What are students who are gifted and talented like? Generally they show some combination of the following qualities:
- They learn more quickly and independently than most students their own age.
- They often have well-developed vocabulary, as well as advanced reading and writing skills.
- They are very motivated, especially on tasks that are challenging or difficult.
- They hold themselves to higher than usual standards of achievement.
Contrary to a common impression, students who are gifted or talented are not necessarily awkward socially, less healthy, or narrow in their interests”in fact, quite the contrary (Steiner & Carr, 2003). They also come from all economic and cultural groups.
Ironically, in spite of their obvious strengths as learners, such students often languish in school unless teachers can provide them with more than the challenges of the usual curriculum. A kindergarten child who is precociously advanced in reading, for example, may make little further progress at reading if her teachers do not recognize and develop her skill; her talent may effectively disappear from view as her peers gradually catch up to her initial level. Without accommodation to their unusual level of skill or knowledge, students who are gifted or talented can become bored by school, and eventually the boredom can even turn into behavior problems.
Partly for these reasons, students who are gifted or talented have sometimes been regarded as the responsibility of special education, along with students with other sorts of disabilities. Often their needs are discussed, for example, in textbooks about special education, alongside discussions of students with intellectual disabilities, physical impairments, or major behavior disorders (Friend, 2008). There is some logic to this way of thinking about their needs; after all, they are quite exceptional, and they do require modifications of the usual school programs in order to reach their full potential. But it is also misleading to ignore obvious differences between exceptional giftedness and exceptional disabilities of other kinds. The key difference is in students' potential. By definition, students with gifts or talents are capable of creative, committed work at levels that often approach talented adults. Other students”including students with disabilities”may reach these levels, but not as soon and not as frequently. Many educators therefore think of the gifted and talented not as examples of students with disabilities, but as examples of diversity. As such they are not so much the responsibility of special education specialists, as the responsibility of all teachers to differentiate their instruction.
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