EXCEPTIONALLY GIFTED STUDENTS IN THE ENGLISH CLASSROOM.

Teaching is one of the most plural job fields that we can find at our society. Education must be integrative and inclusive: everybody has a place in it and is our task as future teachers make the students equal among themselves and with the rest of the society. In this sense, the role of the teacher as a social equalizer is essential.

That is the reason why we received a very interesting talk about one of the collective that is not always mentioned in that inclusion task that we pointed before: the exceptionally gifted students.

We welcomed in our classroom to María Luz Bueno, one member of the AVAST association (Asociación Valenciana de Apoyo al Superdotado y Talentoso) in order to enlarge our view of what educational needs means.

It was an enriching experience, a dialogue based on the exchange of ideas and own experiences in order to demystify the main prejudices of this type of students like “they always belong to high social classes” or “they don’t have friends” . It was also a great chance to know and review the different laws which try to manage with exceptionally gifted students, making emphasis in the inclusion tasks.

The interventions of our peers were extremely interesting, they were focused on how identify an exceptionally gifted student in our day-by-day lessons and how to deal with this type of children in the English subject. There was also a group curiosity of how to develop strategies to interact and how to make the lessons exciting for them. And it was at that point when the importance of the English language was high-lighted: languages are transversal and it could be applied to the rest of high-school subjects. So the learning of a new language could be the perfect starting situation to propose challenge for exceptionally gifted students.

Finally we met the different methodologies that we can use in the classroom: like the ones related with new technologies or new ways of regarding education some of them such interesting as flipped classroom) or the ideological gatherings.