Let’s take a little trip down memory lane, early winter of 1986. It was time to register for my classes for senior year. I had looked through the list of class offerings and chose a “Mentorship in Law” class for one of my electives.  This class would be perfect for me since I thought I wanted to be a lawyer (spoiler alert- I didn’t become a lawyer).  Within seconds of handing my Guidance Counselor my course request list, she informed me that only gifted students were allowed to take the mentorship class.  I, as a matter of fact, was not a gifted student. So, I told her I wanted to take that class, and then referred myself for gifted testing. She gave me a handful of papers and sent me on my way. I only remember three things from my gifted testing experience from back in 11^th grade:

1. my parents’ response(s) on the questionnaire about their observations of me at home (we’ll tuck this story away for another time);
2. the timed IQ test I had to take; and
3. the results of the testing.

The results of the test finally came, and you can imagine my disappointment when I read that I received a 128 on the test, but the cut-off to get identified gifted was 130. Needless to say, I did not get to take the “Mentorship in Law” class my senior year due to this dinosaur of a practice in the field of gifted education. It would be many years before I got justice for this disappointment of testing, but I did eventually redeem that score (that’s a story for another time).

Have you ever had a situation where high-stakes testing impacted your life in some way? I’d love to hear about it! ~Ann

Maybe you’re new to teaching gifted students. Maybe you’ve been teaching gifted students for a long time but are still unclear about how they are identified as gifted. Well, today’s post is for you! I’m kicking off a blog series about gifted identification to provide background knowledge to teachers of the gifted. I hope you will have better insights into what it means to be gifted by the end of it.

Is She Born with It? Nature versus Nurture in Giftedness

We’ve heard it before: “Jose´ is an amazing reader. He has natural ability,” or, “Fiona is so good at science! She was just born with a science brain.” Conversely, we’ve all heard someone say something like this: “I’m just not a math person,” (true fact- I used to say that ALL THE TIME!). All of these statements stir-up an age-old question in the field of gifted education- is giftedness caused by nature or nurture? A long, long time ago, scholars believed that intelligence was innate- you were born with it.  But, around the 1960’s, researchers started to notice that nurture strongly impacted a student’s intelligence, too. So, which is it- nature, or nurture? I happen to firmly believe that BOTH nature and nurture play important roles in giftedness.  This is really important for teachers to realize. Over the next several months, I’ll share everything I know about how these two factors interact to impact our intelligence, and how understanding this interaction shaped my teaching. And I’ll start with a story from my 11^th grade year that revolves around the number 128.  Until then, stretch your teaching, stretch your students. And, please leave a comment with your thoughts and questions!

~Ann