Gifted Children

I've read the article of this week and was wondering about the “gifted children”. What would happen to the gifted children if we only work towards academic standards? I, personally, share children’s strengths with my colleagues and the parents and encourage them to investigate on them.    

As cited in Pyle and DeLuca’s article, “Brookhart (2003, 2004) asserts the importance of integrating assessment with developmentally appropriate, individualized instruction to move learners from their initial level of knowledge toward the achievement of academic standards”. According to their theory, children do not have the opportunity to improve and develop their skills more than academic standards. The article also grabbed my attention, “… having a standardized curriculum is critical; it is a building block to the next step, she did not allow it to guide all student learning. Instead she explicitly described a flexible curricular stance stating.” I believe having flexible curriculum would help the majority of the children promote their skills.