The Routledge International Companion to Gifted Education

Tom Balchin, Barry Hymer, Dona J. Matthews

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136028861
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Routledge International Companion to Gifted Education is a ground-breaking collection of fully-referenced chapters written by many of the most highly-respected authorities on the subject from around the world. These fifty contributors include distinguished scholars who have produced many of the most significant advances to the field over the past few decades, like Joseph Renzulli and Robert Sternberg, alongside authorities who ask questions about the very concepts and terminology embodied in the field – scholars such as Carol Dweck and Guy Claxton.

This multi-faceted volume:

• highlights strategies to support giftedness in children, providing ideas that work and weeding out those that don't;
• is written in jargon-free language in an easy-to use themed format;
• is the most authoritative collection of future-focused views, ideas and reflections, practices and evaluations yet produced;
• includes chapters dealing with the major controversies and concerns in the field today, from the problems of identification to changing understandings of giftedness and creativity.

The international aspect of the Companion, and its juxtaposition of points of view – whereby chapters are deliberately positioned and accompanied by editorial commentary to highlight the contrasts with each other – ensures that different views are addressed, allowing the reader to absorb and reflect upon the many perspectives on each issue.

The Companion is a guide to the new ideas and controversies that are informing gifted education discussion and policy-making around the world. It is a first class resource to students and researchers alike.

Part 1

Approaching giftedness: models, definitions and conceptual challenges

1 Brightening up: how children learn to be gifted

Guy Claxton and Sara Meadows

2 Neural interconnectivity and intellectual creativity: giftedness, savants and learning styles

John Geake

3 Making connections: cognition, emotion and a shifting paradigm

Dona J. Matthews and Christy Folsom

4 Giftedness: the gift that keeps on giving

Dean Keith Simonton

5 Talent development as seen through the differentiated model of giftedness and talent

Françoys Gagné

6 The nature of creative giftedness and talent

Todd Lubart, Asta Georgsdottir and Maud Besançon

7 The future of the English definition of giftedness

Thomas Balchin

One of the most striking aspects of gifted education today is the extent to which the underlying constructs are being questioned, investigated and puzzled over. In this section, we raise explicitly many of the thorny questions that authors throughout the volume address more implicitly. For example, what is intelligence? What is giftedness? What are talents? What is creativity? Who is intelligent/gifted/talented/creative? How should we assess these attributes?

We open the book with a provocative chapter by Guy Claxton and Sara Meadows, who make a compelling case for moving beyond traditional notions of giftedness as innate and unchangeable, and for rethinking the lifetime pigeon-holing that too often results from gifted identification and labelling practices. This is followed by John Geake’s intriguing chapter on the ways that emerging findings on the nature of neural interconnectivity not only explain the creative intelligence associated with giftedness, but also provide important information for educators. Specifically, Geake illustrates that ‘brain-based’ learning styles assessments have little or no educational value, that curriculum should emphasise interdisciplinarity and content connectedness, and that we should expect to find, and celebrate, individual differences.

Although you will find many different perspectives and controversial points of view here, most of the authors in this section would agree with Dona Matthews and Christy Folsom that categorical notions of gifted versus non-gifted are more harmful than useful in practice, and that all educators are involved with gifted education whether they know it or not. Many would also agree with their suggestions that include integrating cognitive and emotional processes in educational practices, and providing a wide range of programming options that are available for educators to select for every student for the purpose of addressing individual and developmental diversity.

You will see as you read through the chapters in this thematic grouping that the nature/nurture question is being turned upside down and inside out. Dean Keith Simonton addresses this fundamental question as it unfolds over the lifespan, and concludes that giftedness is more like a ‘matching grant’ than an outright gift; it requires the recipient to do the work that converts a genetic gift into reality. Similarly, Françoys Gagné argues that outstanding natural abilities, or gifts, must go through a complex and systematic domain-specific talent development process before they can be useful to the individual or society.

Todd Lubart, Asta Georgsdottir and Maud Besançon grapple with the fundamental questions surrounding creative giftedness and talent, addressing issues of definition, development, identification and education. They recommend infusing creativity into teacher development, as well as taking it into consideration in gifted identification and curriculum design and delivery, and also affirming the importance of supporting the development of creative giftedness in all students. In our final chapter in this section, Thomas Balchin writes about findings from his survey and interviews with over 800 gifted and talented education coordinators throughout England, and about the problems that are caused in practice by their confusion over foundational principles, including definitions of terms. He argues for the importance of a developmental, practical definition that embodies an understanding of the dynamic nature of giftedness, and leads directly to effective implications for educators.

Although we raise a lot more questions than we are able to answer definitively and conclusively, we hope that our authors’ various considered responses to the burning questions of the field today inform your own dynamic conceptions of what giftedness is, and how it develops.

1

Brightening up: how children learn to be gifted

Guy Claxton and Sara Meadows

Bristol University, UK

I have always maintained that, excepting fools, men did not differ much in (talent), only in zeal and hard work; I still think this is an eminently important difference.

Charles Darwin (1808–1882), English evolutionary biologist

This chapter addresses the issue of whether the dominant conception of ‘gifted and talented’ is justified by psychological research, and what effects holding this conception have for learners. It argues that both the research base and practical and moral considerations should lead us to exclude ideas of innate and unchangeable degrees of ‘giftedness’ from our educational practice as incorrect, inhuman and counter-productive.

It is easy to forget that ‘brightness’ or ‘giftedness’ are inferences and attributions, not statements of self-evident fact. In this chapter we want to go back to the behaviours and dispositions on which these inferences and attributions are based and explore the ways in which they might have been learned, and thus could be subject to further systematic modification. We ask: To what extent do young people learn to act in ways that will lead parents and teachers to attribute ‘brightness’ to them? To what extent are such behaviours capable of further modification?

When children first arrive at school it is likely that within weeks, if not hours, judgements will be made about how ‘bright’ they are. Let us say for the sake of argument that Neneh is quickly seen as ‘bright’, while Jacob is soon thought of as ‘un-bright’. How are these judgements made and justified? On the basis of a brief sampling of teachers’ views, we offer the following as behaviours that could be taken as symptomatic of the difference in apparent brightness between Neneh and Jacob:

Neneh is usually physically alert and energetic – ‘bright-eyed and bushy-tailed’. Jacob is often listless and slouches.

Neneh is strongly oriented to adults and alert to their presence. She orients to their voices, makes eye contact and reads their faces for clues as to what they want her to do. Jacob is less sensitive to adults and their non-verbal messages. He sometimes looks like he does not know what he is (supposed to be) doing.

Neneh’s facial expressions clearly signal to adults that she is oriented to them and picking up their messages; her face is mobile and expressive and changes quickly when she is confused. Jacob’s face is harder to read.

Neneh is sensible: her choices and reactions are mostly appropriate to what is possible or legitimate in the classroom, and she is alert and responsive to cues as to ‘what goes around here’. Jacob is more impervious to such subtle indicators, and so is more often ‘silly’ or inappropriate.

Neneh is already able to maintain focus on a chosen or prescribed activity and ignore some distractions. She knows how to stick at things. When distracted she soon remembers to come back to the task. Jacob does not have such a strong ‘anchor’ to his prime activity. If things don’t go smoothly he quickly loses interest or focus, or gets upset.

Neneh is more articulate. Her questions and responses are more appropriate to the context of the moment, and more precise than Jacob’s. Jacob is less fluent at expressing his interests and thoughts.

Neneh seems to latch on to the core of ideas and the purpose of activities more quickly than Jacob. She is ‘quicker on the uptake’.

Neneh is more used to sitting still and listening to, or watching, grown-ups. Jacob has not developed this habit. He is used to being more physically active around adults, except when he is watching a screen.

Neneh has greater ease and fluency with her peers. She is already able to discuss and argue with other children in a calm and rational way. Jacob is rougher and more ‘gauche’ in his dealing with other children.

Neneh often remembers and makes links to things that happened a while ago. Her questions suggest she is trying to link things up inside her head. Jacob seems more ‘captured’ by the immediate present.

Neneh is proactive and inquisitive; she is keen to explore new things. Jacob is more hesitant or timid.

Neneh will often see and remark on sensory details and patterns that Jacob does not notice. She seems more perceptive.

We could argue about the detail of this picture, but it is abundantly clear that ‘bright’ is a portmanteau word that contains a number of ingredients. Neneh’s ‘brightness’ reflects the fact that she is more socially sensitive, more adult-oriented, more inquisitive, more resilient, more focused and more interested in connecting ideas and experiences. She also remembers things better, asks better questions, makes more appropriate comments and interacts better with her peers than Jacob. Once we unpack some of the implicit dimensions and observations on which the judgement of brightness depends, we can see that being ‘bright’ is not a single thing; it is woven together from a number of separable developmental achievements, some social, some perceptual, some cognitive and some linguistic.

We are seeing Neneh and Jacob at the start of school, at age five. If we had seen them as babies, we might have seen some differences between them in some of these components of ‘brightness’. But there is obviously a lot of learning that has gone on in the first years of these children’s lives that will have contributed to the differences in their behaviours at school entry. We do not yet have to reach for the genetic explanation of brightness.

How could children’s family life teach them to be oriented to learning in different ways – one that appears ‘bright’ and one that (viewed through the filter of the dominant conceptions of school culture) looks dimmer? There are a host of experiences that could have nudged Neneh and Jacob into different behaviours (Hart and Risley 1995; Meadows 2006). We know that ‘middle-class’ and ‘working-class’ children are immersed in surroundings which differ on average in the quantity, content and style of adult-child use of language. We know that mothers talk more, and in different ways, to their daughters than to their sons. Some carers are more adept at coaching young children in the art of ‘joint attention’ than others. Some get down to the child’s level in shared play more often, or find it easier to engage sympathetically with the child’s own interests.

The habitual ways in which carers scaffold, guide, interpret, comment on and evaluate children’s activities set up corresponding habits and expectations in the child, some of which may be education-positive and others not. (When you tell an outrageously exaggerated story, do grown-ups regularly laugh and clap, or tell you off for bragging or lying? How often do you have a story read to you and discussed with you? Are you allowed to play with things around the house or are you continually told ‘don’t touch’?). Recurrent rituals sow and water the seeds of certain ways of thinking and talking. Family mealtimes, for example, are an important arena in which habits of debate and discussion are displayed, and a child’s ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ as fledgling debaters may be invited and shaped – or not (Pontecorvo and Sterponi 2002). All the time, adults model ways of solving problems such as trying to remember where possessions have been left (Tharp and Gallimore 1988) or how to understand other people’s feelings (Meadows 2006). They are continually teaching through their actions how to react when things go wrong, what to do with leisure time, what is worthy of note and what things (that may be perfectly obvious and interesting to the child) get regularly and strategically ignored (Billig 1999).

Thus the habits of thinking, remembering, noticing and talking that go to make up ‘brightness’ are, as sociocultural researchers have long known (Vygotsky 1978), highly socially contagious. If we push our attention back to individual differences at birth, or focus on heritability studies in twins or adoptees, or look at the problems associated with genetic disorders (Meadows 2006), we see that there probably is some inherited ingredient to ‘brightness’. People do seem to differ somewhat in their genetically underwritten ‘mean position’ on such dimensions (Plomin and Daniels 1987). But there is such a wide indeterminate zone around that mean position, that effectively it is your environment and your learning that most influence where you actually end up. Genes do programme development but they operate in continual interaction with environment and experience, and their programmes are generally flexible.

Most researchers (e.g. Resnick 1999) now believe that young minds are better thought of as ‘developing muscles’ than ‘fixed-capacity engines’. The mind is made up of many interwoven strands which get stronger with exercise. Like musculature, minds have a genetic element to them. Different people are born with different physical ‘potential’, different ranges and aptitudes. But the training which these muscles receive determines whether they get stronger, much more so than differences in ‘potential’. In practice the hypothetical ‘ceilings’ set by genetic differences are so far away from where a child currently is that there is no excuse for anyone to impute ‘lack of innate ability’ when a child finds something hard to master. There is plenty of room for virtually everyone’s physical fitness to improve, and likewise there is plenty of room for everyone to get brighter, whatever portfolio of capacities and dispositions their genes and their early years has provided them with. Of course those early years have a big influence on the kind of learner you might become. But a child’s learning style and capacity is not fixed: far from it. We conclude that it is strategically practical and morally preferable to focus our attention as educators on how children’s minds might be capable of development, rather than on what is immutable.

Despite the broad consensus about the learnability of ‘brightness’ amongst scholars, the contrary idea, that children’s minds, like light bulbs, come in a range of pre-determined wattages that we can do nothing about, is still surprisingly popular. The language of ‘fixed ability’ and the injunction to determine students’ ‘ability’ and teach them accordingly, suffuse educational policy and practice in the UK today. Yet such ideas affect the lives of many children for the worse. Once ability attributions are made, they create long-lasting expectations in the minds both of youngsters and of their teachers, expectations that may be misleading or even damaging. For example, the general-purpose ‘capacity’ assumption can lead teachers to ignore how variable students are from day to day, subject to subject, and from in school to out of school. A bland simplistic summary of a student’s performance can be mistaken for ‘the truth’, and without meaning to, teachers can thereby box students in and cramp their style, reducing their ability to be different.

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword by James H. Borland
• Introduction: reflections on the road ahead
• Part 1: Approaching giftedness Models, definitions and conceptual challenges
• Part 2: Widening the focus International perspectives and cultural issues
• Part 3: Whole child considerations Psychosocial development and extra-cognitive issues
• Part 4: Theory into Practice: Differentiation Strategies, Tools and Approaches
• Part 5: Expanding horizons: supporting gifted development more broadly
• References
• Index