An aim of this book is to provide models for designing learning experiences that support students on a trajectory of developing expertise. Eventually, when students leave our classrooms and enter their fields of study, we want them to be skilled in applying their knowledge and creativity in solving realworld problems as experts do. What does it mean to think and practice as an expert? How do we support students on this trajectory when they are learning the building blocks of a discipline at a young age? What do we know about the development of expertise and how does this fit within the context of gifted education? This chapter addresses these questions.
If we understand what experts do and how they think, we can intentionally plan curriculum and learning experiences to prepare students to engage with content as experts do within their respective fields. Table 1.1 provides examples and questions to ask as part of curriculum planning. As noted in the table, you will see guiding questions for curriculum development to consider what experts know, how they think about content, how they produce new knowledge, and how they organize their knowledge around principles and ideas that generalize to multiple situations. Additionally, you can consider how to support students' trajectories toward expertise through cultivating their habits of achievement, including access to opportunities and the development of psychosocial skills.
Talent Development
The talent development model in gifted education focuses on cultivating students' strengths and talents within a specific domain in order to transform potential to ability, ability into competence, and competence into expertise (Subotnik et al., 2011). This model is based on the assumption that abilities are malleable and can be nurtured in supportive contexts. This cultivation of talent happens on a continuum in different stages and at different trajectories, depending on a student's readiness level, access to opportunities, and the specific discipline. Several factors are necessary for talent development including motivation, access and exposure to high level content, and cultivation of psychosocial skills (e.g., mental skills needed to achieve set goals and counter setbacks).
We must emphasize that it is critically important for students to have access to high-quality curriculum. In many ways, it is the key to unlocking future opportunities in students' lives. When students interact with curriculum designed to support the development of expertise, they not only develop habits of thinking in the discipline but also have opportunities to develop positive habits of achievement, including self-agency, perseverance, and self-regulation skills. Curriculum serves as an equalizer for opportunity because it promotes access to rich learning experiences that open doors to next steps in talent development.
The chapters that follow focus on designing or adapting curriculum so that students can move toward their next steps on their talent trajectories, specifically with exposure to reading, writing, and thinking as experts do. These models make the invisible patterns of expert-like thinking visible by making the connections between concepts explicit. When these structures and connections are continually applied and practiced in various contexts, students begin to perceive and internalize the underlying principles of the discipline.
If students have opportunities to interact with content as experts do, they can apply their learning in creative ways. This includes developing authentic products, evaluating multiple perspectives, making insightful connections, modeling phenomena, asking new questions, and elaborating upon ideas. For example, when students understand the structure of a discipline, they can understand how the structure can be modified or improved. This comes into play in lessons where students develop solution ideas or consider multiple points of view. Also, as students understand more about the connections between concepts within a content area, they can make insightful connections as they uncover nuances within these relationships. You will find these models provide many opportunities for students to ask new questions, create models, apply what they are learning in innovative ways given specific criteria, and generate multiple ideas, solutions, and connections - all important processes related to how experts engage in the creative process.
The models and tools in this resource build mental structures that become stronger and more sophisticated as students examine the interconnected relationships across concepts and ideas. These models also allow students to grapple with real-world issues through exploring multiple perspectives and applying overarching generalizations (big ideas) within and across disciplines. Overall, these models enhance the development of expertise and creative production by building a strong, organized structure of knowledge as a foundation for examining patterns among concepts and determining next steps in solving problems.
So, how do we actually teach students to think this way? Our aim is to simplify the complexity We hope you find the models that follow to be simple tools for supporting students' complex thinking!
