On Human Potential

According to experts in educational measurement, current and past performance remains the best single predictor of future performance. This book seeks to maximize individual and institutional efforts to support students optimal development, specifically their talents. The Talent Record introduced a common language, cataloging, and recording levels of talent achieved thus far on a Talent Profile page. Communicating accomplishments in a common language across talent fields unites the ever-changing team of individuals associated with a child’s development and advances meaningful educational practice. 

On Human Potential: Nurturing Talents and Cultivating Expertise represents an important breakthrough in examining the talent development process in the school context, how to find it and how to respond to students who exhibit advanced behaviors in specific domains. It is a “must read” for busy practitioners who want to be guided in their work with talented learners and offers practical advice to other educators and parents who want to ensure that students who show abilities in areas of learning have opportunities that match them., This book fills a gap in the gifted education literature by focusing on the development of talent in those domains currently identified in the federal definition. I particularly liked the discussion related to converting strengths into talents. Being able to observe specific characteristics and achievements to create a multi-dimensional portrait would support educators’ cultivation of talent in each and every learner., As a student of Dr. Sandra Kay, I remember how moving and unusual it felt to have a teacher focus on understanding and encouraging the potential in my little self. For me, this included her generously reading and responding to endless pages of my early creative writing that I would type in my basement and vulnerably deliver to her desk. Now, many years later, as a parent grappling with how to guide my own child toward opportunities that match her interests and abilities, Dr. Kay's wisdom on identifying and building expertise, and her Talent Record as a tool, offer a blueprint for moving forward., Sandra Kay’s book is a timely and badly needed corrective to the shameful disregard that educators have shown over recent decades for meeting the needs of gifted and talented students in regular classrooms. Using innovative, simple-to-implement methods, and providing clear guidelines and exemplars, Kay empowers teachers, schools, parents, and communities to unite in recognizing, tracking, and fostering the unique abilities of our most precocious and creative students., Every classroom K-12 is an opportunity to discover and develop talent.  There is potential in children and it is our obligation as educators to understand how this potential can be nourished and guided.  While developing expertise is complex, it follows patterns and Sandra Kay helps us understand these patterns.   Through her experience, knowledge, and caring for students and teachers, she challenges us to accept this wonderful obligation to guide students from potential to expertise.

Sandra I. Kay has a Doctor of Education in Special Education and Master of Education in Instructional Practices from Teachers College, Columbia University, where she remained as a Visiting Scholar for 10 years. Her Bachelor and Master of Science in Art Education and the grounding of over 30 years of K-12 teaching directed her research focus on developing talent/expertise and on the problem-finding aspects of creative thought, visual thinking, and other habits of mind that engage the imagination and promote self-directed inquiry in children and adults.