Developing More Exceptional Teachers

For more than 15 years, Commonwealth Professor Carolyn Callahan has served as director of the University’s National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented—and she has been impressed by how different gifted students are from one another. Her research reveals, however, that advanced placement and international baccalaureate programs, designed to meet the needs of a school’s brightest students, are based on a monolithic stereotype. “Highly creative students and students from nontraditional backgrounds do less well in these programs than others,” she notes.

One of the goals of her current research is to develop a model for schools to expand the range of advanced placement and international baccalaureate programs to meet the needs of a wider spectrum of children. With a three-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education, she is leading a team of investigators who have visited 22 high schools in nine states, interviewing 8 counselors, 20 administrators, 150 teachers, and 250 students involved in these courses. This process has generated thousands of pages of interview transcripts, structured classroom observation notes, and field notes.

Callahan has established a rigorous and painstaking procedure to evaluate this material. One advantage of this process is that it enables her team to identify trends emerging in the data and sharpen and refine the questions they ask in the next round of interviews. “We are identifying a set of hypotheses, supported by our research, that can be tested quantitatively,” she says. Among these hypotheses is that many teachers in advanced placement and international baccalaureate classrooms may not have extensive knowledge of the content area, nor are they adequately prepared to reach a wide range of gifted students. The result is that they tend to teach to the exam. Because the standards on these exams are high, students report that the sheer quantity of material they must cover is the major challenge they face when taking these courses. Coverage, not understanding, is the norm. On the other hand, Callahan stresses that she and her fellow researchers encountered a number of exceptional teachers, who, as she puts it, “make content real, exciting, and understandable.”

She and her colleagues are making a number of recommendations for improving advanced placement and international baccalaureate programs based on the practices of these exceptional educators. “All children benefit from an education that challenges them,” she says. “That’s as true for the talented and gifted as for any other group of students.”