Eric Calvert's List: Beyond Remediation: Technology for Talent Development

• When teachers  and parents focus on assets, the youngsters experience success and  begin to find their “island of competence” (a term coined by  author and lecturer Robert Brooks, Ph.D., to describe areas of  interest/talent that have been or have the potential to be sources  of pride and accomplishment). These children also tend to find peers  with similar interests and expertise. By providing opportunities to  develop talents, 2e youngsters develop a positive image of who they  are and a vision of what they might become.  

• What is personal talent? It is exceptional ability to select and achieve difficult goals that are a good fit with a person's unique profile of interests, abilities, and social contexts (Moon, 2001, May). I am going to argue that it is essential that we recognize that personal talent exists and can be developed.
• I am defining personal talent as developed expertise in self-understanding, decision making, and self-regulation. The individual with personal talent understands his/her strengths and weaknesses; makes good decisions; has clear, high level goals for his/her life and is successful in achieving those goals even when faced with setbacks along the way.
• Because personal talent represents expertise, the individual with personal talent, like any other expert, will have acquired specific knowledge and developed specific skills. A person with personal talent will have a large knowledge base about the psychology of goal attainment and be skilled in applying that knowledge to his/her own life to achieve self-selected goals related to achievement and well being. For example, an adolescent with personal talent would know the difference between positive and negative self-talk. In addition, she would be able to use her knowledge to stop automatic negative thoughts when they occur. Suppose she receives a poor mark on a quiz in chemistry and her initial, automatic thoughts go something like this: "I'm a failure; this material is too hard for me; I can't learn it; I'm just no good at chemistry." She would deliberately stop those thoughts and replace them with more positive ones such as "Wait. I can do this. I've mastered difficult scientific concepts before. I can do it again. I'm going to study harder and ask my teacher for help so I will do better on the next quiz."
• Resilient individuals have learned how to overcome obstacles and adverse circumstances so they can achieve their dreams. That is personal talent. From studies of resilience we have learned about many individual and environmental factors that contribute to personal talent.
• Second, many psychological studies have contributed to the knowledge base of the personal talent domain. For example, studies of noncognitive factors that facilitate achievement such as self-efficacy (Bandura, 1997), attributional style (Graham, 1991; Weiner, 1985, 1986), and intrinsic motivation (Ryan & Deci, 2000) have revealed a great deal about internal factors that mediate goal attainment. We can use this knowledge to teach young people about these noncognitive factors and help them develop skill in applying them to their own lives in order to improve their ability to meet their goals. For example, we could explain the concept of self-efficacy to our students and teach them how to use positive self-talk to increase their self-efficacy for specific challenging tasks. This is rarely done in education. It is much more common in sports (Hardy, Jones, & Gould, 1996). Sports psychologists work in just this way to help athletes achieve their performance goals.
• In an extensive program of research, Carol Dweck has shown that the beliefs people have about their abilities and personality traits make a difference (Dweck, 1999). She classifies these beliefs into two categories: incremental and entity. People with incremental beliefs see their abilities and personality traits as malleable. They believe their abilities can be increased and their personality traits can be improved. Entity theorists, on the other hand, believe that their abilities and personality traits are fixed at birth and can't be changed very much by either people or the environment. People with incremental beliefs about their abilities and personality traits are far more resilient than those who hold entity beliefs.

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• Dr. Sternberg's Triarchic Theory of (Successful) Intelligence contends that intelligent behavior arises from a balance between analytical, creative and practical abilities, and that these abilities function collectively to allow individuals to achieve success within particular sociocultural contexts (Sternberg, 1988, 1997, 1999). Analytical abilities enable the individual to evaluate, analyze, compare and contrast information. Creative abilities generate invention, discovery, and other creative endeavors. Practical abilities tie everything together by allowing individuals to apply what they have learned in the appropriate setting. To be successful in life the individual must make the best use of his or her analytical, creative and practical strengths, while at the same time compensating for weaknesses in any of these areas. This might involve working on improving weak areas to become better adapted to the needs of a particular environment, or choosing to work in an environment that values the individual's particular strengths. For example, a person with highly developed analytical and practical abilities, but with less well-developed creative abilities, might choose to work in a field that values technical expertise but does not require a great deal of imaginative thinking. Conversely, if the chosen career does value creative abilities, the individual can use his or her analytical strengths to come up with strategies for improving this weakness. Thus, a central feature of the triarchic theory of successful intelligence is adaptability-both within the individual and within the individual's sociocultural context (Cianciolo & Sternberg, 2004).