https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2122-0673
Albert Ziegler, PhD, is Chair Professor of Educational Psychology and Research on Excellence at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. He is the founder and director of the Statewide Counseling and Research Center for the Gifted. In the areas of gifted education and educational psychology, he has published approximately 450 books, chapters, and articles. He developed the actiotope model of giftedness. The actiotope model promotes a systemic view of giftedness. He is particularly concerned with learning resources and effective environments, self-regulated learning, mentorship, and identification of talent. Throughout his career, he has received more than $30 million in funding for his research projects. He is the founding chairman of the European Talent Support Network (ETSN) and the immediate past vice-president of the European Council for High Ability (ECHA). In 2017, he was appointed as the Director of the World Giftedness Center in Dubai.
What led you to the field of gifted education?
I should probably first answer the question: What prevented me from getting involved with gifted education? In Germany at the time after my graduation, there were two major obstacles blocking access.
Gifted education was viewed very critically in Germany for a long time. The terrible experiences of Nazi rule shrouded the topics of elite and elite education like a deep, black shadow. As late as the 1980s, influential politicians warned against ushering in a new era of Nazi ideology like the notion of supremacy via the promotion of the gifted. As a result, many scholars were hesitant to enter this field of research. In my university studies, topics such as talent, giftedness, etc., were not touched upon.
Besides this politically motivated skepticism, there was and still is a scientifically motivated apprehension toward type theories. This means the classification of people into a few groups. And if we are honest with ourselves, the idea that there may be just two types of people—the gifted and the nongifted—is also strange. People differ in degrees, not in categories.
This double skepticism, the political as well as the scientific one, prevented me from exploring gifted education for quite a while. All that changed on February 1, 1994: the day I first became involved, albeit somewhat reluctantly, with the topic; by March 28, 1996—there is an exact date for that, too—I discovered growing enthusiasm, even love for the research.
Now, of course, we are curious to learn what happened on February 1, 1994 and on March 4,1996.
On February 1, 1994, I started as an assistant professor of educational psychology at the University of Munich. Completely unexpectedly, I was asked by faculty professors on that very morning to present plans for a research project on the promotion of high-achieving girls in STEM by evening. So far, I had mainly worked on cognitive development, but hardly on pedagogical issues. Nevertheless, it was the first time I was confronted scientifically with the problem that there were gifted groups (in this case girls in STEM) who were not receiving enough support. Subsequently, I began to devote more time to such issues. But it was not until 2 years later on March 28, that I experienced something of an eye-opener. But to understand it, you first need to know something about the history of psychology.
The cradle of psychology was in medicine and the clinical approach dominated my discipline for a very long time. We were interested in helping people with mental problems and gathered our knowledge mainly with this group of people. But of course this is a very one-sided approach and it leads to a distorted picture. This, by the way, still affects us today in the field of gifted education. Many of the negative stereotypes about gifted people go back to the fact that our first knowledge about them was mainly related to the clinically conspicuous ones. For example, they were more likely to seek help from counseling centers or therapists and thus, caught the attention of researchers. In the next phase, psychology very quickly moved on to studying completely normal psychological processes. In the 1970s, particularly positive cases or developments were also included in the studies. Unfortunately, I encountered this approach quite late and for the first time on March 28. The case then (as it is now) is that gifted education comprises only a small branch of educational psychology.
Two colleagues from the University of Münster had presented an interesting study at a conference. Instead of focusing on isolated variables and studying their effects (e.g., what are the consequences of a certain instructional style), they started from (positive) effects and asked for causes. Out of about 100 classrooms, they looked at those with the highest achievement, those with the most motivated students, and those with the best social skills. Then they asked holistically, what were the causal patterns of such classrooms as defined according to the different criteria: high achievement, motivation, social acuity.
I then looked at the gifted in a similar way: Were they not the group with the best prognosis for learning? If favorable learning prognoses are not solely determined by a genetic lottery, then a closer examination of the successful socialization of gifted children could be worthwhile. And indeed, research robustly supports the assertion that gifted children receive far more educational input. As a result, they are on average better socially integrated than other children, are more mentally stable and resilient, perform better, are even healthier and have a higher life expectancy. Do we not stand to learn something from both the gifted and their socialization that might benefit all children?
Nonetheless, a rather positive perspective on gifted groups should not deter from the fact that even within these groups, problems may still arise. Gifted group members are fallible and their issues can be serious; after all, to err is human. Nevertheless, from an academic perspective, my focus has always been more on learning from the gifted the components of optimal socialization and development in the process of learning.
What areas have held your interest over the years and how have they evolved?
We all have dreams. In many areas we would like to be better, maybe even much better, but sometimes we simply want to be different. Not all of our dreams can be fulfilled. Yet for the gifted, who by definition are those of us with more promising potential, the landscape is a little different. More specifically, if there is congruency between the dreams and the potential of the gifted, then the right opportunities may very well lead to remarkable possibilities. My research in the field of giftedness has always revolved around this basic idea of what we in science can do to help individual dreams of personal development and improvement come true. This is how I ended up working on questions of motivation, self-regulated learning, and mentoring, for example.
Over the years, there was a trend in my interests. I turned more and more to exogenous resources, that is, the environmental conditions in which gifted people can realize their potential. Unfortunately, these types of resources are seldom available in sufficient quantities, so that many dreams fizzle out, are short-lived, or are never fully realized.
Can you tell us about your work as a Founding Director of the Statewide Counseling and Research Centre for the Gifted?
When I was still at the University of Munich in the 1990s, our department was the base for a small counseling center for the gifted. Parents brought their children (who they thought might be gifted) for consultation. Some of the children were indeed gifted; others were not. What the children did have in common was that they were not supported enough in their learning.
The counseling center staff were committed and tried to do a good job. But their resources, especially time resources, were limited. Essentially, the parents were informed of the child’s IQ and provided with a half-hour counseling session. But talent development is far too complex a process to understand for such a short counseling session that itself is based on a superficial diagnosis. My dream became to one day set up a counseling center for the gifted with much better resources. The result was our Statewide Counseling and Research Centre for the Gifted. At its heart was the learning pathway concept, an intensive form of individual counseling, sometimes extending over years. Together with parents, teachers, and others, we support interested gifted students in their learning and provided them with ample learning resources.
Can you tell us about the actiotope model of giftedness, which promotes a systemic concept of giftedness?
Our counseling approach is based on the actiotope model of giftedness (Ziegler et al., Citation2017). It was the first elaborated systemic model of giftedness (Ziegler & Stoeger, Citation2017). The center of attention is not the gifted person, but the system of the individual and the environment in which he or she acts. Our focus was the co-evolution of system components. The growing action repertoire of the gifted always requires the provision of a learning environment that is also constantly evolving and continuously offers new challenging learning opportunities. It is important to also co-evolve the goals and especially the learning goals of the gifted. Resources need to be permanently provided for such a learning pathway, which we have presented in a special subtheory (Ziegler et al., Citation2017). A distinction is made between endogenous resources localized in the gifted person, and exogenous resources, localized in the environment of the gifted. We call the endogenous resources learning capital and the exogenous resources educational capital. To take a closer look at the exogenous resources as an example: We distinguish economic, social, cultural, infrastructural, and didactic educational capital. In some research studies, we were able to show that resources predict talent development substantially better than IQ (Ziegler et al., Citation2019).
The actiotope model forms the basis for us to construct an individual learning pathway for each gifted person and to support them along said pathway (Ziegler & Vialle, Citation2017).
What are some of the most important lessons you have learned from a mentor?
That depends on the definition of mentor. If you accept a broad definition, then certainly my parents were my first mentors. From them, I learned that a fulfilled life consists mainly of two things: First, to live a life of curiosity that leads to many interesting experiences. Secondly, to always try to give more back to society than the fantastic life it gives us in academia. This basic attitude is the most important lesson.
Later, too, I had the good fortune of wonderful mentors. I learned a lot from them, but they also opened many doors for me. While we are tempted to think of our successes as our own achievements, this fails to recognize the privileged position from which we were able to achieve these successes and the part others played in them.
The positive experiences with my mentors, along with very strong scientific evidence for the effectiveness of mentoring, were important reasons why I run Global Talent Mentoring together with my colleague Prof. Heidrun Stoeger from the University of Regensburg. It is the first and still the only global mentoring program for the gifted. The project started a year ago and already boasts participants from over 50 countries and across all continents. The goal is to identify the top talent for every 5 million inhabitants worldwide and to provide them with a personal mentor. We hope to be very close to this goal by 2027.
What kinds of writing and research are you currently working on?
A professor in Germany is expected to write about 8 scientific papers per year. I always aim for about 15, which I write in different fields. I simply get bored concentrating on just one field. Of course, interests play a big role in the selection of research topics, but so do the ongoing funded research projects. At the moment, I have four major funded projects (i.e., funding of at least 1 million euros). These projects are dedicated to four topics: promoting learning pathways for talented students in school, the Global Talent Mentoring Program, causes of gender gaps in STEM, and talent development in STEM in general. Besides these topics, I am working on some smaller projects and three books at the same time. They are about the actiotope model, education and learning capitals, and artificial intelligence. However, they are all long-term projects.
Aside from these activities, I am also active as an editor of books to which I contribute overview chapters. You see, our job is exciting and always the exact opposite of boring.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Suzanna E. Henshon
Suzanna E. Henshon earned a PhD at The College of William & Mary in 2005. She writes full-time and has 370 publications. In 2019, she published Teaching Empathy: Strategies for Building Emotional Intelligence in Today’s Students with Prufrock Press. Email: [email protected]
References
- Ziegler, A., Chandler, K., Vialle, W., & Stoeger, H. (2017). Exogenous and endogenous learning resources in the actiotope model of giftedness and its significance for gifted education. Journal for the Education of the Gifted, 40(4), 310–333. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162353217734376
- Ziegler, A., Debatin, T., & Stoeger, H. (2019). Learning resources and talent development from a systemic point of view. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1445(1), 39–51. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.14018
- Ziegler, A., & Stoeger, H. (2017). Systemic gifted education. A theoretical introduction. The Gifted Child Quarterly, 61(3), 183–193. https://doi.org/10.1177/0016986217705713
- Ziegler, A., Stoeger, H., & Balestrini, D. (2017). Systemic gifted education. In C. O´Reilly, T. Cross, & J. Riedl Cross (Eds.), Provisions for gifted students (pp. 15–56). CTYI Press.
- Ziegler, A., & Vialle, W. (2017). Using the actiotope model of giftedness to bridge the gap between experiences and practice. In J. A. Plucker, A. N. Rinn, & M. C. Makel (Eds.), From giftedness to gifted education: Reflecting theory in practice (pp. 203–226). Prufrock Press.