- Student diversity
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.
Supporting students who are gifted and talented
Supporting the gifted and talented usually involves a mixture of acceleration and enrichment of the usual
curriculum (Schiever & Maker, 2003). Acceleration involves either a child's skipping a grade, or else the teacher's
redesigning the curriculum within a particular grade or classroom so that more material is covered faster. Either
strategy works, but only up to a point: children who have skipped a grade usually function well in the higher grade,
both academically and socially. Unfortunately skipping grades cannot happen repeatedly unless teacher, parents,
and the students themselves are prepared to live with large age and maturity differences within single classrooms.
In itself, too, there is no guarantee that instruction in the new, higher-grade classroom will be any more stimulating
than it was in the former, lower-grade classroom. Redesigning the curriculum is also beneficial to the student, but
impractical to do on a widespread basis; even if teachers had the time to redesign their programs, many non-gifted
students would be left behind as a result.
Enrichment involves providing additional or different instruction added on to the usual curriculum goals and
activities. Instead of books at more advanced reading levels, for example, a student might read a wider variety of
types of literature at the student's current reading level, or try writing additional types of literature himself. Instead
of moving ahead to more difficult kinds of math programs, the student might work on unusual logic problems not
assigned to the rest of the class. Like acceleration, enrichment works well up to a point. Enrichment curricula exist
to help classroom teachers working with gifted students (and save teachers the time and work of creating