Ten years ago, in 2001, the U.S. Congress enacted the "No Child Left behind Act" (NCLB). This landmark act focused on standards-based education with the goal of raising challenges and improving student achievement. Advocates for gifted children have been concerned over the law's silence regarding talented and high-achieving children. In the first…

The use of a classroom observation tool to monitor differentiation strategies is described, and relevant research findings using the form are reported. The advantages for using this approach to document differentiation are discussed as are the reasons teachers may question its intent. Applications for practice include its use as a self-assessment…

Summer Enrichment Workshop (SEW) is a 3-week enrichment program held at The University of Alabama (UA) Tuscaloosa, Alabama, for students identified as gifted and talented. The faculty of the College of Education, Program of Gifted and Talented (GT), formed a partnership with a College of Engineering faculty member who mentored the graduate student…

Both gifted educators and parents need to be vigilant as to how gifted education is characterized in the popular media. Gifted educators spend countless resources to meet the needs of gifted students using very limited fiscal resources, and it is imperative that those efforts are not undermined in the popular media by unsubstantiated statements.…

Eight students who excelled in a statewide, middle school creative writing tournament discussed their relationships with writing. Students' interview transcripts were analyzed for references to positive and negative teacher influences. Students needed teachers who provided structured writing time and clear deadlines, valued the message of the work…

In his keynote address at the "New York Times" Schools for Tomorrow 2011 Fall Conference, Dr. Larry Summers (2011) suggested that technology implementations have an unusual growth pattern. New technology innovations usually require more time to "catch on" than one might expect, but once they catch on, their use spreads more quickly than anyone can…

The focus of this study was to determine the effectiveness of a series of free workshops for parents of gifted children. The parent education workshops provided research-based information as recognized by experts in the field of counseling gifted children. Content areas include the characteristics of gifted children, identification, appropriate…

This article provides a succinct primer on some of the basic constructs that adults need to know to help keep students with gifts and talents from completing suicide. It focuses on the school as the primary context to look out for potentially suicidal gifted students. This makes sense, as students spend a considerable amount of time in school,…

When explaining why some are gifted and others are not, nature and nurture are invariably mentioned. Is Jason gifted because of his inherited genes, his home environment, or a combination of the two? Researchers and laypersons have debated this for decades. They have conducted research, created tests, written editorials, influenced legislation,…

As the current issues about the nature and quality of education are disseminated through the media, gifted students are privy to these issues and educators should be concerned about the intellectual and affective consequences they might have on this population of students. Teaching gifted students to become politically savvy enables them to…

As teachers continue professional development throughout their careers to better serve the educational needs of students who are gifted, it becomes apparent that one of the goals is to strive to increase self-awareness of ethical and moral professional decisions and actions. Often, this requires intentional reminders and deliberate work to…

The purpose of the article is to provide a brief introduction to Black male masculine identity development and relate it to the field of gifted education. It will begin with information related to identity development that is applicable to Black males. Next, the phenomenological variant of ecological systems theory (PVEST) will be explored and…

The purpose of this article is to explore four experiences that the author has encountered in her teaching career and focus on how they have shaped her understanding of gifted males and the instructional strategies that she uses in her classroom. The situations described in the article focus on four distinct subgroups of gifted males, James and…

A gifted student-athlete, Charlie Bloomfield is introduced to athlete's journals by his coaches at Burke Mountain Academy (Vermont), an elite American ski school. Used by Olympians and professionals alike, journals provide athletes with ways to organize and reflect on training and competitions. Athlete's journals help gifted male athletes address…

One would be hard-pressed to deny the impact that hip hop is having on gifted students. More specifically, because hip hop is a creative and exciting male-dominated culture, gifted males gravitate to hip hop culture. From the perspective of two Black men from two different generations, this article was inspired by discussions about the role of hip…