All students require special provision in the English classroom. This includes those who are gifted, who may need enrichment, acceleration and differentiation from the main classroom programme. Any of the students in your class could be gifted – the ability to be a high achieving, creative, and complex thinker does not have cultural or economic boundaries.
Gifted students in the English Classroom
Three Key Characteristics of Gifted Students:
Gifted and talented students demonstrate a range of generic thinking behaviours: reasoning, accuracy, questioning skills, flexibility and breadth and depth, unity of thought, fairness, clarity, precision, relevance and significance.
The English Curriculum can draw on the range of domains of giftedness:
Glenda Pearce, Recognising the Gifted English Student
There are a range of resources and readings to help us begin to understand and use appropriate pedagogies that will enhance learning for gifted and talented learners when engaging with the English Learning area in The New Zealand Curriculum.
Gifted and Talented: Meeting their needs in NZ - self-review
Ongoing self-review (internal evaluation) of a school’s identification of, and provisions for, gifted and talented learners is essential to ensure accountability and improvement. Self-review ensures that teaching and learning is achieving improved outcomes for all learners in these settings.
Recognising the Gifted English Student (Word 45KB)
This article by Glenda Pearce presents an overview of the range of possible characteristics of gifted English students at secondary level (reprinted with the permission of English in Aotearoa).
Empowering gifted writers
Rowan Taigel from Cambridge High School is an English teacher and one of CORE Education's 2014 eFellows. In this EDtalk Rowan describes her work with gifted writers and how she worked to empower them and help them release their voice using blended E-Learning techniques.
Teaching shakespeare for gifted students: 3 ideas
Shakespeare and gifted students fit together like a glove. Providing them with challenging and creative means to learn will enhance learning, as well as allow gifted students to develop new skills.
GiftedED - Professional learning & support
Explore opportunities for connecting with professionals in gifted and talented education.
Twice/multi exceptional (or 2E students) are sometimes also referred to as double labelled, or having dual exceptionality. These are gifted students whose performance is impaired, or high potential is masked, by a specific learning disability, physical impairment, disorder or condition. They may experience extreme difficulty in developing their giftedness into talent.
Gifted students with disabilities are at-risk as their educational and social/emotional needs often go undetected. Educators often incorrectly believe twice-exceptional students are not putting in adequate effort within the classroom. They are often described as ‘lazy’ and ‘unmotivated’. Hidden disabilities may prevent students with advanced cognitive abilities from achieving high academic results. 2E students perform inconsistently across the curriculum. The frustrations related to unidentified strengths and disabilities can result in behavioural and social/emotional issues.
The Twice-multi exceptional learners section on gifted.tki.org will help you to understand the particular strengths and needs of twice/multi exceptional learners.
Updated on: 07 Dec 2020
