Our research focuses on gifted education as an often neglected dimension in teacher’s work. We highlight the necessity of acknowledging the gifted students as a learner group with special needs when differentiating teaching in inclusive classrooms. To achieve this, teachers need to develop a base of theoretical knowledge and a positive attitude for an in-depth understanding and meaningful educational responses towards the gifted (van Gerven, 2021). The nature of giftedness is a contested issue, but here, gifted are understood as those who are above their age peers in one or more subjects, show creativity and a tendency to immerse themselves in topics of interest (Renzulli & Reis, 2021).

World Council for Gifted and Talented Children (2021) has published global principles for professional learning in gifted education for improving teacher education globally. However, how giftedness is understood and reacted to are strongly conditioned not just by culture, socio-historical and socio-political realities, but also by organizational practices in educational institutions (Cross & Cross, 2021). Unpacking these aspects is important when planning the education of both the gifted students and their teachers. Our research is informed by sociocultural theories where meaning is seen as situated but not situation-bound (Ellis et al., 2010).

In our research, we ask: 

1. How do pre-service and in-service teachers thinking about giftedness in an inclusive classroom differ when using the method of empathy-based stories as a data collection method? 

2. How does this pre-service and in-service teachers’ thinking relate to evidence-based practices and recommendations in gifted education research? 

Through examining our recent empirical research on pre-service and in-service teacher thinking on giftedness inclusive classrooms in five countries (Finland, Austria, Turkey, Philippines and Japan), we identify gaps between the participating teachers’ knowledge and latest research-based knowledge. “Teacher thinking” refers here to knowledge and concepts that teachers use to plan, interact with, and reflect on teaching; that are intertwined with teachers’ beliefs and attitudes (Levin, 2015); and that influence their pedagogical choices and actions.

We also consider the culturally situated differences in teacher thinking and discuss implications of our findings on teacher education in terms of curricular content, policies and teaching practices. For example our results suggest how in some contexts this could take the form of critically unpacking the teacher’s position as an authority or the one who knows the right answer to everyhing.

We have employed method of empathy-based stories(Wallin et al. 2019) for studying teachers’ thinking and beliefs about specific educational phenomena such as moral imagination in ethically challenging situations (Hyry-Beihammer et al. 2020) and teaching gifted students in inclusive classrooms (Lassila et al. manuscript). In this method, the researcher gives participants a premise (called a frame story), on which they continue writing their story freely. The premise is for participants to imagine themselves in an inclusive regular classroom and write about what they would think and feel, and how they would act in a when faced with few intellectually gifted and very capable students to whom the pace of the teaching is too slow and the content unchallenging. This has started to show in the gifted students’ behavior in the class and toward the teacher. Thus one key interest was to find out what kind of solutions do pre-service teachers imagine they would employ with gifted students in an inclusive regular classroom setting. To achieve this, we use pre-service teacher data collected in five countries, around 25 participants in each country and in-service teacher data collected/to be collected in the same five countries. First the national data were/will be analysed using categorical content analysis of stories (Lieblich et al. 1998) and then thematised horizontally across cases, thus making a cross-case analysis between the data from five countries (Miles, Huberman & Saldana 2020, p. 95; Riessman 2008). Since we understand the production of narrative research knowledge as a co-construction process and our educational practices grounded in narrative pedagogies (Hyry-Beihammer, Lassila & Uitto, 2021), we will reflect on the kind of role the teacher educator / researcher plays regarding the process. As a pedagogical tool, the empathy-based method connects with the idea of a “third space” as a site for challenging each others’ thinking, melding together practical and theoretical knowledge and helping reconfigure the power balance between teacher educator and pre-service teacher knowledge (e.g. Ellis & Maguire, 2017).

First results show how pre-service teachers mentioned the most common and often recommended solutions for responding to the needs of the gifted, starting with giving more challenging tasks and encouraging peer-learning and having gifted students act as teaching assistants. They also suggested more communication with gifted students. Our results indicate that the pre-service teachers as a whole (group) do come up with a wide range of solutions even if individual pre-service teacher’s thinking can be somewhat limited in scope. Preliminary analysis of collected in-service teacher data suggests that solutions were highly similar to those in the pre-service teacher data. However, the amount of details and depth of their answers reveals greater capacity for pedagogical reflection. There were also some solutions that were not present in pre-service teacher data such as varying the pace of teaching for the gifted. Since the participants of this research came mostly from non-gifted-education-specialist programs, their thinking is reflective of general pedagogical practices and existing values with the corresponding merits and demerits. While most solutions are based on sound pedagogical reasoning, the lack of theoretical knowledge of gifted education may lead to inadvisable use of various means of differentiation and holding bias against solutions, such as acceleration (i.e. increasing the pace of instruction, skipping grades or curriciculum content already mastered), which are supported by research but against which there is resistance within teachers in many countries. Our results suggest collaborative and dialogical activities where participants share their ideas with each other and where the teacher educator acts as a commentator adding to the already existing (tacit) knowledge and raising to discussion differences with evidence-based practices. Furthermore, we recommend organizing educational opportunities between pre-service and in-service teachers for sharing of different perspectives and enabling novel examination of the relationship between theoretical and practical knowledge (see Max 2010).

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