Profoundly Gifted Learners: A New Platform for Understanding

By Melissa Bilash and P. Susan Jackson 

For more than 70 years, the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) has worked to advance the education and well-being of all gifted learners. This fall NAGC will add a new area of focus to our community with the introduction of a new Special Interest Group (SIG) focusing on the needs of Profoundly Gifted (PG) students. 

Founding leaders  Melissa Bilash (The Grayson School, PA) and P. Susan Jackson (The Daimon Institute, Canada), will work with SIG members to offer educators, parents, and universities a new opportunity to collaborate, share resources, and learn how to better meet the unique needs of profoundly gifted learners. 

Who are the Profoundly Gifted? 

Profoundly gifted learners represent a unique subset of exceptional human ability. These individuals demonstrate extraordinarily high intellectual capacity, special talents, or remarkable creative skills, distinguishing themselves as the most capable individuals in the vast spectrum of human potential. Profoundly gifted students represent about 0.13% of the population—a very small but highly significant group.  

When provided with appropriate support, these learners can achieve remarkable levels of creativity and intellectual excellence. When fully supported, profoundly gifted learners reach the peaks of human nature, demonstrating exceptional creative or intellectual thought and action while accessing advanced development in various aspects of human experience.  

Enhancing Our Understanding and Creating Essential Opportunities 

The establishment of the Profoundly Gifted Special Interest Group (PG SIG) aims to facilitate a comprehensive understanding of profoundly gifted learners. By collaborating among educators, researchers, psychologists, administrators, parents, and other stakeholders, we can better address their unique needs and foster an environment that nurtures their exceptional potential. 

Join us as we: 

1. Connect and collaborate: Supporting profoundly gifted learners requires intentional opportunities for connection and collaboration among educators, clinicians, researchers, and families. By sharing strategies and perspectives, stakeholders can better understand and address the unique needs of these students. Because research on profoundly gifted learners has been limited, such collaboration is crucial. Working together enables the development of knowledge and practices that foster the growth and well-being of these extraordinary individuals. 

2. Advance research and best practices: The SIG will foster evidence-supported knowledge, and interventions as we contribute to the growing body of research on profoundly gifted learners. Focused attention on these outliers of outliers will no doubt contribute to our understanding of exceptional abilities and talents in novel and unforeseen directions.  

3. Support advocacy: The SIG will help create opportunities for profoundly gifted learners through awareness and action at all educational levels, in mental health, family settings, and talent-based organizations.   

4. Engage the NAGC Community: Collaboration across networks is essential to ensure that profoundly gifted students are central to discussions concerning equity, educational programming, and policy development. These learners represent a remarkable diversity—spanning all social spheres, encompassing a wide range of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, identities, and showcasing unique manifestations of talent in extraordinary ways. Ongoing support and partnership within the NAGC community will play a critical role in fostering inclusive practices and sustaining meaningful growth for profoundly gifted learners. 

Join Us! 

We invite all interested individuals to participate, share their expertise, and help spread the word about this initiative. Supporting PG learners is a profound educational responsibility and an investment in innovation and creativity that benefits humanity and our global environment. As expressed by Toynbee: 

Whatever progress is made in confronting the challenges of survival (environment, overpopulation, Urban Decay, Etc.) will be spearheaded by the most advanced thinkers of our times. To give a fair chance to potential creativity as a matter of life and death for any society. This is all important because the outstanding creative ability of a fairly small population is humankind’s ultimate asset, the only one which we have been endowed. (Toynbee, 1967)