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21st Century learners

needs of gifted and talented students

Gifted children are more advanced intellectually than their age peers. They can reason more rapidly and accurately with complex abstract material. This exceptional reasoning ability enables gifted children to be more perceptive and insightful, grasping the essential elements of situations quite quickly. Insightfulness leads to unusual approaches to problem finding, problem solving and "interesting" solutions that are often not appreciated by others. Their rapid learning rate is associated with an unusually "fact retentive" memory. Resultingly, this means there is a need for constant mental stimulation, and if this need is not met problems enhanced because of boredom can result. Intellectual complexity means being able to perceive "multitudinous relationships" in all things and this leads to a need for precise facts and exactitude. Demand for accuracy, exactness, precision of thought and expression leads them to be argumentative and can be a social liability.

For gifted children, nothing is as simple as it seems so precision is needed to help sort out relationships and to enable decision making.True/false and multiple choice questions are extremely difficult for gifted children who see clearly that the answer depends on the context - they see endless shades of grey, not black and white. Seeing many layers of meaning in each situation, gifted children quickly pick up mixed messages in social situations that leaves them very confused and embarrassed.

engaged means students are active.

a lecture is still a lecture, and having students simply listen is still a  passive action. The solution is simple: If a teacher wants to increase student  engagement, then the teacher needs to increase student activity -- ask the  students to do something with the knowledge and skills they have learned. Break  up the lecture with learning activities. Let them practice. Get them moving. Get  them talking. Make it so engaging that it will be difficult for students  not to participate.

harlotte