Szymon Jankiewicz Spoke About Problems of Working with the Gifted Children at the International Scientific Conference “Motivational Giftedness: from Screening to Development”
Szymon Jankiewicz, Director of the Center, presented a report on the “Legal regulation and support of gifted students in the Russian Federation”.
Currently, there is an entire complex of legal acts regulating the measures of identifying and supporting talented students. These legal acts can be divided into strategic, containing declarative norms; program documents, containing regulations of a predictive nature; regulatory legal acts, which include activities for identification and support of talented students.
The basic guidance and activities for implementing the aforementioned policy are included in the National system for identifying and developing young talent, which was approved by the President of the Russian Federation in the 3rd of April, 2012 and in the Concept of additional education for children. These measures are also enshrined in the Federal education development program for 2016-2020 and on the Russian Federation’s State Program “Educational Development” for 2013-2020.
Normative legal acts of the Russian Federation mostly pay attention to the forms of supporting talented students (with grants and scholarships), to the Olympiad movement and to the establishment of specialized centers for gifted children.
Ongoing activities are exactly those direct forms of support for talented students. These activities are variable, but they do not reflect the whole toolkit of the possible measures for identifying and supporting talented students.
Great potential is seen in the indirect measures – mainly in the creating of necessary infrastructure and teachers’ training. In particular, at the moment there is a lack of additional programs for teachers specializing on working with gifted children and youth in general.
At the end of the report, Szymon Jankiewicz has addressed another controversial question. He pointed out that at the moment there is no definitions of a “talented student” and “gifted student”, which were clear to every member of the professional community.
While speaking about talented students, we often refer to the children with the high level of education. This raises a question: are all students with high levels of education talented?
At the same time the institutionalization of the term “talented student” is a very hard challenge. However, it is important to change the existing approaches to the identification and support of talented students and make it not limited by the Federal Law on Education in Russian Federation, contests and Olympiads.
Other effective measures can be summer schools, mechanisms for the involvement of youth in social practices, promotion of scientific and artistic activities among children, field seminars, discussion clubs and lectures.