Rethinking Giftedness: A Shift Toward Talent Development in Schools

Blog Posts, Network Blog,

By Jessica Potts, PhD

The European Council for High Ability held its biannual conference this past August in Thessaloniki, Greece. The folks at CTY Greece at Anatolia College put on a fantastic event, filled with engaging workshops, numerous networking opportunities, and enlightening keynote addresses from leaders in gifted education, including Colm O’Reilly, Del Siegle, Franzis Preckel, and Amy Shelton. As a presenter, I aimed to effectively represent the work my colleagues and I are doing at Davidson Academy Online. However, as an attendee and the Curriculum Coordinator at DAO, I kept an eye out for innovations and information that I could bring back to my team. While I’ve dabbled in research, I’m still a practitioner at heart, so classroom-ready concepts were the most appealing. This year, talent development models were a major focus, and while these models are research-based, they truly shine in active educational settings, making them the perfect souvenir from Thessaloniki.

Researchers have largely moved away from static concepts of giftedness in favor of multidimensional models that consider environmental, socio-affective, and opportunity-based factors. While this shift is generally positive, it hasn’t always been realized in either school settings or in broader cultural conceptions of giftedness. Older models—which focus on academic performance and rely heavily on IQ scores—create challenges for identifying gifted students. In these models, a child is either gifted or is not, and access to specialized educational opportunities is often restricted. Talent development models, however, take a broader approach, allowing teachers to focus less on identifying stereotypically gifted characteristics and more on creating environments that allow talent to flourish. Talent development models–such as Subotnik, Olszewski-Kubilius, and Worrell’s (2021) Talent Development Megamodel and Preckel et al.’s (2020) Talent Development in Achievement Domains (TAD) Framework–encourage educators to cultivate abilities in specific domains and while also supporting the development of psychosocial skills. This emphasis on malleable talent and continuous growth is especially important for educators in gifted programs or self-contained classrooms, where gifted characteristics are well-known, and identification isn’t the driving purpose. Rather than simply teaching educators how to recognize innate abilities, talent development models can be used to train teachers how to foster and refine students’ domain-specific skills.

This is where curriculum comes in. Unlike models of giftedness that focus on identification, talent development models offer classroom-ready applications and are approachable enough to be usable by teachers at all experience levels. Teachers become “talent scouts,” searching for potential in all students, and identification is on-going, as talent might be found in different domains at different points in a student’s development. Additionally, the phrase “talent development” is likely to be more palatable to stakeholders who might be skeptical of gifted education. Research on frameworks such as the Schoolwide Enrichment Model (Renzulli, 1977) has found that these approaches offer challenging and strength-based opportunities for all students (Reis & Peters, 2021). And since neither normative results or ceilings are defined within talent development models (Preckel et al., 2020), teachers can collaborate with students to set personalized goals and benchmarks, guiding them toward excellence in their chosen domains.

The Schoolwide Enrichment Model is widely known in gifted circles, and frameworks such as TAD offer specific applications in domains such as mathematics, music, and the visual arts. However, teachers who don’t have a background in gifted education can still apply talent development principles effectively in their classroom via well-designed curricula and student-centered practices. Below are some recommendations based both on wisdom from the talent development models and the kind of practices we engage in at Davidson Academy Online.

  1. Utilize both diagnostic and formative assessment. Talent development models view giftedness as mutable, so continuous assessment is key. Diagnostic assessments help teachers understand students’ starting points, while formative assessments–such as portfolios, reflections, and rough drafts–allow teachers to monitor student progress and adjust the curriculum accordingly. Feedback from these assessments can help students to identify areas where they might need more support and where they’re ready for more challenge.
  2. Embrace differentiation. Differentiation is essential for talent development. The Schoolwide Enrichment Model advocates for curriculum compacting, which includes assessing students’ abilities, eliminating content they’ve already mastered, and replacing it with challenging alternatives. This method can be applied to all students, allowing teachers to serve multiple ability levels in one classroom. Student choice is another form of differentiation, one that embraces the idea that students' passions and interests play a role in talent development. While differentiation in a large classroom can be challenging, it can result in more satisfied students who are better equipped to reach their potential.
  3. Offer opportunities for real-world applications. Talent development models emphasize that talent can manifest both inside and outside of the classroom. It is crucial, therefore, that teachers find ways to marry what students are learning at school with skills that might be utilized in real-world scenarios. Teachers can achieve this through in-class project-based learning and through access to competitions, mentorships, and other talent-based extracurriculars.
  4. Build social-emotional learning and executive functioning training into the curriculum. Talent development models prioritize not only academic or artistic talent, but also the development of social and emotional skills. Strong psychosocial skills (e.g., motivation, concentration, self-confidence) are critical to the development of talent and can be cultivated by teachers and mentors. The TAD recommends that teachers work to minimize psychosocial delimiters (e.g., unproductive mindsets) and maximize enhancers (e.g., resilience, developed social skills). These skills are taught most effectively when they are integrated into the curriculum, meaning that activities should give students the opportunity to collaborate with their peers, take intellectual risks, struggle productively, and “fail well.”

Many of these recommendations will not be new to veteran teachers, especially those familiar with gifted research. But for me, developing curricula based on talent development models is a significant shift away from traditional conceptions of giftedness. Rather than focusing on identifying a select few who meet predefined criteria, these models empower teachers to see potential in all students. This mindset can be useful for teachers who are in mixed ability classrooms but can be even more powerful for teachers in ability grouped settings who are hoping to find research-backed methods to nurture their students’ talents. Learning more about talent development models at ECHA reaffirmed that we’re on the right track at Davidson Academy Online, and I’m hopeful that these fresh insights will help me and my colleagues to continue refining our curriculum to better serve our students.

Works Cited

Preckel, F., Golle, J., Grabner, R., Jarvin, L., Kozbelt, A., Müllensiefen, D., Olszewski-Kubilius, P., Schneider, W., Subotnik, R., Vock, M., & Worrell, F. C. (2020). Talent Development in Achievement Domains: A Psychological Framework for Within- and Cross-Domain Research. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 15(3), 691-722. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691619895030

Subotnik, R. F., Olszewski-Kubilius, P., & Worrell, F. C. (2021). The talent development megamodel: A domain-specific conceptual framework based on the psychology of high performance. In R. J. Sternberg & D. Ambrose (Eds.), Conceptions of giftedness and talent (pp. 425–442). Palgrave Macmillan/Springer Nature. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56869-6_24

Reis, S. M., & Peters, P. M. (2021). Research on the Schoolwide Enrichment Model: Four decades of insights, innovation, and evolution. Gifted Education International, 37(2), 109-141. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261429420963987