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Joyce VanTassel-Baska's work reaches to Kazakhstan

Former Executive Director of the Center for Gifted Education

Joyce VanTassel-BaskaJoyce VanTassel-Baska, EdD., Smith Professor Emerita is working on a year long project with teachers in Kazakhstan to provide coursework in gifted education as the country launches its gifted education program.  She has designed three courses for faculty from Kazakhstan's Intellectual Schools and will be traveling to the country four times to deliver the coursework as well as conducting an online component for each course.  Kazakhstan is the former part of the USSR where Sputnik was launched.  The project is sponsored through Johns Hopkins University's Center for Talented Youth.

She is also working with the Indiana Department of Public Instruction on a curriculum development project in language arts across the next two years.  In Year 1, selected Indiana teachers designed units of study under her guidance that were aligned with the new common core but differentiated for the gifted.  The teachers just finished piloting the units in their classroom and collecting preliminary data on student learning.  A new group of teachers begin field-testing the units this spring, with the goal of dissemination online to teachers statewide by by 2013.

She is the keynote speaker at two state conferences on the gifted this spring--one in Oklahoma and one in New Jersey.  Her topics focus on working with promising learners from poverty and the importance of designing STEM education for the gifted.

She has been invited to be a keynote speaker at two international conferences on gifted education in Hong Kong in May and Dubai, UAE in July.  her topic at these conferences will be on issues and trends in  talent development around the world.

See Curriculum Vitae