This article introduces the construct of personal talent curation. "Personal talent curation" is one's assessment of one's talents--of one's strengths and weaknesses--but also the building of an adaptive match in life between those talents and both one's career pursuits and one's personal lifestyle. Sometimes, this match means pursuing a…

The focus of the field of giftedness is on the wrong thing. Instead of focusing on identifying who is gifted, the field should identify how people will deploy their gifts and educate students to deploy their gifts in ways that will make the world a better place. In this article, I present at least a partial taxonomy of how gifts can be deployed…

The field of giftedness--including educators, theorists, and researchers--needs to show more cognizance of a phenomenon that is rearing its ugly head in more and more visible ways, namely, dark giftedness. Dark giftedness is giftedness used for bad and even toxic ends. Being gifted provides little, if any protection against the dark deployment of…

This article discusses kinds of transformational giftedness, or giftedness that makes a positive, meaningful, and possibly enduring difference to the world. We extend previous work by suggesting that there are two kinds of transformation that matter: self-transformation and other-transformation. Combining these two kinds of transformation yields a…

This article reviews the implications of many of the major schools in the history of psychology for understanding giftedness and its inner workings: operationist, psychometric, psychoanalytic, associationist, behaviorist, Gestalt, cognitive, humanistic/positive psychology, functionalist/pragmatic/constructivist, cultural, and biological. Each…

In this article, I discuss two kinds of giftedness, transactional and transformational. "Transformational giftedness" is giftedness that is transformative. Transformationally gifted individuals seek positively to change the world at some level--in their own way, to make the world a better place. "Transactional giftedness" is…

What is, or should be, the role of ethics in giftedness? In this article, I consider why ethical behavior is much harder to come by than one would expect. Ethical behavior requires completion of a series of eight steps to action, the failure of any one of which may result in a person, even one who is ethically well trained, to act in a manner that…

This article analyzes an essay by Joseph Renzulli reviewing his work on gifted models by using the career of Renzulli himself as a case study of the components of creative, productive giftedness. It finds that creatively gifted individuals must face challenges that are formalized in the Sternberg and Lubart investment theory of creativity.…

This article presents WICS as a model of giftedness. WICS stands for Wisdom, Intelligence, Creativity, Synthesized. The article considers the relation between giftedness and expertise, and argues that giftedness is, ultimately, expertise in development. One cannot clearly distinguish between giftedness and expertise, because all measures of…

A subtheory of intellectual giftedness is presented that centers on the role of insight. Component processes of insight (selective encoding, combination, and comparison) are reviewed, and approaches to its evaluation are noted. Results of an intervention study are cited to suggest the feasibility of training insight. (CL)

Creatively gifted individuals propose ideas that initially seem odd, but they "invest" in these ideas, bring them to fruition, and convince other people of their worth. Creatively gifted individuals display a combination of six resources that function interactively: intelligence, knowledge, styles of thinking, personality, motivation, and…

This article argues that decisions regarding identification, instruction, and programming for gifted students need to take into account not only their abilities but their styles of thinking. The article discusses the theory of mental self-government; data gathered from testing the theory; and relevance of thinking styles to decisions regarding…