Labels are clearly handy, and they’re often essential. Anyone with a food allergy will attest to the importance of labels on food products, and, trivially, how would I find my Sun Pat Crunchy Peanut Butter in the supermarket without being able to scan the labels from the vast range of peanut butters available?
So, labels are a kind of shorthand; they give names to things, for our convenience.
Me: ‘I can’t decide what to get tall-hairy-fella-with-very-long-beard-and-spiky-grey-hair’ for Christmas.
Bob: ‘Oh, Derek? I’m getting him beard oil’.
People’s names are an uncontentious kind of label, but when it comes to more complex labels, they can sometimes take on a life of their own and when that happens they risk distorting rather than clarifying things. And so it is, I think, with the terms ‘Gifted’, ‘Talented’ and ‘More able’. Pause reading now and run through in your mind your own definitions of these three terms when applied to the context of schooling.
I found this bit of gobbledygook on the website, ‘difference.wiki’:
‘The main difference between gifted and talented is that gifted has exceptional talent and natural ability, whereas talented has a natural capacity and skill for something…Gifted has no precise ability or talent while Talented is a special term, and mentions to a definite capacity. Gifted students have outstanding abilities, but talented students have brilliant abilities.’
What do you make of that?
Here are my own definitions:
‘More able’ is a comparative term, referring to the higher or highest-performing portion of a defined group – say, the top 30-40% in Year 8 in Science in a school. In this example, if you are in the more able group in Science, you are ‘more able’ than 60-70% of your year group in Science. The crucial point is, of course, how the membership of the ‘more able’ group is decided: it should be done as a result of demonstrated performance in Science, for example in regular formal tests.
I don’t use the word ‘Gifted’. Its use comes from a time when everyone, or almost everyone, believed that talent was a ‘gift’ from God. These days, the word ‘Gifted’ speaks to me of so-called ‘natural’ talent, so I dislike using it in school, but if I did use it outside of school it would be to give a name – or label – to the very highest performers in a group: Lionel Messi is a gifted footballer; Einstein was a gifted scientist; Shakespeare was a gifted wordsmith; Michelangelo was apparently gifted at many things, and so on. In this definition, then, ‘gifted’ is the top x% (add number. 0.5-1.0?) of the distribution curve in a subject or domain.
The word ‘talented’ is often defined as ‘having a ‘natural aptitude or skill for something’: He’s a talented mathematician/writer/actor/dancer/chef… This makes me wonder about the inclusion of the word ‘natural’. Natural as in, innate, already there on the day we emerged into the world? I prefer this simple, less contentious definition of talented: demonstrating a high level of performance, over time, in maths/writing/acting/dancing/cooking etc…. Then, it would be up to the appropriate people to define what is meant by ‘high’.
My first main point here is that gifted, talented and more able are all labels describing, presumably, measurably high levels of performance in a domain. Which is why I much prefer the term ‘high performer’ – if you’re scoring over 90% in maths test after maths test, we can argue about whether you’re gifted or talented in maths, but who can argue that you aren’t performing highly?
My second main point is that for everyone involved in education, arguing about whether someone is ‘naturally’ talented or ‘gifted’ is a pointless activity; instead, we need to be constantly underlining the link between applying ourselves and achieving well, or better. Everyone can try really really hard, and everyone can get smarter as a result. We want every student in our school to be a high performer.
