Parallel Session Proceedings »
2.2.7 Building Confidence in Regional Pre-Service Teachers for Teaching Gifted Students
During initial teacher education (ITE), pre-service teachers (PSTs) begin developing the understandings that will underpin their practice. This is the time when their learning and teaching philosophy is being formed, as acknowledged by Rowley (2012), who found that “Many professional educators rely heavily upon their pre-service teacher training to provide the resources for a lifetime of experiences in teaching” (p. 79). Moreover, this time is full of inbuilt reflection opportunities and yet most ITE courses have little or no content relating to giftedness or gifted education (Berman, Schultz & Weber, 2012; Fraser-Seeto, et al., 2013; Troxclair, 2013; Vreys et al., 2018). This situation is further exacerbated in rural and regional areas, where the topic of ‘giftedness’ has a range of nuanced connotations that result in a different set of learning and teaching challenges (Plunkett, 2018). How then do we ensure that as teacher educators, we adequately prepare our PSTs for the specific task of teaching gifted students? Knowledge of giftedness, positive attitudes and informed confidence are all important considerations in determining the level of preparedness. This presentation examines data from a small study conducted with PSTs in a regional university in Australia. Part of the study examined PST perceptions in relation to teaching students with diverse learning needs. PSTs were asked to reflect on how confident they felt about teaching students who were either gifted or with other learning needs and about how well prepared they felt as a result of completing their teacher education program. Altogether forty-eight PSTs who were in their final year of their Bachelor of Primary Education degrees, completed the surveys. A small proportion had completed an elective unit on gifted education, while others had completed units on disability, diversity and inclusive education. Findings suggest that the majority of PSTs felt their degree had prepared them quite effectively to teach students with learning difficulties but not gifted students. As anticipated, PSTs who had completed the gifted education elective were more confident that they could identify and cater for diversity including giftedness in their classrooms. Many commented that they felt the topic of giftedness had not been effectively covered in the four years of their education degree, which is concerning in light of the fact that next year these graduate teachers will be teaching in classrooms that may well include gifted students, and yet most feel unprepared and lacking in confidence for the challenges associated with giftedness.