Summer 2023

In this issue of Talent:  Director's Message: What We've Learned about Talent Development | Looking Back on Programmatic, Philosophical Wins | Moving Talent Development from Theory to Practice | Talent Development and Social Impact: Preparing Students for Leadership

Director's Message: What We've Learned about Talent Development  

I am retiring as director of CTD at the end of August, and as the incoming director, Susan Corwith, and I talked about the transition, we reflected on what we have learned about talent development through years of research and programs and what comes next. In this edition of Talent, I am excited to share what I see as the most important outcomes of CTD’s work to date, while Susan and Eric Calvert examine the next stages of research and practice that we hope will inspire and support educators and families. 

One of the most exciting outcomes of my 40 plus years at CTD has been the development and testing of interventions that help more kids cultivate their talents and maximize their potential. From our work with Project EXCITE and Project OCCAMS to our Civic Education Project service-learning and leadership offerings and our work with schools to design talent development programs, we have moved the needle in the fields of gifted education and talent development in ways that leverage strengths and center access and equity.  

Going forward, Susan and the entire CTD team will continue to emphasize collaborations that put theory into practice, bringing talent development opportunities to students in their classrooms and through community-based supplemental programs that CTD alone cannot provide. We are increasingly viewing CTD programming as a laboratory and a platform for translating talent development theory into practice, and we want others to do that with us.  

I am grateful for my time as director at the Center for Talent Development and for all the opportunities it has provided me. Thanks to everyone who has been a part of this journey, and I look forward to continuing my research and supporting CTD’s ongoing work. CTD is in excellent hands with Susan and the dedicated team we have in place.  

Paula Olszewski-Kubilius

 

Looking Back on Programmatic, Philosophical Wins

Paula Olszewski-Kubilius, MA ’80, PhD ’83, retires this summer after presiding over a wide spectrum of successful CTD programming over the past 40 years. Perhaps her greatest triumph has been infusing the Talent Development model of gifted education within CTD and across the wider educational world.

“That model, which includes what in the field is called ‘front-loading,’ has been taken on as an approach for kids who have a lot of potential, but they’re not being identified because it’s not demonstrated in achievement in the younger school years,” she says. “And largely because they’ve just had fewer opportunities to learn. It’s not that they have less potential to learn, or less potential to achieve.”

Olszewski-Kubilius first gained insights into the potential of this model through 1980s-era programming developed by founding CTD director Joyce VanTassel-Baska. Early examples include NUHorizons, which provided college counseling to lower-income, mostly Black children who had the ability to succeed in selective universities but weren’t getting the guidance they needed; and Project Excite, a collaboration with Evanston’s two school districts, 65 and 202, that provided enrichment programming starting in third grade to students with exceptional potential, with the goal of accelerating them in math and preparing them for honors classes in high school.

“Families were so involved in their children’s lives, and they really, really wanted opportunities for their kids. And often, the reasons that they weren’t getting them was because they were marginalized in society.”

- Paula Olszewski-Kubilius

 

“Families were so involved in their children’s lives, and they really, really wanted opportunities for their kids,” she says. “And often, the reasons that they weren’t getting them was because they were marginalized in society. But also, because parents had not had good experiences themselves in school, and they just didn’t have access to or know how to work the system [in a way] that more economically advantaged parents seem to.”

That work in building interventions to help more kids achieve their potential continued with programs like the Online Curriculum Consortium for Acceleration in Middle School (OCCAMS), which attempts to provide an on-ramp to gifted services in middle school. Established in partnership with the Columbus, Ohio, public school system, the program offers an accelerated language arts curriculum to any student who, at any point prior to sixth grade, had achieved at least in the 75th percentile on a standardized test.

“The reality is, many of them, at the time of sixth grade, were at the 50th percentile; yet, those students ended up really succeeding in the program,” Olszewski-Kubilius says. “Which says something about the fact that potential that was there, early on, and was never nurtured.”

Center for Talent Development at Northwestern · The Shift In Gifted Education

Another way in which CTD has worked under Olszewski-Kubilius’ leadership to create opportunities for a more diverse group of gifted students has been through its partnership with the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, through which CTD helps to identify children who qualify for the foundation’s Young Scholars Program.

“These programs support students from seventh grade through the end of high school with outside-of-school opportunities, online courses, and even tuition to special schools,” she says. “These kinds of programs and collaborations have been a centerpiece of CTD’s work, and I think we’ve moved the needle in the field on innovative ways to approach complex challenges."

A impactful and enduring program developed at CTD during Olszewski-Kubilius’ time leading the center is the Civic Education Project (CEP), which focuses on social impact and building civic engagement and leadership skills among youth. The program grew out of an earlier program aimed at Northwestern undergraduates that was adapted, initially, for high school students.

“The staff of CEP has focused the programming on major social issues like hunger and access to nutritious food, homelessness, and access to health care,” she says. “Students explore and learn about these issues in a very hands-on way. The students interact with community organizations that are working on these issues. And the ultimate goal of the program is to help these young students feel empowered to address an issue within their community. The idea is to say to students, ‘Look, you don’t have to wait until you’re an adult to make an impact or facilitate change.’ ”

“Moving from potential into expertise, or in some cases even eminence, is a very complicated process. It requires ability, I’m not denying that—but we’ve learned that a lot of ability can be developed. It’s not just inborn. And it requires certain inputs, particularly from school, but also outside of school."

-Paula Olszewski-Kubilius

In more recent years, CTD has expanded the program and “brought opportunities to younger kids, in an appropriate way,” through a course called Taking Action, for example, she adds. “We’ve also offered programming as one-day or two-day experiences, where we take it to a school district, and we fashion a program specifically for their students and communities. It’s not a large program in terms of the numbers of students, but it’s very impactful.”

CEP leadership has consulted with schools to create their own homegrown versions of the program; and, for the past two summers, the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation has been sending its Young Scholars to campus to receive CEP’s three-week Civic Leadership Institute programming.

Olszewski-Kubilius’ influential work has reached a mass audience through the two award-winning books she has written or co-written focusing on the Talent Development model. This began about a dozen years ago when she co-wrote a monograph in collaboration with two colleagues, Dr. Rena Subotnik and Dr. Frank Worrell, on the psychology of high performance. The recognition that monograph received led to other writing and speaking engagements, including a book called Talent Development: A Framework for Gifted Children, which helped accelerate the linguistic and conceptual shift away from the idea of giftedness as a fixed trait.

Center for Talent Development at Northwestern · Talent Development In Practice

“Moving from potential into expertise, or in some cases even eminence, is a very complicated process” she says. “It requires ability, I’m not denying that—but we’ve learned that a lot of ability can be developed. It’s not just inborn. And it requires certain inputs, particularly from school, but also outside of school. The reason this shift in framework is so important is because it moves the field away from its focus on identification to more of a focus on fostering talent.”

When Olszewski-Kubilius served as president of the National Association for Gifted Children in the early 2010s, she publicly made the case in favor of that philosophical shift. “And at the time, it was like heresy,” she says. “There was a lot of flak online, and people were writing to me, and they didn’t like it. The perception was that somehow if we let more gifted people in, that gifted services would be diluted.”

A lot of the push back came from parents of children already identified as gifted, and Olszewski-Kubilius figures they were worried about their children somehow no longer qualifying and/or losing their gifted “designation”. “I think a lot of this was false interpretations of what we meant by ‘talent development,’ because it was never the case that we were going to say, ‘If you have a high IQ, or you’re a high achiever, we’re not going to serve you,’ ” she says. “But we were also going to put more of an emphasis on students who had high potential, but not necessarily high achievement.”

While Olszewski-Kubilius and her colleagues were hardly the first to propagate these ideas, they ultimately did so at the right time to gain traction within the wider field. “The timing was propitious,” she says. “It was a difficult period for me, to get a lot of negative feedback, but it was also worth it. And that perspective on what giftedness is – that focus on talent development – is really entrenched in CTD. It guides every decision we make about what we do.” In fact, CTD eliminated its own admissions criteria for placing children grades two and younger into its summer and Saturday programming – shifting to an open enrollment model – without changing the course content or level of expectations.

Center for Talent Development at Northwestern · Partnering With School Districts

CTD’s programming continues to evolve based on the latest research in the field, Olszewski-Kubilius says. “We make changes as we learn more information from the research outside of us, but also what we do here at CTD,” she says. “That’s what makes us well-regarded in the field. We’re a center that’s very research-based, but also applying that research in our classrooms."

Olszewski-Kubilius believes CTD will continue its success into the future with longtime associate director Susan Corwith taking over as director. “She will bring an increased emphasis on working with schools and districts, and the application of talent development,” she says. “She really likes using the research and the knowledge to helping schools and community organizations do well with their kids.. She’s very good at networking with other organizations as a way of broadening our scope, and as a way of bringing novel experiences to our students that we, ourselves, couldn’t provide.”

Olszewski-Kubilius says she’s had wonderful opportunities during her long tenure at CTD, but stresses that the center’s work and success was never about her. “The center is all of us,” she says. “The only reason we’ve been as successful as we have is because we’ve had such great staff. And so, I’m very happy that those people are continuing, and I have every confidence in them. I’m just grateful I got the chance to work with them.”

Moving Talent Development from Theory to Practice

The talent development model that Center for Talent Development has developed to hone and diversify the universe of students with access to advanced and accelerated programming continues to flourish through collaborations with educational organizations around the country and throughout the world, under the leadership of incoming CTD director Susan Corwith and associate director Eric Calvert.

As she steps into the director role, following the retirement of long-time CTD leader Paula Olszewski-Kubilius, Corwith says she’s most excited about continuing to both develop CTD’s research base and to apply the principles of talent development in classrooms and in supplemental programming.

“That’s where our heads are right now,” she says. “We’ve been laser-focused on our own programs, but we are also collaborating with school districts and other institutions working with young people. Additionally, Eric works a lot with state policymakers, and that’s an initiative that we’re amplifying. We remain committed to working closely with our colleagues in the [Northwestern] School of Education and Social Policy, who are influential change-makers in education.”

Where historically, CTD might have thought of its research and service missions sometimes operating on separate tracks, Calvert adds, “We’re increasingly viewing our own programming as a laboratory and a platform for developing and implementing some of these ideas we have about how to translate talent development theory into practice, and we invite educators to do that with us through practicum experiences and professional learning opportunities.

Center for Talent Development at Northwestern · Redefining The Identification Process

“We take the knowledge we gain inside our own classrooms and translate it into scalable, sustainable, equitable school-based systems for our communities. This is extremely exciting,” he says. “Because we’re proud of the impact that we make on the thousands of students each year [who] we get to work with directly. But being able to translate this work into models that can be applied in schools, it’s possible to dramatically scale the impact that we make on the field. The goal is to benefit millions of students each year.”

One key aspect of infusing the talent development model into classrooms has been helping schools move away from the “in or out” dichotomy—a one-size-fits all approach traditional to gifted education—to a mindset in which ability is seen as more malleable. Enrichment activities need to be understood as critical for all students, and instruction must be aligned to students’ strengths and what they’re ready to learn and when, Corwith says.

Center for Talent Development at Northwestern · The Importance Of Providing Non-Academic Support

This “optimal match” approach is not new, but a lot has been learned about how and when to create the environment for this to occur and the means of identifying students’ strengths, interests, and readiness to learn, she says.

While finding an optimal match is critical to students’ growth, CTD has learned that it doesn’t need strict test scores or other barriers. “We can reliably use other pieces of information to determine if a student is ready for advanced or accelerated learning,” Corwith says. “We’re going to try to take that [knowledge] and talk with schools about how to adjust the way they think about identification for services and the tools that they use, to align better with the kinds of opportunities they’re offering to students.”

As one already successful example of that, Calvert cites the Online Curriculum Consortium for Acceleration in Middle School (OCCAMS) in collaboration with Columbus (Ohio) Public Schools, through which students from low-income households – who might have shown promise in early grades but subsequently stagnated – are being identified in middle school and encouraged based on their early progress (see Lead story for more). Through OCCAMS, students complete three years of middle school language arts in a two-year sequence, which provides them the opportunity to take a freshman year language arts class in eighth grade. This allows for both early high school credit and additional time to progress toward AP or other advanced courses in high school.

“Because there was that indicator of early potential, we kept the door open for them,” he says. “They have been successfully completing the program at very high rates, and most importantly, growing faster than most other students in their schools and narrowing the gap with gifted students in more affluent schools. And so I’m seeing that academic growth … and an increase in the number of students that are then going into honors and AP courses.”

“We find that a lot of kids from low-income households, or kids in very rural areas, might have all the brain power in the world, and they might do exceptionally well in school. But they also need access to a peer group that’s highly interested and motivated in what they’re doing, and adult mentors who can open doors for them and coach them. Not just on content, but, ‘Here are some areas of opportunity for people with your interests. Here’s how people in this field talk. This is what the culture of this field is like.’”

-Eric Calvert 

Talent development requires more than content knowledge, so determining how best to teach psychosocial skills is also critical. These skills may be taught in school but also come through supplemental, outside-of-school experiences, which CTD has engaged in through its programs and through work with partner organizations.

“We find that a lot of kids from low-income households, or kids in very rural areas, might have all the brain power in the world, and they might do exceptionally well in school,” he says. But they also need “access to a peer group that’s highly interested and motivated in what they’re doing, and adult mentors who can open doors for them and coach them. Not just on content, but, ‘Here are some areas of opportunity for people with your interests. Here’s how people in this field talk. This is what the culture of this field is like.’”

Center for Talent Development at Northwestern · Dr. Calvert on Project OCCAMS

In addition to providing content and skills, talent development explores questions like, “How do we provide some of these scaffolds?” Corwith adds. “How do we teach and develop these non-cognitive skills, these social-emotional pieces that are imperative? And how do we then support schools, families, and after-school and supplemental program leaders, to leverage and pay attention to those skills? Because they’re just as important as the writing abilities and the math problems we are solving.”

A related research project a few years back examined executive functioning skills in very bright children, which revealed that simply having high cognitive ability does not automatically lead to development of time management or emotional regulation, Calvert says. “We’ve also found by working in schools that you really have to pair the rigorous academics with that metacognitive skill-building—because if the core curriculum itself isn’t challenging enough to require students to increase their attention management, or they don’t experience enough challenge to stimulate development of the emotional regulation skills, they often won’t.”

But once the academic rigor is amped up, students need to draw upon the related psychosocial skills—and are thus that much more receptive and willing to practice them, Calvert says. “What we’re really talking about here is social-emotional learning, but connected to skills that are clearly beneficial to students’ academic gain,” he says, which could transcend the traditional either-or debate about whether social-emotional learning “belongs” in schools.

Going forward, Corwith envisions continuing to help schools translate data into action. “They’re still struggling to understand the data that they have and make good decisions and help the teachers translate that into instruction in the classroom,” she says. “I cannot tell you how many districts are coming to us and specifically asking, ‘How do we use this data, or understand this data, to make decisions and changes in the classroom to help teachers instruct differently?’ And there are lots of layers to that, but that is another piece we’re trying to think about in talent development and help translate what we know into real, in-the-classroom solutions.”

On the public policy front, Calvert has been encouraged by the fact that the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, passed in 2015 as a successor to No Child Left Behind, has enabled states to shift their focus from student proficiency to growth. Schools working with students from low-income households are freer to use funding to support talent development—not just remediation—in high-poverty schools.

“[With regard to gifted education and talent development] there are changes happening at the state and national policy level that are encouraging. For instance, in Illinois there are senators and lawmakers that are acting to include advanced and accelerated course access into legislation, saying that schools must allow students to take the next-highest-level courses if they’ve achieved in their grade-level course work. But school leaders need to understand the requirements and the research and be able to apply evidence-based practices to assure success. This is where CTD is prepared to help."

-Susan Corwith 

“When we set a goal of basic proficiency, it seems that’s what we get,” he says. “But under that proficiency-focused model, we’re not doing enough to ensure that a bright student experiencing poverty has an opportunity to not only go to community college but go to a selective school; not just get a job, but to get a great job with a path to a leadership role. And so being strengths-based is going to be helpful to bright students who have been given fewer opportunities to stretch [their abilities] in the past.”

“Policy, research, and practice are complementary,” Corwith adds. “With regard to gifted education and talent development, there are changes happening at the state and national policy level that are encouraging. For instance, in Illinois there are senators and lawmakers that are acting to include advanced and accelerated course access into legislation, saying that schools must allow students to take the next-highest-level courses if they’ve achieved in their grade-level course work.” But school leaders need to understand the requirements and the research and be able to apply evidence-based practices to assure success. This is where CTD is prepared to help.

 

Talent Development and Social Impact | Preparing Students for Leadership 

As CTD director Paula Olszewski-Kubilius noted in the feature article of Talent, the Civic Education Project at CTD provides innovative programs that develop talents which enable young people to have an impact on their communities.

CEP consists of the summer Civic Leadership Institute for high-school students, which integrates theory and practice to inspire change agents on current social and political issues; Online Leadership Intensive for grades 7-10, focused on building leadership skills through reflective learning opportunities; and two academic summer camps for middle-school students: the Summer Leadership Intensive, which adds a hands-on component to the online version, and Taking Action, in which students research issues and learn about innovative solutions.

Mateo Wallace, a seventh-grader from Boise, Idaho, is one frequent CEP participant who can attest to the value of deliberate attention to leadership development. He’s taken several courses, including Leadership for Today, Dynamic Leadership: Skills & Strategies, and Social Entrepreneurship & Innovation, in addition to numerous other courses across a range of disciplines through CTD.

The opportunity to become a better leader, build his confidence, and learn more about the collaborative aspect of working within a team is what has attracted him to the Civic Education Project courses, he says. “I’ve liked them a lot,” he adds. “They’ve been really engaging, and I have learned so much. I remember that in my favorite CTD Leadership Intensive course, Leadership for Today, I identified that I really needed to improve on talking to my peers and work on my leadership skills more than I realized,” Mateo says. “Before I took this class, I wasn't the most comfortable speaking in front of others. But afterward, I was able to speak confidently and not feel embarrassed about it. The class overall helped improve my leadership skills in many different areas, but especially my speaking skills.” 

What advice would Mateo give to classmates who are thinking about developing their leadership talents? “Always have a pen and paper handy so you can write different things down,” he says. “Don’t be nervous....Keep an open mind because there might be some discussions or points of view that go against what you’re thinking, but keep your ears open and you will learn from others.”

Read more of Mateo's story in our recent blog post, Becoming a Better Leader.