Thirty Years of Research on the Lived Experience of Students with Gifts and Talents

This presentation will provide a synthesis of 30 years of research analyzed through a phenomenological lens on the lived experience of students with gifts and talents. The primary focus of the presentation will be within the context of school and its intersection with family and society. More specifically, the presentation will focus on how these students’ lived experiences affect issues such as identity, passion, labeling, stigma, culture, schooling, academic resistance, bullying, and suicidal behavior. The outcome of the presentation is to provide information for teachers, parents, counselors, administrators, and psychologists to enable them to better understand and support the psychological wellbeing of students with gifts and talents.

Using Active Engagement to Optimize Learning for Gifted Students

Have you observed gifted students who sometimes sit back while others actively engage? Or those gifted learners who are so anxious about their performance that they seem to be spinning out? Active engagement can increase learning enthusiasm as well as address the anxiety of gifted learners.

Active engagement is a multidimensional process directly related to the learning process. Active engagement enhances student enthusiasm for tasks and their performance. Engagement strategies can also be used in reducing performance anxiety of gifted learners.

In considering underachieving gifted learners, active engagement is particularly important when students are apathetic or discouraged. (Brophy 2004) Educators also need to be aware that ethnicity plays a role in student engagement. (Bingham and Okagaki, 2012) We will explore these dimensions of active engagement and introduce strategies that can make a difference in gifted students’ enthusiasm and motivation and reduce their performance anxiety.

Evolving from Labels to Services:

Overrepresentation, underrepresentation, underserved, and unidentification are the focus for many special and gifted education scholarly pursuits. Moreover, students often exhibit identified areas of strengths and areas of struggle simultaneously. However, effective solutions are few. Promoting whole child and SEC responsive development, Collins’ discusses the importance of implementing talent development approaches that are appropriate for remediation and acceleration while maintaining rigor, depth, challenge, and complexity withing the curriculum. Grounded in the work of Brofenbrenner’s Bioecological Model of Human Development, Collins will show how multidirectional and dynamic interactions across systems impact student development and cognitive diversity. Attendees will understand the broader impact of evolving from a hyper focus on static labels to implementing dynamic services that maximize the individual potential for each student.