Socio-Emotional Guidance and Counseling: Guiding Principle 2

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Standards Icon Color Socio-Emotional Guidance
and Counseling:
Exploring Guiding Principle 2

2. Gifted learners must be provided with career guidance services especially designed for their unique needs.

Gifted learners need to learn about many potential careers beginning at an earlier age than most students. Due to advanced abilities, intense interests, and a wide range of attractive options, many gifted learners have career guidance or life planning needs unlike those of their peers. For example, gifted learners have been reported to have difficulty making choices among all the career possibilities available to them because, as a group, they have multiple skills and multiple interests. In addition, gifted learners may struggle with unrealistic expectations from themselves or other. However, recent research has demonstrated that the use of above-level traditional assessment tools combined with individually focused feedback may help gifted learners to identify relative strengths and weaknesses as well as helping them to better understand their abilities and preferences, allowing them to plan more effectively for their future (Achter, Benbow, & Lubinski, 1997).

Standards and Sample Outcomes

2.0 MINIMUM STANDARD

2.0 EXEMPLARY STANDARD

Gifted learners must be provided with career guidance consistent with their unique strengths.

Counseling strategies are implemented that address the multipotentiality of gifted learners.

Beginning in the primary grades, gifted learners are introduced to varying professions and occupations as desirable to both genders.

For gifted girls, in particular, the guidance counselor encourages extensive enrollment in courses in science and math beginning in the middle grades.

Gifted learners should be provided with college and career guidance that is appropriately different and delivered earlier than typical programs.

Gifted learners have opportunities to observe professionals in areas matching potential and interests rather than stereotypes of gender, socio-economic status, race, or ethnicity.

If location permits, high schools consider partnerships with a college or university for sharing career guidance opportunities to gifted learners.

Schools offer mentor experiences to gifted learners in order to encourage student contact with professionals from a variety of fields.

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