Fifty college students were interviewed about their prior experiences in gifted programs and their perspectives on the impact of these experiences on their lives. Interview questions probed the types of experiences they remembered, including the types of instruction they had, their relations with peers, and their views about how their experiences in gifted programs affected other parts of their lives. Data were analyzed qualitatively with additional topics and themes emerging. In this paper, the author shares their voices and discusses the implications of their reports.
Federal attention is focused currently on investing and improving the quality of early childhood education, so that children’s potential and talent development can be used as a natural resource for the future of our country. This article engages readers in transitioning their thinking about early childhood gifted education from a traditional advanced skills-based approach that introduces young children to academic standards earlier and faster, to an education that honors the developmental stages of young children and the experiential emphasis that parallels how they learn. The framework proposed empowers teachers to design learning contexts that elicit talent, potential, and emerging abilities, and challenges all learners to display their strengths. Practical suggestions are given to develop a pedagogy that enables young children to learn in developmentally appropriate play-based and student-focused environments.
In one first-grade classroom, children are planting beans in different cups preparing to experiment with the amount of water and sun they will need to germinate. In another classroom, students are coloring in a worksheet on the life cycle of a seed. Both of these activities were completed in the same school. Both teachers were following the district-mandated curriculum for first grade that included a science unit on "Seeds." Which one of these activities would one expect to find in a gifted program? Which activity allows for higher level thinking? Which activity has a greater opportunity for displaying students' interest in experimentation or the plant life cycle? Which activity fosters curiosity and the love of learning in young children?During the last 20 years, gifted education has promoted pedagogy that connects learning to students' interests, provides opportunities for students to pursue topics and investigations that are meaningful to them, and encourages creative and critical thinking. In sum, gifted education has been the forerunner of curricular reforms that have embraced higher level thinking skills, problem-based learning, and inquiry processes of learning. The participating teachers in this study implemented the type of This study explores how a project-based approach, based on gifted education pedagogy, was implemented in a public school program where the majority of students were from low-income families. The 2 first-grade teachers in this study were able to change their teaching practices to include more strategies commonly found in gifted programs such as brainstorming, creating surveys, and collecting data. The teachers also indicated a greater comfort level with a child-centered and project-based approach to curricular units over the course of the study.In addition, classroom observations indicated students were better behaved when engaged in project and small-group activities, as seen in classroom observations. This paper also highlights several challenges to implementing project-based approaches in the early childhood classroom. Teachers in this study perceived barriers to implementing the project approach that they had been taught in their professional development course. They felt constraints from their school context, as well as from their own beliefs and assumptions about their students. They often had difficulty assuming the role of facilitator and releasing control of learning to the students. However, as the teachers in this study implemented the new approaches, they were able to overcome many of the internal and external limitations that they expressed prior to beginning the units. This study has practical implications for reform initiatives related to the identification of strengths and talents in students who are typically underserved in gifted programs.
532Journal of Advanced Academics TRANSPORTING PEDAGOGy instruction most commonly found in gifted programs into their classroom of predominantly low achievers.The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore the ways in whi...
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