Applying gifted education pedagogy to total talent development for all students

This vision of schools for talent development is based on the belief that everyone has an important role to play in societal improvement, and that everyone's role can be enhanced if we provide all students with opportunities, resources, and encouragement to aspire to the highest level of talent development humanly possible. Rewarding lives are a function of ways we use individual potentials in productive ways. Accordingly, the Schoolwide Enrichment Model is a practical plan for making our vision of schools for talent development a reality. We are not naive about the politics, personalities, and financial issues that often supersede the pedagogical goals that are the focus of the model. At the same time, we have seen this vision manifested in schools ranging from hard-core urban areas and isolated and frequently poor rural areas to affluent suburbs and combinations thereof. We believe that the strategies are flexible enough for making any school a place for talent development.

There are no quick fixes or easy formulas for transforming schools into places where talent development is valued and vigorously pursued. Our experience has shown, however, that once the concept of talent development catches on, students, parents, teachers, and administrators begin to view their school in a different way. Students become more excited and engaged in what they are learning; parents find more opportunities to become involved in all aspects of their children's learning, rather than only in around-the-edges activities; teachers begin to find and use a variety of resources that, until now, seldom found their way into classrooms; and administrators start to make decisions that affect learning rather than merely enforcing tight-ship efficiency.

Everyone has a stake in schools that provide all of our young people with a high-quality education. Everyone has a stake in good schools because schools create and recreate a successful modern society. Although everyone has a stake in good schools, America has been faced with a school problem that has resulted in declining confidence in schools and the people who work in them, drastic limitations in the amount of financial support for education, and general public apathy or dissatisfaction with the quality of education our young people are receiving. A great deal has been written about America's school problem, and studies, commissions, reports, and even a Governor's Summit Conference have been initiated to generate solutions to problems facing our schools. However, the hundreds if not thousands of conferences, commissions, and meetings, and the tons of reports, proclamations, and lists of goals, have yielded minimal results, mainly because they generally focused on tinkering with traditional methods of schooling.

Three Key Ingredients of School Improvement

If the traditional methods of schooling have failed to bring about substantial changes, we must look to different models that show promise of achieving the types of school improvement we so desperately need. New models must focus their attention on three major dimensions of schooling--the act of learning, the use of time, and the change process itself.