Giving Our Gifted Students a Voice

Gifted students continue to struggle in class because they are restricted to learning the standardcurriculum (Clark, 2002). Gifted learners cannot be confined to a proficient level of education andtherefore the need to advocate on their behalf continues. Not only can the need be recognized by thosein the classroom, but also by those outside of the classroom with an interest in gifted and talentededucation.(Douglas, 2004) (Kaplan, Summer 2004) Each year the students that are enrolled in giftedand talented programs are asked to do an advocacy for gifted and talented education. They take ondifferent approaches with the majority of them building on a personal teaching experience (Grant,2002). While writing from three different approaches, three teacher-students captured the totality of theneeds of gifted students as you will see in the following examples.