Summary

`This is a book which is a must to be read by those teaching able children and of course parents with children who appear to show giftedness or a high level of talent′ - Dr L F Lowenstein, National Association for Gifted Children Newsletter

David A Sousa, author of the bestselling How the Brain Learns (2000) and How the Special Needs Brain Learns (2001) presents a new book dealing with gifted and talented students. How the Gifted Brain Learns assists the reader in turning research on the brain function of intellectually and artistically advanced students into practical classroom activities and strategies.

David A Sousa shows how the brain processes information and offers both simple and complex strategies that will help identify and challenge gifted students in the classroom. Building on the latest discoveries in neuroscience, learning and the nature of intelligence, this book examines why traditional talent-identification techniques are inadequate (and often inaccurate), and presents methods that will allow identification of giftedness and talent potential with greater accuracy than ever before.

This book will help answer such questions as:

- How are the brains of gifted students different?

- What kinds of strategies are particularly effective for students with particular gifts?

- What can be done to adequately challenge gifted students in our schools?

- What can we do to identify and help gifted students who are underachievers?

- How can we identify and help students who are both gifted and learning disabled?

Schools have a responsibility to provide for the needs of gifted and talented students--to challenge them so that they may reach their fullest potentials. Offering real strategies for real classrooms, How the Gifted Brain Learns is an indispensable tool for all educators--school administrators, teachers, staff developers, preservice students, and even parents who want to better understand their gifted children, and help them reach exceptional levels of performance.

Choice Review

This is a superb text covering the multifaceted area of gifted education. It examines the needs of gifted students and provides fascinating insight into the thought processes of gifted children and how the "gifted brain" operates. Each chapter offers the practitioner page after page of suggestions on how to apply the research discussed to educational practice. The applications sections are extremely intriguing and offer more than the traditional "discovery learning" approach to teaching these remarkable children. After reading some of these suggestions, the reader may get the urge to go immediately to a classroom and try some of the teaching strategies with students. Specific musical, linguistic, and mathematical talents are given separate chapters. Issues of minority underrepresentation in classes for gifted children are addressed in a compelling manner. The reader friendly text avoids unnecessary jargon, even though a large part of the first few chapters deals with the physiology and neurology of the human brain. This will be a great addition to the library of any teacher who works with diverse groups of children. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduate, graduate, research, and professional collections. J. D. Neal University of Central Missouri