for
political reasons) now take their place among other staff members on bus duty, lunch duty, and
playground duty. They also serve on school improvement teams, strategic planning task forces,
and other sitebased school committees.
Integrating gifted education into the entire school operation in this way has improved client attitudes
toward the field, its specialists, and bright students themselves.
Program Oversight
As schools include talent development in the building's overall staff development plan, principals
could be encouraged to create a line item in their budgets for talent d development This, too, builds
ownership; funds for program administration are a part of, not apart from, their school operation.
Other aspects of program organization and operation include providing adequate facilities in which
several types of program activity can be conducted simultaneously. Too frequently services for
bright youngsters are carried out in closets. This makes a powerful statement about curricular
priorities. I've supervised teachers in cafeteria storage closet and boiler rooms, places in which I yet
to see math or reading instruction take place. Isn't the development of individual youngsters' talent
is important in the grand scheme of education?
Program evaluation is another aspect of program organization and operation. Do you as a district
administrator have sufficient information to make informed decisions about your services for bright
and talented students? Through which channels do you communicate with the special staff
providing these services? What is the quality of data you receive?
Evaluation must be a integrated component, also. Data must be collected continuously by the gifted
education specialist who makes information available to clients who request it.
Active administrative leadership plays a key role as well. Leadership is more than support. Ask your
gifted education specialist to compose a brief column for you principal's newsletter to parents an
community. Report a particularly successful activity involving bright and talented kids in your
year-end reports to the board, parent organization, an other community groups. Take one or two
kids who've done outstanding research to talk about their work a your Rotary or Chamber of
Commerce luncheon. This is leadership!
Integrating gifted education into the total school curriculum can bring a radiation of excellence
throughout the entire school. All students can benefit, every student will enjoy school as never
before, and because all students' talents are being nurtured--not just a few--student and teacher
performance will improve.
A Call for Overhaul: Gifted Education Overlooks Talent.
JOHN F. FELDHUSEN
Gifted education is undergoing a major paradigm shift. While current practice and ideology were set
forth largely in the Marland Report of 1972, one major aspect of that report and subsequent federal
and state legislation and provisions for the gifted never was implemented.
The definition of giftedness in the Marland report was stated as follows: "Gifted and talented
[author's emphasis] are those ... with demonstrated achievement and/or potential ability in ... (a)
general intellectual ability, (b) specific academic aptitude, (c) creative or productive thinking, (d)
leadership ability, (e) visual and performing arts, and (f) psychomotor ability."
Alas, this differential conception of giftedness never really has been implemented in the school
programs that grew up in the United States.
Instead, a global conception of general, all-purpose giftedness emerged in which multiple
measures including intelligence, school achievement, and ratings of "gifted behaviors" were
combined into a single index of giftedness. Children then were given the label "gifted" and most
often assigned to a general enrichment treatment. Little effort was made to identify or diagnose a
child's specific talents, aptitudes, or abilities or to design instruction to meet specific needs.
The essential precocity of highly able children often seemed to be overlooked in designing
instruction, and general, bland enrichment activities were offered for all. Such inappropriate
approaches to the education of precocious youth continue today.
Now the inclusion movement also threatens special educational provisions for precocious youth by
implying that all children can learn equally well and that we need not differentiate instruction for
individual entry levels of ability and achievement. While we recognize that children with disabilities
need special services when they are integrated with other youth in regular heterogeneous
classrooms, the talented and precocious often are left to take care of themselves or to serve as
teachers of less-able children.
The well-documented problem of boredom that besets highly able children in regular classrooms is
ignored and the basic need of all youth at all ability levels for challenging learning experiences is
forgotten.
New Insights
From at least five major research and theoretical developmental projects of the past decade, we
have learned that the single, global approach to assessing human abilities with intelligence or
aptitude tests does not provide sufficient information to understand children's talents or abilities as
a prelude and guide to providing appropriate instruction.
Major insights about the development of human talent came first and foremost from the project
carried out by Benjamin S. Bloom, author of the 1985 book Developing Talent in Young People, in
which human talents in psychomotor, aesthetic, and mathematics-science areas were studied
through the years of early development up through world-class achievement by age 35. The results
of that project show clearly that early awareness of specific talents on the part of child, parents, and
teachers plays a significant role in the talent development process, probably by providing focus for
efforts to develop talent.
Howard Gardner's publication of Frames of Mind in 1983 also has had a powerful impact on our
thinking about human abilities. The seven intelligences--linguistic, spatial, musical, bodily
kinesthetic, logical-mathematical, intrapersonal, and interpersonal--now constitute a new approach
to human abilities that recognizes a diversity of potential talents.
Gardner acknowledges that multiple intelligence theory "has not been subjected to strong empirical
tests within psychology," but wisely concludes "that many talents, if not intelligences, are
overlooked nowadays; individuals with these talents are the chief casualties of the single-minded,
single-funneled approach to the mind."
The publication in 1985 of Francoys Gagne's new conception of the linkage between genetically
determined abilities that emerge early in the life of a child and the later emergence in childhood and
adolescence of specific talents constituted a mile-stone for gifted education.
Gagne showed clearly how the effects of school, home-family, and the general environment
surrounding and impacting on a child influence the development of specific talents. This new
theoretical conception pointed the way to a new orientation in gifted education calling for programs
and services that would address the specific talents, strengths, and needs of "gifted" youth. It also
renewed the thrust, already in progress then, to shift away from the terminology of "giftedness"
toward "talent," "talented," and "talent development."
David H. Feldman's work with prodigies, while limited to the study of children with prodigious
capabilities, also highlighted the conception of gifted children as having very specific talents. In a
presentation delivered in 1992, Feldman explicated further the relationships among general
intelligence, specific skills, and domains of ability. Again the evolving conception is one that focuses
on nurturance and development of specific talents.
A most recent addition to our understanding of talent and the development of talent in young people
came from the 1993 publication of Talented Teenagers by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, Kevin
Rathunde, and Samuel Whalen. They studied a group of adolescents who showed high-level talent
in mathematics, science, music, and athletics and found that crucial to the continuing or sustained
development of their talents is the learning of specific skills in the talent domain(s).
They also concluded that "talent" and "talent development" are complex processes that require the
development of supportive work-study habits, appropriate personality traits, and motivational
immersion in the talent domain.
Shifting Direction
A shift in orientation and a change in terminology in the field that has called itself "gifted education"
and called the children "gifted" is clearly called for. Our concern should be with children's specific
talents and with the emerging talents in all children, not just the highly talented.
Talents are not dichotomous variables. They are not simply present or absent. Talent strength has
various levels and they differ markedly from child to child.
From a school point of view, four major domains of talent concern should be addressed in
instructional programming: academic, artistic, vocational, and personal-social. Athletic and
psychomotor talents are generally well-served in most schools so we do not include them in the
framework we developed for talent development in schools.
We have formulated a longitudinal model of the processes of talent development. The model is
oriented to develop talent to a high level, but we recognize that many youth will not develop their
talents that far. We especially highlight the influences along the way that facilitate talent
development. They should be available to all youth, not just those who show exceptional talent
potential at points along the way.
While an early start seems desirable, it seems equally clear that the stimulus for many youth will
come at various points along the way from childhood to adulthood.
A set of goals for talent development programs is presented in the table on page 13. We stress a
range of services to serve the diversity of talents and levels of talent emerging in youth. No single
program model, as touted in the field of gifted education, will serve the diverse needs of youth and
their special talents.
We truly believe that a tidal shift is needed toward the new orientation that seeks to recognize and
nurture the talents of all youth and to be especially cognizant of the need to provide high-powered
services to meet the needs of youth who show signs of exceptional talent.
John Feldhusen is the Robert B. Kane Distinguished Professor of Education at Purdue University.
10 Goals for a Talent Development Program
Provide accelerated and enriched learning experiences for highly able students.
Emphasize high-level conceptual understanding in honors, accelerated, and elective courses and
seminars.
Provide group and individual counseling to help gifted and talented students plan optimal academic
and extracurricular programs.
Engage gifted and talented students in high-level independent study and help them become
autonomous learners.
Stress inquiry, problem solving, investigation, report writing, and product development in homework
and assignment activity.
Identify and nurture special talents in artistic, vocational, and intellectual realms.
Organize opportunities for gifted and talented students to work together and opportunities to work
with students of different abilities.
Provide opportunities to work with tutors and mentors.
Provide personal and career counseling to help talented youth.
Help youth with special talents develop personal and career goals.
John F. Feldhusen
Want to Learn More?
Here are some selected resource centers and publications relating to gifted education that would
be helpful to school administrators.
Resource Centers
* Center for Talented Youth, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md. 21218, 410-338-8427.
Works with mathematically precocious students and operates the nation's oldest "talent search"
program.
* ERIC Clearinghouse on Disabilities and Gifted Education, Council for Exceptional Children, 1920
Association Drive, Reston, Va. 22091, 703-264-9474. Provides digests and research briefs on
aspects of gifted education and other subjects.
* Gifted Education Policy Studies Program, University of North Carolina, Suite 300, NCNB Plaza,
Chapel Hill, N.C., 27514, 919-962-7374. Publishes studies of policies governing identification of
gifted students and services provided them.
* National Association for Gifted Children, 1155 15th St., N.W., Suite 1002, Washington, D.C.
20005, 202-785-4268. Runs a national conference and provides resources for educators and
parents.
* National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented, University of Connecticut, Box U-7, Storrs,
Conn. 06269, 203-486-4041. Produces executive summaries and full-length studies on current
issues related to educating bright and talented students.
Publications/Articles
* National excellence: A case for developing America talent, by P. Ross, U.S. Department of
Education, U.S. Government Printing Office, Superintendent of Documents, Washington, D.C.
20402-9328.
* "Admiministrators' attitudes toward gifted programs based on the enrichment triad/revolving door
identification model," by Carolyn Cooper, doctoral dissertation available from Dissertation Abstracts
International (University Microfilms No. 8410816).
* Schools for talent development: A practical plan for total school improvement by Joseph S.
Renzulli, available from Creative Learning Press,
Mansfield Center, Conn., 06520, 203-429-8118.
* "Lies we live by: Misapplication of tests in identifying the gifted," Gifted Child Quarterly, (Vol. 26, p.
157), available from National Association for Gifted Children (see address above under Resource
Centers).
* Gifted Child Today Magazine, P.O. Box 8813, Waco, Texas 76714, 800-998-2208. A bimonthly
magazine that features practical non-technical articles by noted authors in the field.
COPYRIGHT 1995 American Association of School Administrators
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group