4.3.5 Meeting the Affective Needs of Gifted Students While Addressing Required Curriculum

The use of books has long been lauded as an intervention by itself in addressing the affective concerns of gifted learners but is magnified in effectiveness when paired with specific issues of the gifted population (Halsted, 2009). Bibliotherapy can be useful in helping these students explore issues of decision making (Friedman & Cataldo, 2002), identity development (Frank & McBee, 2003), emotional intelligence (Sullivan & Strang, 2002–2003), empathy (Ingram, 2003), social problems (Hébert & Kent, 1999), and multiculturalism (Ford, Tyson, Howard, & Harris, 2000), among others. This text to self approach allows teachers to meet required curriculum standards in reading and provides opportunities for students to discuss key issues in a safe environment that does not require educators to possess counseling skills or for students to disclose personal information that may not be appropriate for sharing in a classroom. By promoting accelerated and advanced level texts through a framework for supporting common social-emotional and affective needs that develop talent gifted students become aware of their own affective needs and can set goals or gain/assess problem solving strategies based on textual conflicts and character personalities.

In this session, a framework and examples of curriculum will be provided so that participants can see how to connect the framework to their own content and requirements. The framework presented involves a compilation of instructional scaffolding and reading experiences necessary to aid students on their journey toward becoming self aware and also becoming strong readers. This learning approach ensures that students can traverse easily from basic comprehension skills to higher level critical and creative reading skills, while using the same reading stimulus to navigate this transition. The questions and tasks for each reading are open-ended, as this type of approach to responding to literature improves performance on comprehension tests (Wasik & Hindman, 2013). Progressing through the hierarchy of skills also requires students to re-read the text, thereby improving meta-comprehension accuracy (Hedin & Conderman, 2010), thus meeting a variety of curriculum standards and promoting text-to self, self awareness, goal setting, and problem solving opportunities.

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