Your Top Students: Classroom Strategies That Meet the Needs of the Gifted

Luke Lawson is a teacher and administrator in Vancouver, B.C.

Your Top Students is a reasonably good attempt at enabling educators,
especially at the elementary level, to develop ideas and strategies to
challenge students who are variously described as “gifted,” “high
achievers,” and “high ability.” (The title is somewhat misleading
because at one point the author states that many of the lesson plans and
exercises in the book could be used with all students in the classroom.)
Some of the strategies are rather mundane and unoriginal (e.g., help a
loner with a friend, don’t allow peers to use “put down”
language).

Taylor’s best chapter, “Ideas for Your Classroom,” provides key
teaching strategies (one interesting lesson deals with Egyptian
multiplication). She could have developed much more of this chapter
instead of wasting her time rehashing Bloom’s taxonomy and recent fads
and theories in educational literature, many of which are taught in
teacher education.