7 items | 5 visits
Articles and resources related to the education of gifted and talented students.
Updated on Jun 22, 12
Created on Jun 30, 09
Category: Schools & Education
URL:
What are telementoring programs, and how can gifted students benefit from them?
In Francoys Gagné’s gifted and talented model, he discusses turning gifts into talents. He views giftedness as untrained natural abilities and talent as the mastery of those abilities through development. Benjamin Bloom found that the process of developing talent requires a concerted effort of a variety of individuals. The nature and diversity of gifted and talented students’ interests and abilities demand resources beyond the confines of the home, school, and sometimes beyond the boundaries of the community. At some point, students need contact with more knowledgeable others who share their expertise and can guide them. Ideally this process takes place in person. Unfortunately, time and distance constraints often prevent this from occurring.
Telementoring is one way to provide gifted students with opportunities to interact with others who are very knowledgeable. It is particularly valuable for students in isolated areas, for students with esoteric interests, or for students whose academic needs exceed the local educational system’s capacity. In these cases, it may be difficult to find a mentor in the community who is willing to spend time with the young talent. Telementoring is a viable solution. During the experience, the student and the telementor work toward a student goal that the two have jointly set. They usually communicate through monitored email or bulletin board postings. While parents and educators can set up such relationships if they know appropriate mentors, a number of organizations provide this service on a large scale. One of the more prominent ones is the International Telementor Program (www.telementor.org).
Mentoring is not for every student and telementoring is even more restrictive. Just because students are disenfranchised with their educational program does not mean they need a mentor. An authentic mentorship is more than students receiving supplemental information. It can provide students with opportunities for real-world application of their passions, self-confidence, an increased knowledge base, deepened enthusiasm for a subject, a role model, and growth in their area of giftedne
Driven by the intense focus on accountability, schools and teachers used standardized test scores to help identify and address student weaknesses. Over time, these deficits began to define far too many students so that all we saw were their deficits – particularly for African-American males. As a result, we began losing sight of these young boys’ gifts and, as a consequence, stifled their talents.
This article discussed five lessons the research on the education of the gifted and talented suggests. Although several of the considerations derive from traditional practice in the field, some reconsideration is warranted because of more currently researched differences in how the gifted learner intellectually functions. It is argued that thinking of the gifted learner as idiosyncratic, not necessarily one of many classified as "the gifted," requries a reconceptionalization of how to appropriately and fully serve this unique learner.
This article provides an overview of existing research on 11 curriculum models in the field of gifted edu- cation, including the schoolwide enrichment model and the talent search model, and several others that have been used to shape high-level learning experiences for gifted students. The models are critiqued according to the key fea- tures they contribute to student learning, teacher use, and contextual fit, including alignment to standards and use with special populations of gifted and nongifted learners. The authors also provide a set of key principles derived from the research studies on what has been learned as a field about curriculum and instruction for the gifted. The article concludes with a set of practical considerations for educators in implementing any of the curricula analyzed and specific district applications of the Integrated Curriculum Model (ICM) that illustrate effective implementation over time.
2009 Gifted Child Quarterly article by Tonya R Moon.
Articles and resources related to the education of gifted and talented students.
7 items | 5 visits
Articles and resources related to the education of gifted and talented students.
Updated on Jun 22, 12
Created on Jun 30, 09
Category: Schools & Education
URL: