2.6.5 Teaching for Talent Development: How to Motivate, Engage, and Educate Innovators

Current research that shows even our best schools may not be preparing students for the challenges of the 21st century global economy (Hargreaves & Shirley, 2012; Ripley, 2013; Wagner, 2008, 2012; Zhao, 2012). The Global Education Reform Movement with its emphases on standardization, accountability, and testing has left many of our students disengaged, unmotivated and underachieving (Robinson & Aronica, 2015; Sahlberg, 2015). The most serious crises occur among poor and minority students with potential for high achievement but little opportunity to develop it (Plucker, Hardesty & Borroughs, 2013; Tough, 2012, 2016). Schools need a comprehensive approach for motivating, engaging, and educating innovators across diverse student populations. Talent-Targeted Teaching and Learning is a brain-based model for talent development which fosters students’ content expertise, metacognition, and creative problem solving. Students achieve the required curriculum content standards while they work toward long-range aims for talent development. Educators learn how to create and assess talent development goals that target the development of specific aptitudes such as creativity, insight, persistence or logical reasoning which undergird student engagement, motivation, and achievement.

Educators use the Design for Innovation Framework, 15 evidence-based instructional which develop the skills and processes of future innovators. Curriculum practices such as “structure learning around open-ended problems,” “challenge critical and creative thinking” and “design authentic performances for real audiences” are used to develop authentic studies in STEM and Humanities content but focused on long range goals for talent development. Educators learn how to design authentic performance tasks to assess students’ talent development and mastery of the content standards. Teachers assess students’ growth using a Talent Development Continuum rubrics and students use corresponding rubrics to self-assess, reflect, and record their progress in their Talent Development portfolios. The Talent Development rubrics define the learning progressions for each talent aptitude, thus acting as formative assessments for future instruction. The Talent-Targeted Teaching and Learning Model (TTTLM) explicitly supports student motivation, engagement, and talent development. Student motivation is supported by the process of setting personal talent development goals and receiving feedback using the talent development continuum rubrics. Student engagement is supported through the curriculum’s Design for Innovation practices which are used to the challenging, product-based curriculum studies. Overall, the TTTLM supports students’ individual talent development through the self-identification and assessment of their progress in the targeted talent aptitudes.

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