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Applying gifted education pedagogy to total talent development for all students
Theory Into Practice, Spring, 2005 by Joseph S. Renzulli
Everyone has a stake in good schools because schools create and recreate a successful modern society. Unfortunately, traditional methods of schooling can fail to bring about schools as places for developing the broadest and richest experiences imaginable for creating talent in the young. The field of gifted education has been a true laboratory for the many innovations that have subsequently become mainstays of the American educational system. The Schoolwide Enrichment Model comprises strategies for increasing student effort, enjoyment, and performance, and for integrating a range of advanced-level learning experiences and thinking skills into all curricular areas. Every school has students within it who possess the highest potential for advanced-level learning, creative problem solving, and the motivation to pursue rigorous and rewarding work. Rather than merely being sources for the acquisition of information, schools can and should be places for developing the talents of all students.
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THE ACHILLES HEEL OF GIFTED education has been its inability to adequately include children who do not fall into the nice, neat stereotype of good test takers and lesson learners--ethnic minorities, underachievers, children who live in poverty, and young people who show their potential in nontraditional ways. And yet, the field of gifted education has been a true laboratory for many of the innovations that have subsequently become mainstays of general education in American public schools. In many respects, special programs of almost any type have presented ideal opportunities for testing new ideas and experimenting with potential solutions to long-standing educational problems. Programs for high-potential students have been an especially fertile place for experimentation because such programs usually are not encumbered by prescribed curriculum guides or traditional methods of instruction. It was within the context of these programs that the thinking skills movement first took hold in American education, and the pioneering work of notable theorists such as Drs. Benjamin Bloom, Howard Gardner, and Robert Sternberg first gained the attention of the education community. Other developments that had their origins in special programs are currently being examined for general practice. These developments include (a) a focus on concept rather than skill learning, (b) the use of interdisciplinary curriculum and theme-based studies, (c) student portfolios, (d) performance assessment, (e) cross-grade grouping, (f) alternative scheduling patterns, and (g) perhaps most important, opportunities for students to exchange traditional roles as lesson-learners and doers-of-exercises for more challenging and demanding roles that require hands-on learning, first-hand investigations, and the application of knowledge and thinking skills to complex problems.
Research opportunities in a variety of special programs allowed my colleagues and I to develop instructional procedures and programming alternatives that emphasize the need to (a) provide a broad range of advanced-level enrichment experiences for all students, and (b) use the many and varied ways that students respond to these experiences as stepping stones for relevant follow-up on the parts of individuals or small groups. This approach is not viewed as a new way to identify who is or is not gifted. Rather, the process simply identifies how subsequent opportunities, resources, and encouragement can be provided to support continuous escalations of student involvement in both required and self-selected activities. This approach to the development of high levels of multiple potentials in young people is purposefully designed to sidestep the traditional practice of labeling some students gifted (and by implication, relegating all others to the category of nongifted). The term gifted is used in our lexicon only as an adjective, and even then, it is used as a developmental perspective. Thus, for example, we speak and write about the development of gifted behaviors in specific areas of learning and human expression rather than giftedness as a state of being. If we use the g-word, it is to label the service rather than the student. This orientation has allowed many special-needs students opportunities to develop high levels of creative and productive accomplishments that otherwise would have been denied through traditional special program models.
The good news is that practices that have been a mainstay of many special programs for the gifted are being absorbed into general education by reform models designed to upgrade the performance of all students. This integration of gifted program know-how is viewed as a favorable development for two reasons. First, the adoption of many special program practices is indicative of the viability and usefulness of both the know-how of special programs and the role enrichment specialists can and should play in total school improvement. It is no secret that compensatory education in the United States has largely been a failure (Fredricks, Blumenfeld, & Paris, 2004; Wirt et al., 2003). An overemphasis on remedial and mastery models has lowered the challenge level of the very population that programs such as Title I attempt to serve. Second, all students should have opportunities to develop higher order thinking skills and to pursue more rigorous content and first-hand investigative activities than those typically found in today's dumbed-down textbooks. Leon Lederman, Nobel Prize winner, testified before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce in 2000. He stated that children trained in the hands-on inquiry methods not only learn science, but they experience the joy of learning. They even do better on their reading skills (Lederman, 2000).
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