Parallel Session Proceedings »
4.4.9 Stakeholders’ Views of Gifted Education in the Netherlands and Flanders and the United States
Internationally, there has been shifts in our understanding of the importance of meeting the needs of our most highly able students. Specifically, there have been five significant paradigm shifts within education: 1. a focus on inclusion of all members of society; 2. a change in how we teach and support learners; 3. changes in stakeholders’ attitudes toward giftedness; curricula that meets 21st Century skills; and 5. the need for evidence-based teaching practices informed by research. These shifts call on the knowledge and skills of specialists in gifted education. This has consequences for the way we train these specialists. They need to be able to see, understand and response the educational needs of gifted students from these current educational concepts.
In this study, we looked at stakeholder attitudes (i.e., teachers, administrators, parents, psychologists, and others) toward gifted education. Specifically, we asked these stakeholders to identify those factors that they find to be most beneficial to gifted education in five areas: theory on giftedness, seeing educational needs, understanding educational needs, responding to educational needs and assessment of the response to applied interventions. For each of these five factors we distinguished identical areas that should be covered by the specialist’s knowledge and skills: academic achievement, cognitive styles, interpersonal relationships, intrapersonal insight, self-actualization, and those more generic counseling skills required for specialists in gifted education. During this session, we will discuss the outcomes of our research and the implications that these outcomes have on teacher preparation programs to better prepare pre-service teachers, as well as professional development programs for in-service teacher, to meet the needs of the gifted students that they work with on a daily basis.