Collection

Strategies for Teaching the Gifted

Teaching the gifted and talented can be a pleasure and a serious challenge. Children showing precocity in one curriculum area may need tutoring or extra work in another. Measuring and defining advanced skills can be difficult at best. These articles give us information on how to understand, direct, and teach the gifted and talented.

In the 1970s, the United States Office of Education provided a loose definition of "high performance capability" in broad areas including intellectual, creative, performing arts, etc. and deemed such "gifted" children entitled to unspecified special services. They had earned the same right to special education as the handicapped, but with much less specificity. As a result, there is no clear universal offering; each district decides what it will offer gifted children, leaving a good part of the final decision making to parents.

Teachers and other educators offer information, discussions, and strategies for teaching gifted and talented children in this collection of articles. To follow this discussion further, read our Gifted Learners blog.Two of the contributors to the blog discussions, Jennifer Chandler and Jill White, are authors of lesson plans and articles on our site as well as active teachers of the gifted.