Being Smart Back Cover
Being Smart About Gifted Learning
Empowering Parents and Kids Through Challenge and Change
Published in September, 2021, this is the third book in the Being Smart series by Dona Matthews and Joanne Foster. Being Smart About Gifted Children was published in 2004. It won several awards and sold over 10,000 copies, and was followed by Being Smart About Gifted Education in 2009, which also received rave reviews from parents, educators, critics, and others interested in supporting kids’ gifted learning needs.
In late 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, Molly Isaacs-McLeod, the publisher of Gifted Unlimited, approached Joanne and me about doing a revised and updated version of our book, which she saw as a gifted education classic that she wanted to keep fresh. We began a virtual collaborative process, totally revising and updating the book, adding new or expanded sections on topics like homeschooling, which had become so important to so many families during the pandemic, as well as anxiety, stress, and cyberbullying, which have unfortunately been increasing among young people over the 12 years since the 2nd edition.
In this 3rd edition of Being Smart, we aimed the focus less at teachers, and more at parents—many of whom had taken on more of the burden of their children’s education during the pandemic—and provided current views on nurturing children's and adolescents' abilities, while supporting their well-being more across every dimension of their lives. We discussed equity and diversity, creativity, assessments, homeschooling, neural plasticity, social-emotional issues, and more, addressing parents’ and teachers’ questions and concerns, and sharing resources.
One of the themes running through this book, as with the first two editions, is that every family and every child—including every gifted child—is unique. There is therefore no single formula to follow in order to support gifted-level learning. Instead, what we offer are ideas for considering each child’s and teenager’s emotional, social, intellectual, and physical interests, and their strengths and challenges, with the idea of empowering them to engage more meaningfully with a wide range of learning opportunities.
Available for Purchase
Praise for Being Smart About Gifted Learning
An authoritative, up-to-date, and comprehensive manual."
“Being Smart about Gifted Learning is a brilliant book that empowers and enlightens parents with essential information about optimizing their child’s educational, social, and emotional experiences. Drs. Matthews and Foster have a winning formula: helping children and teens discover the right combination of safety and challenge to support life-long resilience and creativity.”
“This tremendous book describes how gifted education resources can be applied to nurturing talent broadly and inclusively across the population. The Optimal Match approach demystifies understandings of giftedness, and brings common sense to conceptions of meaningful learning at home, school, and elsewhere.”
“Matthews and Foster highlight the importance of an appropriate education for gifted and talented students with the concept of an optimal match between students and their learning environments. The ideas in this book represent an important conceptual framing that will help gifted and talented programs serve broader and more diverse populations of students.”
"Dona Matthews and Joanne Foster understand that each learner is unique. They discuss child development and education, paying attention to factors such as resilience, play, motivation, creativity, and supportive relationships. Being Smart about Gifted Learning is about finding and embracing opportunities to encourage children’s strengths, and nurture their well-being."
“By presenting exciting new work on mindsets, as well as recent research findings on expertise and cognitive neuroscience, these authors show the importance of habits of mind in cognitive development. This book will prompt re-examination of many long-held beliefs!”
“Drs. Matthews and Foster have given us not only a comprehensive, intelligently designed, and brilliantly crafted book but one written with extraordinary understanding and compassion. Readers of all kinds – parents, grandparents, teachers, counselors - will recognize that the authors have ‘been there’ and will be grateful for how smart about gifted learning they have become from reading their work.”
“Telra Institute illustrates Matthews & Foster’s Optimal Match in practice, recognizing that learning is fluid and requires ongoing re-evaluation and appropriate levels of challenge. This differentiated, rigorous, and accelerated approach benefits all advanced learners, while instilling in them the practices and values of curiosity, tenacity, initiative, and passion for learning.”
“It’s clear right from the introduction that understanding, nourishing and encouraging children’s unique sets of learning strengths and challenges is the key to accommodating them in their individual educational journeys. Reading this book is a must for anyone who works with children whose focus is optimally developing their capabilities.”
“Drawing on clinical research and real-life examples, and also addressing underrepresented populations, the authors deftly demonstrate how each gifted student is best supported through an individualized Optimal Match educational framework addressing the five “R’s” (being resourceful, reasonable, receptive, respectful, and responsive). This updated edition will be a welcome resource that should be in the hands of all parents and educators alike.”
“Rich with examples, this book highlights the importance of an optimal match between challenging and engaging school and home experiences and opportunities to develop gifts and talents! A practical, thoughtful contribution by two leading experts!”
“Matthews and Foster provide no-nonsense advice based on decades of research. Their Optimal Match approach cuts to the heart of what is essential for all gifted learners—having a curriculum that meets their needs on a variety of levels. The chapters on testing demystify the vocabulary and the process, the benefits and pitfalls, in a clear and concise way.”
“This 3rd edition of Being Smart enlightens, and speaks clearly to the importance of family dynamics, engaging learning experiences, creativity, and core values. The authors provide guidance for nurturing well-being, motivation, and capacities across domains. I recommend this book highly!”
“Being Smart About Gifted Learning is the new generation gifted education guide for parents, educators, policy makers, and anyone who desires a deep understanding into giftedness. Dona Matthews and Joanne Foster have created a compassionate and comprehensive resource by sharing their expertise in the field of gifted education and personal experience.”
Excerpts from Being Smart About Gifted Learning
Each child needs “learning opportunities that challenge them sufficiently and appropriately, along with the right kinds of guidance and support, so they can meet and enjoy those challenges, and feel good about themselves at home and at school.” From Chapter 1, “Perspectives and Paradigm Shifts”
“Creative parenting means welcoming problems as possibilities, as ways of identifying what you can do better. It means pushing beyond your comfort zone, being open to new ideas, and inventing new ways of doing things.” From Chapter 2, “Creativity and Giftedness”
“The only good reason to test gifted learning needs is to figure out how to better meet those needs, putting the focus on diagnosing possible mismatches, rather than on categorizing children as gifted (and not).” From Chapter 3, “Questions and Answers About Testing”
“Rather than seeing IQ as a true measure of a person’s intelligence, it’s more accurate to see it as describing an individual’s functioning at a certain time on a certain number of specific tasks.” From Chapter 4, “Assessments and Tests”
“As much as possible, the Optimal Match approach avoids categorizing some children as gifted (and some therefore as not gifted), and instead focuses on identifying individual children’s subject-specific gifted learning needs.” From Chapter 5, “Mismatch Diagnostics: Labeling Learning Needs, Not People”
“Every child wants to learn. They yearn to be engaged and to have their time in school feel useful and relevant. Those who arrive already knowing big chunks of the curriculum won’t be doing much learning without some kind of change to what’s normally taught, or how it’s taught.” From Chapter 6, “Meeting Gifted Learning Needs in the Regular Classroom”
“A range of options that can nurture high-level development…can be made available in regular classrooms. The objective is to find a good match between the learning needs of your child, and the range of learning opportunities that are available, thinking as broadly as possible.” From Chapter 7, “Other Options: Stretching the Boundaries”
“Recent research points to three recommendations for motivating continued engagement in learning: 1. Match tasks to each child’s ability and interests; 2. Support students’ autonomy; and 3. Create an environment that’s warm, welcoming, inclusive, and accepting.” From Chapter 8, “Motivation and Achievement”
“By providing a dependable environment, and modeling effective coping skills and good problem-solving attitudes, you can go a long way toward helping your child respond effectively to adversity and acquire the emotional resilience they’ll need for making the most of their abilities.” From Chapter 9, “Social, Emotional, and Behavioral Considerations”
“A person’s intelligence is a result of early nurturing experiences, the surrounding cultural milieu, educational paths and circumstances, life events, and other factors, all interwoven with inherited genetic patterns, and organized by the individual as an active agent in creating their own intelligence.” From Chapter 10, “How Does Giftedness Develop? (And What Role Do Parents Play?”
“Successful advocacy can be thought of as a problem-finding and problem-solving process…Gifted advocacy occurs on various levels, from individual parents working toward more appropriate programming for their own child, to a concerned group improving the way an entire district deals with gifted education.” From Chapter 11, “Parents and Teachers: Supporting Children’s Gifted Learning Together
“We hope you’ll continue being smart about gifted learning, open to the wealth of opportunities available for encouraging and supporting gifted-level development in those children and adolescents with whom you work, live, and share the richness of life.” From Chapter 12, “Optimal Learning for All Children”