Challenging Gifted and Talented Students

To rid this topic of its elitist overtones, I like to think that all of us are especially good at something and that there're many different types of talent / intelligence that us thinking, feeling, joining, and doing creatures display. This page is narrowly focused on those gifted in possessing a greater (thinking?) capacity to learn using cognitive processes (taking existing knowledge and discovering new knowledge), and mastering concepts / making related connections faster than most people. Surprisingly then, one commonly hears that 20% of high school drop-outs are gifted and talented kids! Why?

One answer is that those kids are bored--they don't find their school challenging them. Adding to that is an observation: bored students--those not busy actively engaged in learning--can cause trouble. I suspect that the departure of many in that 20% drop-out population cited above was welcomed: the school got rid of trouble-makers! So, below we present challenges that teachers or parents / grandparents to challenge high school age gifted and talented students. With the exception of the last one, these can typically be done by students sitting a computer surfing the internet.

Using Project Worldview to Challenge Students:

#1 Throw Some of Life's Big Questions at them.

Click here for Fifty such Questions. This can be a good introduction to challenge #3
--that is they can be used for worldview development, characterization, and analysis purposes.
Note: the webpage linked to above is based on our older worldview theme structure (version 2.0 and 3.0).
The next challenge is based on the newer (version 5.0) structure.

#2 Throw Some Difficult Choices (re: what to believe or value) at them.

Click here for fifty-two such choices. Like challenge #1, this can be a good introduction to challenge #3
--that is they can be used for worldview development, characterization, and analysis purposes.

#3 Ask a student to figure out what he or she believes in relationship to two worldview analysis programs, and report on the quantitative results of such analysis and apparent contradictions uncovered.

If careful attention is given to input, the one person program can provide a fairly good estimate of how the student's worldview correlates with twelve different generic worldviews (examples: HUMANIST PROGRESSIVE, USA CONSERVATIVE , PRO ENVIRONMENT, PRO BUSINESS, ETC.) Click here for the program.

A second program can be used to specifically estimate the extent to which the student's worldview correlates with that of another person's. Click here for the program. While a teacher, parent, or another student can provide that second worldview for such a comparison, another possibility is for the second person to be a "generic global citizen" as defined in Figures #10 and #11 on pages 162-163 of the book
Choices We Make in the Global Village.

#4 The Choices We Make card deck and booklet lends itself
to all sorts of educational and fun activity, including the hands-on activity of making the playing cards and tuck box to house them in.

click here for more info about the playing cards (this is version 5.0 worldview theme version based)

making your own playing cards

#5 Have students pick a particular person of historic interest and, after much reading / research, characterize the person's worldview using Project Worldview theme structures.

Direct students to the ten or so examples (for Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, Queen Elizabeth I, etc.)
found here and instruct them to use either this (older) program or this (newer) one.

#6 For students concerned about the environment,
ask them to determine their carbon footprint.

Discussion accompanying Figure #28 pages 299-300 and Figure #40 / Appendix C pages 408-411 of the book Choices We Make in the Global Village can serve as a guide.

#7 For students interested earth and space science,
ask them to make some observations and measurements
and use them to determine the size of the Earth.

Restrict access to the internet and let them brainstorm for awhile. Many will need help--
and they'll find various solutions to this problem outlined online. Here is one:
Making Observations (New Mexico Style) to Estimate the Size of the Earth, pdf file

#8 If student circumstances, scheduling and logistics permit,
they may be interested in taking one of our Independent Study Courses

#9 For students who love Wikipedia, check out these offerings:

the wikiWorldview Themes structure for characterizing worldviews w/ links to roughly 1000 Wikipedia articles

104 worldview themes paired to make 52 choices
summarized using roughly 1000 Wikipedia articles

#10 More to Explore...we have provided links below to additional online resources to aid your self-directed learning:

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"As you shop in "The Reality Marketplace" avoid spending your "reality cash" too early, before you have seen everything. "
from Coming of Age in the Global Village, by Stephen P. Cook, with Donella H. Meadows.