I Agree—Well,Mostly!

In this essay, I reply to my five commentators in the October 2017 issue of the Roeper Review to my July 2017 article: “ACCEL: A New Model for Identifying the Gifted.” I respond to each in turn. I end with the question I believe most important for those of us interested in giftedness to confront at the present moment.     

Does ACCEL Excel as a Model of Giftedness? A Reply to Commentators

In this essay, I respond to commentators on my article on the Active Concerned Citizenship and Ethical Leadership (ACCEL) model for understanding giftedness. I cover a number of topics that arose in or out of the commentaries, in particular, systems inertia; toxic leadership; teaching for creativity; flight from reality; the role of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in teaching for wisdom; the developmental nature of giftedness; making a positive, meaningful, and enduring difference; IQ as a diagnostic tool rather than as a gatekeeper; meeting the needs of marginalized young people; teacher education; and retrospective studies. I conclude that the differences among all of us in this symposium are small and that we all agree that a model like ACCEL—whatever its exact terms—is needed to move the field of giftedness beyond a preoccupation with abilities, narrowly defined.     

美国天才教育目标与作用的讨论--课程设置是为少数天才还是为多数学生能力的发展

这是美国心理学专家费尔德胡森（Ｊ．Ｆｅｌｄｈｕｓｅｎ） 对当今美国天才教育组织及其多种教育模型的研究综述。１ 针对并不乐观的美国天才教育实际,费氏指出,由于天才表现在不同的领域,尽管设立了各种特殊课堂或相应的全日制教学班级,现今的公共教学对于早慧学生能力开发的作用不大。本文介绍了各种才能定向和表现模式,强调个体能力倾向抉择。费氏认为,对学生才能鉴别具有长期作用,要求研究者和教育者使高智学生理解自身才能的本质,并投入到长期发展之中     

Interdisciplinary Exploration Supports Sternberg’s Expansion of Giftedness

Robert Sternberg’s (2017) Active Concerned Citizenship and Ethical Leadership (ACCEL) framework provides a helpful way to align gifted education with the complexities of 21st-century socioeconomic and cultural environments. The recommendation that we shift away from pseudoquantitative precision in conceptions of giftedness aligns with similar recommendations in other fields including political science, economics, and mathematics. The emphases on ethics and wisdom are reinforced by analyses of the need for more ethical awareness in societies. These analyses arise from research and theory in other fields, including ethical philosophy, political science, economics, history, sociology, and journalism. These transdisciplinary similarities are interpreted to be conceptual triangulation supporting the importance of Sternberg’s model as a catalyst for the development of more holistic conceptions of giftedness and talent.     

Planning to Unmask Potential Through Responsive Curriculum: The “Famous Five” Exercise

Barriers to the identification of gifted students from traditionally underserved groups have been well documented. Although contemporary definitions of giftedness give heed to both performance and potential, the literature provides little concrete direction for how “potential” can be recognized, particularly in underperforming students who have lacked access to the kind of high-quality, personally relevant, and appropriately challenging curriculum likely to bring their talents to the fore. It is argued that high-quality curriculum can serve as an effective catalyst for the emergence of diverse talent but that such an objective must be a deliberate focus of curriculum planning. The “Famous Five” exercise presented in this article is a heuristic procedure that has been used with experienced educators and is designed to stimulate the thinking of curriculum developers as they design opportunities for unmasking diverse gifted potential.     

Learning and Creativity

Creativity was an enduring interest for George Roeper. For him, gifted children represented the divergent thinkers who could change the trajectory of the world. In this 1962 presentation to parents at the school, he discussed his findings about the differences between intelligence and creativity—how they overlap, how they differ, and how they are assessed. As an active educator, George was unable to contribute as much in formal publications as he might have. Presentations such as this one are our best view into the depth and insight of the man. As a contemporaneous account, it also gives us a view into attitudes in the early years of gifted child education.     

Cognitive Development in Gifted Children: Toward a More Precise Understanding of Emerging Differences in Intelligence

To truly understand gifted performance, it is necessary to merge research on giftedness with current thinking in cognitive development and intelligence. This article presents traditional research on gifted children's cognitive development then considers how the application of newer models and theories from the field of cognitive development can be combined with research on giftedness to change the way people think about gifted performance. First four factors that have often been associated with giftedness are discussed from the perspectives of cognitive developmental psychology and gifted education. Next, emphasis is placed on investigating the strategic development of gifted children. Specifically, R. S. Siegler's (Emerging Minds: The Process of Change in Children'sThinking, Oxford University Press, New York, 1996) model of strategy development is addressed in terms of what it may contribute to understanding gifted cognition. Finally, future lines of research using models from cognitive development and complex systems models of development are recommended.