How the Gifted Brain Learns
- David A. Sousa - International Educational Consultant
What does it mean to be gifted and talented? The second edition of David Sousa's best-selling How the Gifted Brain Learns helps bring clarity to this topic, leveraging the latest neuroscientific findings to separate fact from fiction and provide teachers with practical strategies for engaging artistically and intellectually advanced learners.
This reader-friendly guide gives elementary and secondary teachers the help they need to not only recognize and challenge their gifted learners, but also to support gifted students who underachieve. Acknowledging that students are often gifted in specific subject areas, the text includes chapters dedicated to talents in language, math, and the arts. Special "From the Desk of a Teacher" sections offer classroom-tested examples of the instructional applications suggested by research. In addition to featuring new research and expanded curriculum ideas, this second edition helps answer questions about:
- How the brains of gifted students are different
- How to gauge if gifted students are being adequately challenged
- How to identify students who are both gifted and learning disabled
- How improving programmes for the gifted and talented benefits other students
- How to better identify gifted minority students, who are often underrepresented in gifted programmes
This resource is a one-stop shop of brain-compatible strategies for teaching the full range of gifted students!
"A great book to use to assist preservice teachers, inservice teachers, and administrators with ways to meet the needs of all types of gifted learners."
"Each chapter offers the practitioner page after page of suggestions on how to apply the research discussed to educational practice. The applications sections are extremely intriguing and offer more than the traditional 'discovery learning' approach to teaching these remarkable children."
"I loved this book. It expands the reader’s definition of what it means to be gifted. Many schools focus only on academic giftedness, but this book has very practical ways to help students gifted in the arts utilize their talents. Sousa provides enough information to help someone who has never developed a gifted program before get started, and yet challenges the reader’s preconceived notions enough to help a school with a rich gifted program have discussions that will improve the existing program."
“Pulls many areas of gifted research, knowledge, and applications together in a clear and concise manner. This is a one-stop book for teachers who have high-ability/gifted students in a classroom and need to understand how these students’ brains work and how to plan effective instruction.”
"Brain research is changing the way teachers respond to student needs, and this book deals with the topic well. The biological descriptions of brain anatomy were simplified so that non-science educators could comprehend the research with the author’s ideas on implications. While the book is intended to focus on identifying and educating gifted and talented students, it also provides insights for instruction of all students."