Modern Curriculum for Gifted and Advanced Academic Students

Todd A. Kettler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000494679
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

Modern Curriculum for Gifted and Advanced Academic Students addresses the need for advanced curriculum design in an age of national standards and 21st-century learning innovations. The text and its authors work from the assumption that the most advanced learners need a qualitatively different design of learning experiences in order to develop their potential into outstanding achievement, answering the question, "How should we design learning experiences for our most advanced academic students in the foundational curriculum areas?" This book provides the most contemporary thinking about how to design in-depth courses of study in the foundational curriculum areas with a high degree of complexity and advanced content. The book includes chapters articulating specific design components like creative thinking, critical thinking, and authentic research, but also subject-specific chapters in mathematics, language arts, science, and social studies to demonstrate application of those design components.

SECTION 1
MODERN APPROACHES TO GIFTED EDUCATION CURRICULUM

CHAPTER 1
CURRICULUM DESIGN IN AN ERA OF UBIQUITOUS INFORMATION AND TECHNOLOGY

NEW POSSIBILITIES FOR GIFTED EDUCATION

TODD KETTLER

DOI: 10.4324/9781003236696-2

“Good gifted curriculum, where it exists, should set the standards for learning at world-class levels.”—Joyce VanTassel-Baska (1994, p. 397)

I recently spoke to a group of educational administrators on the topic of leadership in gifted education. They were mostly directors and coordinators of gifted and advanced academic programs; some were assistant superintendents or chief academic officers. I posed the following question of support for gifted education programs, “How many of you enjoy almost unrestricted support for gifted education in your school districts?” Two or three hands eased into the air, but silently they retreated as hesitantly as they were raised. The gravity of unrestricted support sinks in slowly. I would have followed up with “Why not?”, but I can generally predict those responses as we have voiced them as a field for years, decades even. Instead, I offered a story from my own experiences as the director of advanced academic and gifted education programs at two large school districts in Texas. I was appointed to serve on interview teams for many school positions during my school leadership work. I distinctly remember interviewing several candidates for head football coach, which falls just below the superintendent in school hierarchy in many places, and I also remember interviewing a number of candidates to direct fine arts programs. In those interviews, we knew much of the information about the candidates from document review, references, and preliminary meetings. There were two distinct features of the interviews that bore the gravity of the decision making: vision and leadership. Our team wanted to be sold on a vision for excellence in athletics or fine arts, and we needed to assess whether the candidate possessed the leadership skills to make that vision a reality for the kids in our schools.

The potential coaches and fine arts directors talked about outstanding performance and achievement in their respective areas. They talked about systematic opportunities to involve as many kids as possible and train and develop those who have the desire and motivation to push toward our highest levels of performance. They talked about the benefits to the school and community when we compete for state championships and elite performance awards in the arts. They painted a vision of our most elite performers rising through the system and being sought after by the best colleges in the nation. They sold us on a world-class vision of performance and achievement in football, performance arts, and visual arts. Our selection team made our decisions, and for years, I watched the football coaches and fine arts directors garner near unrestricted support for their programs.

Then I looked my audience in the eye and asked, “When was the last time you vividly painted a picture of world-class gifted education in your school?” After a brief pause, I repeated the question, clarifying that world-class is bolder than great; it’s systematically excellent. World-class changes kids lives in ways unimaginable; world-class is the conduit to dreams and genius. Then I suggested what I believe to be true. Most do not know how to paint the vision of world-class gifted education. Some in that room likely even questioned their own leadership to build such a vision into reality. I asked them why athletics and fine arts develop gifted athletes, artists, and performers with near unrestricted support, while we try to develop gifted mathematicians, scientists, and writers and often remain tangential to the entire enterprise. That is an amazingly complex, yet important, question—one whose answer, I think, involves vision, equity, and capacity. Do we as educators of the most advanced students present a clear vision of excellence, make it equitably available to all students, and demonstrate the capacity to develop elite academic performances at world-class levels?

Never did a candidate for head football coach or director of fine arts sit at the head of the interview table and explain how he or she was going to meet the needs of our athletes, artists, and performers. They did meet and even exceed the needs of many students, but need-meeting does not a bold vision make. Did they differentiate in a way to take the best students to heights seemingly unimagined? Of course they did; the cellists who wanted to attend Julliard did not have the same practice and instruction as those seeking to make the all-state orchestra, who did not have the same instruction as those wanting to play a few songs with the holiday ensemble. But differentiated instruction does not a bold vision make; it is simply a means to an end. It is time we think boldly about gifted education and learning designs capable of turning those bold visions into viable opportunities for students.

In 1986, the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) published a special issue of Gifted Child Quarterly devoted to theory and research on curriculum in gifted education (Volume 30, Issue 4). It was arguably one of the most significant collections of scholarship on the topic of gifted education curriculum in the history of the field. Joyce VanTassel-Baska and Harry Passow served as guest editors for the special issue. Passow (1986) contributed a paper on gifted education curriculum at the secondary level, but I think the most significant ideas from that manuscript were not even specific to secondary gifted education. Passow argued that lack of a clear concept of the goals of gifted education was to blame for undermining curriculum efforts. He stated, “… curriculum planning must begin with clear goals and objectives if curricular efforts are to be meaningful. Without a clear concept of what it is we expect the gifted and talented students to achieve, what it is we want them ‘to become,’ our curriculum efforts will be directionless” (p. 186).

Roughly 30 years later, Passow’s cautionary statements about a lack of clear goals seem as relevant as they were in 1986. Renzulli (2012) offered a similar sentiment suggesting that without theory, practices in gifted education are fragmented and loosely connected. Specifically, fragmentation undermines clarity and consistency of goals, services, and evaluation. In their articulate description of three competing paradigms in gifted education, Dai and Chen (2014) also offered compelling evidence that the field is fragmented, contested by multiple theories, and searching for direction (Ambrose, VanTassel-Baska, Coleman, & Cross, 2010). Thus, I argue that Passow was absolutely correct about the vital relationship between goals and curriculum. Without clear goals, recommendations for curriculum and learning designs are meaningless.

Bold Goals for World-Class Gifted Education

Finding statements of the goal of gifted education in the field’s literature is surprisingly difficult. Subotnik, Olszewski-Kubilius, and Worrell (2011) suggested that goals in the field generally fall into two categories, self-actualization or development of eminence, and they made a talent development argument that eminence ought to be the goal of gifted education. Subotnik and Rickoff (2010) similarly made an argument for eminence as the goal of gifted education, and they suggested that curriculum in the field of gifted education actually may be discouraging pursuits of eminence as a goal. However, developing eminence as a goal of gifted education has its critics; the October 2012 issue of Gifted Child Quarterly (Volume 56, Issue 4) featured several critical responses to eminence as a goal for gifted education. It may be fair to characterize the field of gifted education as in a dilemma. Curriculum experts know that curriculum development without goals is problematic at best and meaningless at worst; however, the field seems mired in theoretical debates about what the goal ought to be.

There is a pragmatic axiom that asserts the meaning of a thought can be found in the actions it produces. The pragmatist is less concerned with ultimate truth of an idea and more concerned with whether the idea produces actions and habits that are judged useful or productive (e.g., Peirce, 1878/1992). Subotnik et al. (2011) hinted at the pragmatic axiom and claimed that the “… goal [of gifted education] is to develop the talents of children and youth at the upper ends of the distribution in all fields of endeavor to maximize those individuals’ lifetime contributions to society” (p. 23). Eminence as a goal for gifted education leads to socially valuable ends (contributions to society). Furthermore, it leads to useful and productive program design and curriculum development (domain specific talent development). Eminence ought to be the grand goal of gifted education, not because we may develop eminence by the time students reach high school graduation, but because we seek to increase the number of individuals capable of achieving eminence in adulthood.

To understand an orchestrated approach to elite talent development leading to potential eminence, I have been engaged in a 3-year, ethnographic case study of an elite youth baseball program (Kettler, 2015). The baseball program works with children and youth ages 8 to 18 with the explicit goal of transitioning players to college and professional baseball. It is estimated that only 6.8% of high school baseball players will play at the college or professional level (National Collegiate Athletics Association, 2013). The baseball club has been operating for 25 years. Teams in the club have won 15 national championships and more than 150 players have received scholarships to play college baseball. Twenty-six players from the club have been drafted into professional baseball, and in 2014, both the American League and National League Cy Young award winners were alumni of the baseball club. It is a good example of systematically developing elite talent in a specific domain projecting young men on a trajectory that may lead to eminence. One goal of the study was to compare baseball talent development with the athletic talent development studies in Bloom’s work (Kalinowski, 1985a, 1985b; Monsaas, 1985) and the Subotnik et al. (2011) model for talent development. Additionally, I wanted to understand the nuances of the process of developing elite talent in athletics in order to apply those principles to the work of developing mathematical talent, writing talent, or computer science talent. The following seven principles have emerged from the study (Kettler, 2015):

• The goal of the program is clear and explicitly stated.
• The goal of the program is bold—elite performance leading to the highest level of achievement and recognition in the domain.
• The goal fundamentally drives the work of the teams and the players.
• Players are required to try out to be invited to participate in the club, and even if they are accepted, participation is annual, with new tryouts each year.
• Not all players will achieve the goal of college or professional baseball, but all are treated as though they will.
• Achieving the goal requires discipline, commitment, and practice combined with focused instruction, mentorship, and participation on the most competitive stages in the domain.
• To potentially achieve the goal, players prioritize work in their talent area and minimize distraction in other areas.

When we view gifted education as a talent development process, we assimilate principles of learning and design from highly successful talent development models, including athletic talent. Eminence should be the goal propelling gifted education into productive 21st-century relevance, but eminence alone is too broad. The baseball talent development program successfully prepares young men for a career trajectory that may lead to eminence, but their operational goals focused on performance by the end of high school. In order to develop world-class gifted education, we must translate the possibility of eminence into discipline specific goals that are bold, clear, and explicitly stated. These operational goals should focus on elite performances by the end of high school. For instance, learning from the baseball model, the following examples of goal statements would be influential to guide practice in a school district and research for those studying gifted education:

• The gifted STEM program develops elite talent in mathematics, science, engineering, and technology in order to place students in prestigious colleges and universities to pursue degrees and careers in STEM fields.
• The gifted writing program develops elite talent in literary and journalistic writing in order to place students in prestigious liberal arts programs to pursue degrees and careers in media and communications.
• The gifted leadership program develops elite talent in law, policy, and business in order to place students in elite colleges and universities to pursue degrees and careers in fields of business, law, and leadership.
• The gifted social sciences program develops elite talent in psychology, education, and sociology in order to place students in elite colleges and universities to pursue degrees and careers in the social science disciplines.

The pursuit of clarity does not stop with those goal statements. The next step is to establish empirical indicators to verify that students are performing at elite levels in those areas. What are the exemplars of elite performance in science and mathematics in high school, middle school, and elementary school? What external validations confirm elite writing talent in high school, middle school, and elementary school? In the baseball case study, I found that players at the high school level are very familiar with the metrics of elite performance. Position players knew how fast they needed to run, how they would be expected to demonstrate arm strength and accuracy, and how to demonstrate batting skills against the most talented pitching. Pitchers knew the velocities associated with elite performance; they knew the metrics of earned run averages, WHIP (walks and hits allowed per inning pitched), and strikeout ratios based on batters faced. The players learned these metrics because the coaches and directors of the club teach them specifically and they measure them often. What are the equivalent metrics for elite performances in social sciences, journalism, visual arts, or computer science? What are the metrics of elite performance in mathematics, biology, or business? Those are the questions schools need to ask, and the field of gifted education needs to study.

Curriculum and Learning Design in Gifted Education

Once we establish bold goals that are both relevant and compelling, we face the daunting task of building curriculum pathways to make those attainable. Gifted education curriculum reflects the process of developing elite talent projecting toward eminent levels of adult achievement.

Designing and implementing advanced curriculum is arguably the most important task of those working in the field of gifted education (Borland, 1989; VanTassel-Baska & Brown, 2007). Gifted education is built upon the principle of individual differences, that some learners demonstrate outstanding performance or are capable of elite levels of performance compared to their peers. Moreover, these differences require modified approaches commensurate with ability and aligned with goals of superior performance (Renzulli, 2012). Models and theories of curriculum development abound in gifted education, and national standards for gifted education include standards for curriculum and instruction (National...