Eric Calvert's List: Gifted Education

• What are telementoring programs, and how can gifted students benefit from them?
• In Francoys Gagné’s gifted and talented model, he discusses turning gifts into talents. He views giftedness as untrained natural abilities and talent as the mastery of those abilities through development. Benjamin Bloom found that the process of developing talent requires a concerted effort of a variety of individuals. The nature and diversity of gifted and talented students’ interests and abilities demand resources beyond the confines of the home, school, and sometimes beyond the boundaries of the community. At some point, students need contact with more knowledgeable others who share their expertise and can guide them. Ideally this process takes place in person. Unfortunately, time and distance constraints often prevent this from occurring.
  
• Telementoring is one way to provide gifted students with opportunities to interact with others who are very knowledgeable. It is particularly valuable for students in isolated areas, for students with esoteric interests, or for students whose academic needs exceed the local educational system’s capacity. In these cases, it may be difficult to find a mentor in the community who is willing to spend time with the young talent. Telementoring is a viable solution. During the experience, the student and the telementor work toward a student goal that the two have jointly set. They usually communicate through monitored email or bulletin board postings. While parents and educators can set up such relationships if they know appropriate mentors, a number of organizations provide this service on a large scale. One of the more prominent ones is the International Telementor Program (www.telementor.org).
  

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• I wanted to cry when I read about the recent widely publicized report from the Council of Great City Schools about the underachievement of African-American males in our schools. Its findings bear repeating: African-American boys drop out at nearly twice the rate of white boys; their SAT scores are on average 104 points lower; and black men represented just 5 percent of college students in 2008.

• Driven by the intense focus on accountability, schools and teachers used standardized test scores to help identify and address student weaknesses. Over time, these deficits began to define far too many students so that all we saw were their deficits – particularly for African-American males. As a result, we began losing sight of these young boys’ gifts and, as a consequence, stifled their talents.
• We need to shift from remediation focused on weaknesses to mediation that develops strengths.
• Finally, students must be enabled to be more active in their own education. Schools should give students opportunities to participate in teachers’ professional development aimed at enriching curriculum, improving teaching and expanding the range of materials students create.
• In this way, student strengths will be illuminated. Teachers will get meaningful feedback on their instruction. Numerous ideas for creative classroom activities will be generated, and new bonds between teachers and students will develop. We must embrace a new approach to African-American males that focuses less on what they aren’t doing and builds on what they can and want to do as the path to improving their academic performance.

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