Expanding the umbrella: an interview with Joseph Renzulli.

Joe Renzulli is the director of the National Research Center for Gifted and Talented and a professor at the University of Connecticut Neag School of Education. Dr. Renzulli is well known for his Three-Ring Conception of giftedness which has fostered a more inclusive view of gifted children. His identification and curricular models have received wide acceptance, transforming schools across the country for the benefit of all students, including the gifted.

Q: What lead you to the field of gifted education?

A: When I began teaching I immediately became aware of the inadequacy of my preparation in dealing with smart kids! This caused me to create my own "Crash Course" in Gifted and Talented Education, since very little was being offered in nearby universities at the time.

Q: What was your earliest experience in the field?

A: My earliest experience in the field was a pullout enrichment program for highly able middle school students in science--the initiative for this resulting from post-Sputnik hysteria on the parts of educational leaders! Although I was initially frustrated because there weren't books with titles such as Science for the Gifted on the cover, it lead me to a brand of teaching that eventually became The Enrichment Triad Model (Renzulli, 1997). In fact, it was the kind of teaching that I fantasized about as a college student but never could pursue when you are required to follow a very prescribed curriculum guide. And to this day I firmly believe that the more highly prescribed curriculum we prepare for gifted students, the more we will be recreating a pedagogy that our field should be eager from which to escape.

Q: Who was your major professor? What are a few of the important lessons you learned from him?

A: Dr. Virgil S. Ward was my major professor at the University of Virginia and one of the main things I learned from him was the importance of good theory and good research to guide practice. I later added my own version of what to me is a circle, and that is that practice should also give direction to theory development and to research, l also learned from Dr. Ward the need to defend practically anything that you said or wrote! He was a rigorous mentor and he knew how to push you even beyond levels of which you thought you were capable.

Q: What persons had the greatest affect on your thinking?

A: Several persons have had an influence on my thinking, beginning with my mother who instilled in me the belief that you are your own best resource when it comes to figuring out how to solve a problem. You might seek advice and guidance from others, but in the final analysis it is you yourself who must "get it together" to get done what you need to get done.

Three persons in the gifted field have strongly influenced my thinking: Paul Torrance, Harry Passow, and Paul Brandwein. Each of these individuals brought new, exciting, and yet ultimately practical theories of human potential and pedagogy--how to develop that potential--to my attention and they also served as superb role models when it comes to good professionalism. They cared more about making a change in their respective areas of focus than they did about seducing audiences, gaining tame, or profiting financially from their work. I hope that history will ultimately judge me as being at least somewhat like these three persons.

I also have been influenced in my thinking by my wife and colleague, Sally Reis. Sally continues to maintain extensive contact with schools, classrooms, and kids; and the first thing that I do when I come up with a new idea that I have convinced myself will save the world of education is to run it by Sally. Her research expertise, coupled with the sights, sounds, and smells of real schools and classrooms, adds an element of reality and practicality to what I might push forward with in a far too idealized fashion.

Q: What topics in the field have held your interest over the years? How has your thinking on them evolved?

A: The topics that have held my interest can be summarized in two simple questions: What makes giftedness? And, how can we promote the development of gifts and talents in as many young people as possible? In recent years I have also elaborated on these questions in two ways which I describe below.

Q: What are you currently working on?

A: I am currently working on a series of research projects entitled Operation Houndstooth. The name comes from the background into which I embedded the Three Ring Conception of Giftedness in the 1970s. This background represents the interaction between and among various components of personality and environment. These components include such traits as optimism, courage, romance with a topic or discipline, sensitivity to human concerns, physical and mental energy, and vision and a sense of destiny. My interest in traits grows out of a concern for linking conceptions of giftedness with the important leadership roles that potentially gifted young people will play in all walks of life and a need to use their gifts in ways that will make a better world. So I have really added two subquestions to the ones mentioned earlier. Regarding the "what makes giftedness" question as the subquestion, what causes some people to use their gifts and talents in socially constructive ways? And to the second question, do we develop gifts and talents," I have added, how can we promote more socially constructive giftedness? This research focuses on admittedly less precise variables than most researchers are comfortable in dealing with, but I believe that they are at the heart of what makes some of the most important people in the world tick! Where do Mother Theresa's and Nelson Mandela's and Mahatma Ghandi's and Rachel Carson's come from? No one would argue that these people have not provided society with remarkable gifts--the way in which I prefer to use the term--and I believe that if the field of gifted education is going to leave an important impact on society at large, we need to draw some of these characteristics under our umbrella--an umbrella that prior to this point has focused mainly on cognitive characteristics.

I also am working on a general theory that tries to combine theories of knowledge, learning, and the use of technology with theories of instruction. I believe that all learning theory will change in the decades ahead because of the advent of technology, so this new work is also attempting to blend together in a very practical and understandable way the foundations that can serve as compass points for classroom practice.

Q: Have you taken any wrong turns in your research? Did they inform your beliefs or practice in anyway ?

A: I don't think I've taken any wrong turns, but my ideas have expanded as new research has been completed and new information has come to my attention. That's what growth is all about, and even unsuccessful research has had value in helping me to rethink what needs to be investigated.

Q: What do you see as the most important question researchers in the field should be pursuing? Is there promising research on these topics?

A: Most of the major theorists agree that giftedness is a much more complex set of behaviors than can easily be measured through traditional cognitive ability tests. This is not to say that cognitive abilities are unimportant--I've made that argument many, many times; however we need to look at some of the other kinds of traits such as the Houndstooth factors mentioned above because these are characteristics of people who have made things happen in this world and in many cases things that have made societies better places in which to live. As we expand our conception of giftedness we will find that many people who have been excluded from advanced opportunities because of language; socioeconomic background; cultural, gender, and ethnic differences; stylistic differences; and other differences perhaps yet undiscovered will be given greater opportunities to develop their potentials.

A number of people have begun addressing some of these topics and I think that in the years to come we will see a greater focus on both a broadened conception of giftedness and the always-related issue of how do we develop these types of giftedness through what I have referred to in my writing as the continuum of services concept (Renzulli & Reis, 2002).

Q: Whose research in the field do you think should receive more attention than it has?

A: In spite of all of the excellent research on radical acceleration, there still seems to be limited use of this programming alternative. Greater efforts should be made to bring this information to the attention of practitioners; and I also think it would be a good idea for someone to conduct a research project that examines exactly why more schools are not making use of various acceleration options.

A good deal of research has been conducted on social and emotional development, counseling the gifted, and on more flexible identification procedures that would allow greater access to minority students and students who show their potentials in nontraditional ways. Once again, I think that greater efforts should be made to share information about these topics with policy makers and with practitioners. One of the things that I started at the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented was a publication genre called The Research Based Decision Making Series. My goal was to give practitioners (including parents) and policy makers some specific and practical advice about a wide variety of identification and service options that has a strong basis in research. You can find out more about this series by visiting our website: www.gifted.uconn.edu.

Q: Are there questions in the field that should be approached differently?

A: As respect for qualitative methodology has grown in the scientific community it is time for us to apply this methodology by looking at young people at work in various learning situations that are designed to develop gifts and talents. A combined quantitative and qualitative approach will provide greater insights into the kinds of cause/effect relationships that should be the basis for good research. We also need to examine how and to what extent various programmatic interventions work with students from different backgrounds, ability levels, and differential opportunities to develop their respective strengths. Almost all studies that deal with gifted students have as experimental groups youngsters who gained access to special services based on cognitive ability test scores. Are there other students who might benefit from some of the interventions described in these studies? If we provided a broader range of students with highly challenging and exciting learning options, will we see more students displaying gifted behaviors and higher levels of motivation for challenging and engaging learning experiences? Most of all, however, we need to look inside classrooms to examine things that make a difference in cognitive and personal growth in individual students. This type of more intensive examination will reveal new insights and research questions that may not be easily discovered if we continue to simply look at one group mean score after another.

Q: Are there areas of research that you think are misinterpreted?

A: I will let other authors respond to this question in connection with their own work. As far as my work is concerned, there are still some people on the speaker's circuit who are literally "making a living" by misinterpreting my work, the work of Howard Gardner, and work related to the recently developed Parallel Curriculum Model. Without any research whatsoever to support these criticisms and outright distortions of our work, it is hard to take such persons seriously! For example, I have never said that "you must produce a product to be gifted," and Gardner has never said that "all children are gifted." As I am fond of saying when someone recounts these misinterpretations to me, "If you haven't seen it in print don't assume I have said it." As is sometimes the case, when people are incapable themselves of original work and high quality research, their main recourse for gaining access to the speaker's platform is criticism and misinterpretation of others. The sad part about such misinterpretations is that it feeds on the insecurities of parents desperately seeking solutions for meeting their own children's needs, it undermines the hard work of teachers struggling to maintain programs for the gifted, and it provides ammunition to antigifted policy makers who are always looking for ways of minimizing or eliminating services to students with special needs. There's too much important work to be done, and positive rather than negative energy is the only way that our field can grow and provide the kinds of leadership necessary to ensure that gifted education is a viable force in the overall education community.

REFERENCES

Renzulli, J. S. (1977). The Enrichment Triad Model: A guide for developing defensible programs for the gifted and talented. Mansfield Center, CT: Creative Learning Press.

Renzulli, J. S., & Reis, S. M. (2002). What is schoolwide enrichment and how do gifted programs relate to total school improvement? Gifted Child Today, 25(4), 18-25.