Research Article
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How professional learning impacts gifted educators’ perceptions and practice

Year 2025, Volume: 12 Issue: 1, 23 - 53, 30.06.2025
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15395939

Abstract

Effective equity-driven professional learning (PL) is one strategy to work against the disproportionality of marginalized populations in gifted and talented programs. This professional learning should be steeped in equity and culturally responsive practices, ongoing, job-embedded, collaborative, sustained, and operationalized within the context of the educators’ lived and work experiences. In a critical convergent mixed-methods research design, we, as university researchers, partnered with a gifted coordinator in a large Texas school district, providing equity-focused professional learning to gifted resources teachers (GRTs), and asking GRTs to pass this training on to other educators, on characteristics of students identifying as Latiné, bilingual, and gifted to determine the impact of the PL on GRTs’ sense of cultural awareness and knowledge of gifted characteristics for this population of learners. We collected pre- and post-PL quantitative data on two instruments to measure GRTs’ perceptions, as well as qualitative data on PL exit surveys, GRTs’ logs of training other educators, an interview of the gifted coordinator, and researchers’ notes. Quantitative findings included short-term positive changes on GRTs’ cultural self-awareness, but without consistent long-term changes on the same measure. Additionally, GRTs showed growth in identifying characteristics of gifted Latiné bilingual students. Qualitative data resulted in four themes: understandings, outcomes, barriers, and needs. Mixed methods analysis contributed to the discussion of white exceptionalism and adult learning theory. Results provide continued empirical support for the Four Zone Equity-Driven Professional Learning Model (4ZEPL).

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There are 65 citations in total.

Details

Primary Language English
Subjects Special Talented Education
Journal Section Teacher of Gifted Students
Authors

Katie Lewis 0000-0003-1398-5673

Angela Novak 0000-0002-8257-4731

Early Pub Date May 13, 2025
Publication Date June 30, 2025
Submission Date December 7, 2024
Acceptance Date May 3, 2025
Published in Issue Year 2025 Volume: 12 Issue: 1

Cite

APA Lewis, K., & Novak, A. (2025). How professional learning impacts gifted educators’ perceptions and practice. Journal of Gifted Education and Creativity, 12(1), 23-53. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15395939

JGEDC is one of approximately ten academic journals in the world that publish in the field of gifted education, and its editorial board includes some of the most prominent scholars in this field.