Teacher Judgment

The article “Teacher Judgment in Identifying Gifted/Talented Students” is about a teacher’s role in selecting students and referring them to a talented and gifted program. The article investigates what could hinder a teacher’s judgement and what could help them better decide which students were talented and gifted. Research has found that a student’s socioeconomic status can impair a teacher’s judgement and make them less likely to refer a student to a talented and gifted program. Students who were classified as being in lower socioeconomic groups were less likely to be referred to a talented and gifted program than those classified in higher socioeconomic groups. In addition, race and culture also affect a teacher’s judgement of whether students …show more content…
The article is written by teacher who teaches a self contained gifted classrooms and is about her students who exhibited many different forms of unhealthy perfectionism. The teacher describes five different types of unhealthy perfections forms of students: the academic achiever, the risk evader, the aggravated accuracy assessor, the controlling image manager, and the procrastinating perfectionist. A student who fits the profile of an academic achiever feels the need to answer every question on test, regardless of their exposure to the material. Academic are achievers are the students who put pressure on themselves to get the highest grade, while also aiming higher through extra credit assignments. This form of perfectionism hurts students’ self esteem, as they are not always able to get the highest grade possible and make common human errors. A teacher can help academic achievers by acknowledging students’ efforts and the process of learning, rather than solely complimenting student’s grades. Academic achievers should also be encouraged to reflect on their efforts and find areas of weakness in order to improve themselves. The next form of perfectionism is the risk evader, these students can’t always demonstrate their abilities due to physical or mental blocks and instead opt to not perform at all. These …show more content…
As a child, I was often seen as having above average intellectual skills and this article resonated with me because I share many of these traits, in a mild form. I can remember multiple times as a child when I would avoid sharing test scores or standardized testing information with my peers in order to maintain a status of success and excellence in their minds. In elementary school I would make many drafts of projects in order to ensure that my ideas would come to life exactly as I had envisioned them. In fact, even through high school, I would often rewrite essays the night the assignment was due in order to achieve perfection in my mind. Although my experience with perfectionism was not detrimental or particularly unhealthy, it is easy to see how it could be in students who are seen as the “smart kids” and who have pressure to succeed to the highest level of their ability. I believe as a teacher it is very important to teach students the value of failure and to allow for mistakes to be made in order to help students grow. Once students realize that they can learn from their mistakes, they will be less likely to be worried about making them. Ultimately, I believe that failure is the key to growth and success in all students and that is something that needs to be expressed very clearly when teaching gifted