TALENT DEVELOPMENT PHILOSOPHY/MODEL*

 

The Talent Development Model begins with the assertion that all children can learn in demanding, high-expectations academic settings. This goal is reachable if schools are committed to providing the appropriate levels of support, assistance, structure, and conditions for learning.

First, however, the traditional function of schooling must be redirected from that of classifying, sorting, and weeding out students, to maximizing every child's potential for academic development. Rather than viewing academic success as an elusive, exclusive goal, the Talent Development Model posits widespread success in a demanding curriculum as the standard by which all schools and classrooms are judged.

Moreover, the school is reconceptualized as a service-providing institution, and the teachers as essential service providers, whose mutual task is to prepare our nation's children for productive participation in their communities and society at large.

For schools to provide such an essential service, the Talent Development Model offers some important guidelines. Most fundamentally, the model calls for putting into place a framework whereby many different means for ensuring success are simultaneously provided.

This entails:

    1. Fortifying children where they are vulnerable, both academically and personally
    2. Ensuring that peers, parents, and the surrounding community are supportive of students' academic success
    3. Promoting through professional development the ideal that teachers function as advocates for their students and are proficient in practices and procedures consistent with the model
    4. Creating learning conditions that are engaging, inviting, challenging, and constructively responsive to students' experiences outside of school
    5. Structuring schools to be as organizationally prepared as possible to promote widespread academic success.

In applying the Talent Development Model, certain crucial themes must also be adhered to, such as:

    1. Building on a student's personal, adaptive, and cultural integrity
    2. Helping students successfully negotiate key transitional hurdles
    3. Providing a constructivist, active learning approach to schooling
    4. Promoting assessment that is performance based and growth oriented
    5. Preparing students for the economic and social realities of the 21st century
    6. Fostering a school climate that is personal and caring
    7. Promoting an approach to learning and skill development that connects, across subjects and in practical and beneficial ways, to ones surrounding community and wider society.

Implementation of the model, also demands that success be judged in terms of a wider range of outcomes than that usually encompassed by standardized cognitive achievement test scores.

 

*From the CRESPAR-Howard University website. For more information visit the site at www.crespar.law.howard.edu