Margriet Walker is an experienced Primary and High School teacher with a specialisation in Gifted and Talented Education. She holds a Postgraduate Certificate of Gifted Education at the UNSW (Australia), a BA in Theatre Studies (Acting) from the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten in Amsterdam; a BA with Honours in English Literature from Durham University (UK), and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Education from Murdoch University (Western Australia). She has a range of experience in developing and running programs for gifted students K1-10 within the mainstream classroom setting as well as in pullout extension and enrichment classes. She taught Drama, Media and English from K7-12 before swapping to Primary School level as a gifted specialist to take responsibility for Reach, a K4-7 English and Mathematics extension class. Currently she is the PEAC coordinator and teacher of the Albany region in WA, Australia.

Before qualifying as a teacher, Margriet did over seven years of community outreach work, including drama, media, writing workshops, and developing plays and movies with young people, many with social and emotional difficulties.

 

What’s the deal with Gifted Education?

The goal of gifted education is to provide academically gifted students with the opportunity to fulfil their high potential. Research across the world has consistently shown that this does not automatically happen in the mainstream classroom, and that gifted students do not automatically ‘float to the top’.

Highly gifted students who have never been extended in class can struggle with working memory issues. Since they haven’t had to use it, it never got developed very well. They can have difficulties planning, concentrating, and persisting with challenging tasks. They haven’t had to do any of these in order to succeed: everything was always really easy. Many gifted students fail to develop the necessary study skills to succeed in later school life, or at university. After all, they have never had need of them before. When the moment comes that they do need such skills (and it always does), plenty of them fail.

Gifted education aims to create educational challenges for students who do not receive the benefits of day-to-day academic struggles in the mainstream classroom. Pullout programs like PEAC (the Primary Extension and Challenge program in Western Australia), also offer highly gifted students the opportunity to socialise with similarly gifted peers. Particularly for rural and remote students, participating in a program like PEAC is often the first time that they do not have to adapt their language and conversational topics so others can understand them, and relate to them.