Creating Spaces of Imaginative Engagement for Gifted High School Honors and Advanced Placement English Students

Gifted students may have safety needs beyond the universal needs for security that all students have in order to learn. I investigated the needs of gifted students first hand through interviews with nine gifted students with diverse backgrounds. Interview questions and findings were organized around five major themes: characterization of self, characterization of classmates, characterization of teachers, characterization of classroom, and characterization of strategies and activities. Conclusions show that gifted students share commonalities in personality, needs, and characteristics as well as commonalities among the challenges they face, conditions in which they learn, and the environment in which they feel safe to learn. Features in classroom, teachers, and activities create conditions for excitement about learning and student engagement in learning. The most salient findings were the importance gifted students place on a learning community that includes learning through interaction and conversation as well as through classroom discussions, the need that gifted students place on being in gifted classes with their peers throughout the day, and the focus gifted students put on trusting a teacher to teach what is needed as the gifted students further pursue their educations