Wow! I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed going through all of my notes from the 2025 NAGC Annual Convention to create the 12 session reviews I’ve been posting for the past 2 weeks or so. Writing them brought everything I learned at the convention into clear focus, and this process helped me decide on the takeaways that I must share with my staff. Some of the big ones are:
- My school division is on the right track with using MTSS to serve talent development and gifted education (see MTSS, IEPs, and AI and Leveraging MTSS).
- Teacher rating scales must be used with care and taken with a grain of salt.
- We can create incredible AI bots designed to lead our gifted students to deeper levels of critical thinking and problem solving.
- The relationships we build with our students matter more than ever and are foundational in bringing out the best in our students.
- A powerful gifted education program can be built through capitalizing on talent development pathways.
- Productive struggle is necessary for students’ brains to grow.
- Gifted identification methods need to be updated to find students who have been historically underrepresented in gifted programs.
- Actively providing talent development activities in PreK-2 can be a powerful way to help identify gifted students from underrepresented populations.
This was my third ever NAGC Annual Convention (see the few reviews I did from the 2023 Annual Convention in Orlando: My First Annual Convention, The Innovator’s Mindset, Parental Influence on Gifted Males, Research to Guide Practice, and my most read post from Dr. Donna Ford’s session Underrepresentation and Inequity). I never finished posting my reviews from 2023, 2024, OR from the 2024 NAGC Teacher’s Summit. I might go back and work on those to refresh my memory on all of that learning!
My favorite moment from #NAGC25 was seeing my mentor and favorite professor ever- Dr. Joyce VanTassel-Baska! She taught me gifted classes at William & Mary back when I did my Master’s degree in Elementary Education with my endorsement in Gifted Education, mentored me for 14 years through several of my gifted teaching jobs, then taught me again for my Doctorate in Gifted Education Administration before she retired (I’ll have to share the story one day of how she convinced me to finally apply for my doctorate). Anyway, I was in a session right next door to hers, and as soon as the session ended, I scooted right over into the room in which she was presenting and waited on the side for the throng of people to drift away from her. She happened to look to the side, saw me, and her face lit up and she said, “Annie!” It was wonderful to get to see her and to catch up just a bit. Hopefully, you can see the joy on my face in the picture above. Well, I hope that this Gifted Education Conference review series was meaningful for you and that you, too, had some takeaways from the information I shared. Was it? Is there something you learned from my review that you’d like to discuss? If so, please add your thoughts in the comments below. I can’t wait to read them! ~Ann
Teaching for Talent 