Differentiating Giftedness from Talent

The DMGT Perspective on Talent Development

Françoys Gagné

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367543297
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000246346
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This comprehensive volume explores the origins, development, and applications for Françoys Gagné's Differentiating Model of Giftedness and Talent (DMGT).

In an authoritative yet accessible style, Professor Gagné offers a holistic coverage of the DMGT, including its implications for the field, and its main divergent points with competing theories of talent development. Chapters guide readers through each of the five DMGT components, addressing the diversity of gifts, the contributions of Nature and Nurture, the most important personal qualities, the overemphasized power of outside agents, the key role of chance, and more.

Filled with illustrative examples and vignettes from the author's estimable career, this book is the authoritative resource for researchers and students looking to understand the DMGT and its unique role in shaping gifted education as we know it today.

1

Origins of the DMGT and Quick Owner’s Tour

When I joined the Department of Psychology at l’Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) in the summer of 1978, I had completed ten years of research and other professional activities on the evaluation of college professors by their students; I really felt that I had “covered the field,” or “fait le tour du jardin” to use a typical French Quebec expression! At the same time, I was facing a family problem that led me to examine the literature on the phenomenon of academic acceleration. My daughter Véronique was entering Grade 2. After the very first day, she told us that she was no longer going to school, because, as she said, “I am wasting my time, it’s just the same as last year.” So I asked myself if a skip to third grade could offer a simple solution to her problem. In my youth, I had benefitted from three consecutive accelerative measures: an early entrance to first grade, a class that combined the sixth and seventh grades, and another skipped grade during high school. Just a few articles confirmed my own past experience, convincing me that the vast majority of professionals fully endorsed well-planned accelerations. I succeeded, not without some difficulty, in “selling” that solution to the school principal. It was an instant success!

An Innovative Model Born from Conceptual Chaos

My daughter’s quandary introduced me to a subject I found so interesting that I decided to make academic talent development my new research and teaching field.¹ To build my initial expertise in that field, I invested many months in a reading program, mostly from US publications. It took me just a few weeks to discover a conceptual and terminological universe full of ambiguity and controversy.

Overview of the Conceptual Chaos

From my period of intensive immersion, four prominent ambiguities arose from the conceptual chaos. Much as I’d like to say the field has moved past these issues, I’m afraid my initial observations remain equally relevant today.

A Plethora of Definitions

First, the key concept of giftedness received a multiplicity of definitions, as if every scholar needed to distinguish themselves from their colleagues by creating their own personal definition. You think I am exaggerating? Here are two comments from local experts. First, in a national report on the identification of gifted students, three scholars described a “labyrinth of seemingly conflicting definitions in use in the United States.”² Just a few years later, Professor James Borland from New York’s Columbia University didn’t mince his words when he noted:

In short, there is a basic problem of definition that has yet to be resolved. The problem … is not one of paucity but rather one of a surfeit of definitions. Every writer in this field seems to be a Humpty Dumpty, using the word gifted in a manner that suits his or her purposes. Definitions abound but meaning is in short supply.³

The author was referring to a well-known excerpt from Alice in Wonderland: “‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’” w ⁴ In the early 2000s, two researchers analyzed the empirical studies published during two years (1997–8) in five major gifted education journals. They pointed out that “high ability can be counted among the dreaded ‘toothbrush concepts.’ It seems that everybody has a toothbrush, but nobody wants to use a toothbrush which belongs to somebody else.”⁵ Another scholar asked sixty-four authorities in gifted education to answer five questions, the first one being, “What do you see as the three greatest identification, assessment, and/or definitional issues in the gifted field?”⁶ Sixty of them (94%) targeted the lack of consensus on the conceptualization and/or definition of the gifted and talented. I will not bore you with a detailed survey of the more popular definitions at the time, and since.⁷ In fact, I will myself play Humpty Dumpty by proposing my own definitions of the two key concepts!

Two Terms Used as Synonyms

I frequently observed that professionals described the field’s target population as “gifted and talented children.” One of the most popular US definitions of the 1970s, initially proposed in a major federal report, began as follows: “Gifted and talented children are those who …”⁸ I have never seen any user of that expression specify if it meant two distinct types of children, or if we should consider these terms as synonyms; synonymy became the default interpretation. One could also find the term “talent” in the common expression “talent development.” But again, users never took time to properly define that expression. I would have liked to know if it meant the transformation of “gifts into talents,” of “talents into gifts,” or another type of developmental process. This semantic confusion of the terms “gift” and “talent” just reproduces common language, even meanings given by dictionaries. If, like me, you are crossword aficionados, you are well aware that if the word “talent” appears in the definition, the word “gift” will be the usual answer, and vice versa. It is the same in French.

Giftedness Reigns!

If we put aside the two examples given above, scholars and professionals almost never used the term “talent.” Page after page, I observed the complete supremacy of the gifted/giftedness pair; and it still applies today! Not only do professionals call their field “gifted education,” and its target population “gifted children,” but they identify their special programs as “gifted programs,” and the main professional association in the US as the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC); the main scientific and professional journals all use the term “gifted,”⁹ and so forth. And that supremacy extends to most countries, even non-English-speaking ones.

So strong is the supremacy of the “gifted” term in education that all other talent development fields, especially arts and sports, often avoid using that term, preferring to talk about talented artists or athletes rather than gifted athletes or artists. This hegemony has led most people to spontaneously associate the concept of giftedness with intelligence or academic excellence. In my courses or workshops, I frequently asked participants if they considered the terms “gifted” and “talented” as synonyms or not. Most, approximately 70% to 80%,¹⁰ perceived some difference, and one of the three more popular distinctions was precisely to associate giftedness with intelligence, and talent with non-intellectual fields like arts or sports.

An Underlying Duality

The fourth ambiguity—and to my mind the most important one—targets the generalized practice by most scholars of giving two distinct meanings to the term giftedness, often in the same paragraph: either outstanding potentialities or outstanding achievements. Here is one example among hundreds:

Individuals capable of developing gifted behavior are those possessing or capable of developing this composite set of traits and applying them to any potentially valuable area of human performance.¹¹

Note that this definition proposes a three-step sequence: 1) the capacity [potential] to develop the trio of traits that make up giftedness; 2) actually possessing [achievement and potential combined] the trio; and 3) applying [achievement] that trio to valuable human occupations. In my view, this semantic habit, observable in the vast majority of giftedness definitions, created not only unacceptable semantic confusion, but as I will show below, was entirely unnecessary. Consider for instance the phenomenon of academic underachievement among some intellectually gifted students. Professionals commonly define it as follows:

a discrepancy between expected performance (ability or potential) and actual performance (achievement) that cannot be explained by a learning disability or the documented need for any other category of special education services.¹²

According to the two different meanings given to the term “giftedness” by these same professionals, gifted underachievers are defined as simultaneously gifted (high potential) and non-gifted (average or low achievement), a clear semantic contradiction!

The Original Idea

The problem I perceived wasn’t in the value of making a distinction between potentialities and realizations, but rather in the use of the single “gifted” label to represent both concepts. Indeed, the potential/realization duality appears not only in the professional literature but also in common expressions:

Ensure the full blooming of your talents!—Maximize your aptitudes!

Develop your full potential!—It is so sad: all that wasted potential!

Such slogans are common everywhere we encounter some form of competency acquisition: arts, business, sports, technology, and so forth. And we see them commonly in the field of education. The United Nations’ 1989 Convention on the rights of children, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Origins of the DMGT and Quick Owner’s Tour
• 2 Competencies and Aptitudes
• 3 The “How Many?” Question
• 4 About Talents and Gifts
• 5 The Nature and Nurture of Aptitudes
• 6 The Developmental Process
• 7 Intrapersonal Catalysts
• 8 Environmental Catalysts
• 9 Developmental Dynamics
• 10 The DMGT Applied
• 11 A Self-Extolling Finale
• Epilogue
• Index