Teens with Talent: Developing the Potential of the Bright, Brighter and Brightest.

Teens with Talent: Developing the Potential of the Bright, Brighter and Brightest Ellie Schatz and Nancy Schuster 1996 Boulder, CO: Open Space Communications, Inc. 88 pp. $15.45 ISBN 0-9638228-8-8

This book, written for parents and educators of highly able learners, explains thoroughly the need for off-level assessment information, in this case from the Talent Search process, and how it can be used to plan instruction for this population. The book's title alludes to the overarching purpose of off-level assessment -- to match youngsters with differentiated programming options that best meet their academic needs.

The topic of greatest interest to most educators and parents is meeting students' identified academic needs. The majority of the book discusses options available to, and appropriate for, students based on the results of their (Talent Search) off-level assessment. Chapter 3 should be extremely useful to educators as they plan curricular options, and to parents as they advocate for appropriate programming within the school year and day. The authors thoroughly discuss summer and out-of-school accelerated academic programs in chapters 4 and 5.

Chapter 6, a no-nonsense discussion of myths and realities in gifted education, emphasizes parent advocacy as the key to provision of appropriate academic programming. Every parent of a gifted child should read these eleven pages early in their child's educational career and use the authors' vision of gifted education -- appropriately challenging curricula at an appropriately challenging pace -- to guide decision-making about programming and placement for their youngster.

For educators, chapter 6 is a marvelous discussion starter for a professional development session or study topic for a school improvement team meeting. The issues presented should give teachers and administrators new insight into the needs of their gifted students, helping to focus their efforts to meet those needs.

The authors have produced a readable, concise, beginning guide to reasonable expectations for gifted programming for parents and educators. Readers, particularly those new to gifted education, could benefit from an annotated bibliography as much as from the resource information provided by the authors in Appendix A. Parent advocates, upon whom so much responsibility is placed, as well as educators, need to develop depth and breadth in their knowledge base beyond the valuable introduction to such knowledge Schatz and Schuster provide in Teens With Talent.

Reviewed by Sue Vogel, a consultant in gifted education and program evaluation, who edits a newsletter for the Kalamazoo Association for Talented and Gifted (KATAG), is active in the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC), and is cofounder with Carol R. McCarthy of Parent Leadership Training.