Faculty Q&A

Carla Brigandi

Dr. Carla Brigandi is both an expert in and an advocate for helping high-ability students realize their potential. An assistant professor in the Department of Special Education, Brigandi teaches graduate-level courses in gifted education. She also facilitates professional development workshops for West Virginia teachers and presents her work nationally and internationally. Here, she provides the insights she’s gained from her years of experience working with and studying gifted students.

How did you become become interested in gifted education?

I started off as a math teacher, and I had an opportunity to start a middle school program for kids who had talent in mathematics. From there, I began to realize that we don’t really acknowledge that working with high-ability students is a discipline. You have to have an understanding of pedagogies and techniques to get good work out of high-ability students and challenge them at an advanced level. My first year in, I was a passionate teacher and I cared very much about what I was doing, but I didn’t really know how to get work out of students who were so advanced. I started taking courses at the University of Connecticut in gifted education. From there, I learned how much I did not know about teaching my students at an advanced level.

What are some of your current research interests?

Mostly, I’m looking at goal valuation — how we motivate and engage students to get them interested in school, create academic environments where students thrive and challenge students with projects that interest them. I study how we develop a sustainable and replicable process so that gifted students can have challenging experiences and look back on them with pride. I think that’s going to be good for the kids and good for society.

What does it mean to be gifted?

Right now, there is no universal definition for gifted. A student could be gifted in Michigan and not gifted in Virginia. That makes it really difficult to do research on gifted students, because we don’t all agree on what a gifted student is. Having a high IQ is an important piece, but there are also other factors. You need to be creative, to be able to examine things and put them together in unique ways. I would also say that you need task commitment, that perseverance is a true demonstration of giftedness.

What is one big issue in gifted education today?

There is a myth that gifted students are going to be fine without interventions. Many of them are, but what we’re not doing is measuring those who aren’t. There are current statistics that show 20 percent of high school dropouts score in the gifted range, so not all of our high-ability students are achieving. As educators, our goal is to help all kids actualize their potential. For many years, gifted kids have not been asked to actualize their potential. My own teaching experience really drove that home for me.

What do you hope that students learn from your classes?

When I’m teaching educators who work with gifted children, I want them to learn that gifted education is a real discipline. There are two parts of gifted education — acceleration and enrichment. You want to move gifted students faster through curriculum at a pace that’s good for them. You also want to enrich them, to give them time to form their own opinions and grapple with critical questions. I hope that my students will go back to their schools and actually use research-based practices that meet the needs of gifted children by incorporating both acceleration and enrichment.