The Schoolwide Enrichment Model: A How-To Guide for Educational Excellence, 2nd ed.

The Schoolwide Enrichment Model: A How-To Guide for Educational Excellence (2nd ed.) Joseph Renzulli and Sally Reis Mansfield Center, CT: Creative Learning Press 1997 424 pp. $42.95 ISBN-0-936386-70-3.

Delivering quality substantive services to students of high ability has long been a challenging task as well as frequently a controversial topic. In this book Renzulli and Reis offer a theoretical model to fulfill their vision of talent development schools. They state that such schools can be places where "everyone's role can be enhanced if educators provide all students with opportunities, resources, and encouragement to aspire to the highest levels of talent development" (p. 1). The purpose of the book is to demonstrate and delineate how it is realistic to provide appropriate enrichment to all students who wish to participate.

The book is divided into 10 chapters with appendices containing helpful forms and documents for those who wish to implement the SEM (Schoolwide Enrichment Model) in their schools or districts. Readers who are familiar with the authors' previous books will find much familiar territory is again covered here; however, there are new perspectives offered in terms of current administrative and political trends in education.

Chapter One not only gives an overview of the model and its history, but also offers a rationale for its place in the context of educational reform. Chapter Two addresses the specific components of the model, and how these can be effective tools for school improvement. Chapter Three is highly practical, as it offers a six-step planning process for the SEM, including specific suggestions for consensus and team building. Later chapters deal with identification issues, assessment issues, curriculum compacting, and the three types of enrichment described in the Enrichment Triad Model. Chapter Ten concludes with an extensive examination of enrichment clusters and how to connect both students and teacher facilitators with the groups most appropriate for their interests and abilities.

While the focus of the book is primarily on the SEM, embedded in Chapter Two is critical information regarding a total talent development program. The authors recognize the reality that while the SEM can provide a range of enrichment services, many other services should also supplement the school curriculum. The Continuum of Special Services chart found on page 25 provides a comprehensive capsule look at the broad range of potential ways services can be delivered to gifted students beyond enrichment offered by the SEM. The discussion of cluster grouping, also found in Chapter Two, presents a brief, but important, argument that gifted students, as well as low achieving students, can profit from opportunities to interact with others of similar abilities; this is a position not popular with many in the school reform movement.

In summary, this book does provide a clear methodology for initiating and developing one part of a talent development program, namely the authors' model. As such, the audience most likely to find this helpful is administrators and those teachers who would be involved in implementing the SEM in their schools. One reservation, however, concerns the overall impression which may be created if this book were the focus of administrators' approach to gifted programming. A reader unfamiliar with the broader field of gifted education could easily be given the impression that gifted education services are appropriate for all students, thus reinforcing the damaging myth that gifted programming is elitist.

Reviewed by Mary Christensen, assistant professor of Education and Director of Gifted Programs at Dominican University, River Forest, Illinois.