Christine Weber

Gifted education is an important facet of education and schools, but it is often overlooked, with the majority of the attention going to closing the gap between students who are at level and students who struggle. While helping students who struggle is important, it is equally vital to make sure that students who are gifted are given the opportunities and support needed to grow. Fortunately, Prufrock Press offers a number of useful resources on gifted education. Best Practices in Professional Learning and Teacher Preparation: Professional Development for Teachers of the Gifted in the Content Areas (Volume 3) is a worthy addition to the Prufrock lineup. The text consists of 10 chapters that provide readers with idea and strategies to use with students who are gifted, with each chapter examining a different content area. I especially appreciated the inclusion of subjects too-often neglected, such as foreign language and the arts. Overall, this is a useful book for practicing and aspiring teachers.… (mere)

Best Practices in Professional Learning and Teacher Preparation offers useful information about teaching "gifted" or higher-level students. Teaching gifted students takes more time and effort than one might think. This text helps by offering strategies for teachers to use. Every chapter has copious citations and endnotes. This is a bonus for anybody who wants to dive deeper into the academic literature. The first three chapters give the reader a broad overview of the content and the following chapters offer specific strategies and resources broken down by subject areas. I like that the book often emphasizes the importance of educators being sufficiently knowledgeable in their subject field. This book alone does not give enough information for a teacher to develop lessons or supplemental lessons aimed at high-level learners but this book does offer a good starting point to develop those plans.… (mere)

This work is a reissue of the 2018 work by the same name, it is designed so that both beginning as well as established educators.Weber, has the work divided into two sections, the first gives the educator a overview and overall look at curriculum and in the second section Weber has a chapter that deals with most of the subjects that gifted and talented students are exposed to durinf their education. This second section covers professional learning for educators of Literacy, Social Studies, Foreign Languages, The Arts, Science and Engineering, Mathematics and Language Arts.
Each chapter has a overview, the strategies of the topic, a summary, and resources and references on each chapters topic. The work also contains numerous charts and tables to assist the educator in learning their topic. The work draws from the need of specific strategies related to professional development and uses a variety of methods to achieve these strategies. This work is the third part of a three part series. The cost of this work is $65.00. It should be made available in media centers for staff development and also in the libraries of Colleges and Universities that prepare students to be educators. If they are interested to become educators of gifted or talented students.… (mere)