How professional learning impacts gifted educators' perceptions and practice

Effective equity-driven professional learning (PL) is one strategy to work against the disproportionality of marginalized populations in gifted and talented programs. This professional learning should be steeped in equity and culturally responsive practices, ongoing, job-embedded, collaborative, sustained, and operationalized within the context of the educators’ lived and work experiences. In a critical convergent mixed-methods research design, we, as university researchers, partnered with a gifted coordinator in a large Texas school district, providing equity-focused professional learning to gifted resources teachers (GRTs), and asking GRTs to pass this training on to other educators, on characteristics of students identifying as Latiné, bilingual, and gifted to determine the impact of the PL on GRTs’ sense of cultural awareness and knowledge of gifted characteristics for this population of learners. We collected pre- and post-PL quantitative data on two instruments to measure GRTs’ perceptions, as well as qualitative data on PL exit surveys, GRTs’ logs of training other educators, an interview of the gifted coordinator, and researchers’ notes. Quantitative findings included short-term positive changes on GRTs’ cultural self-awareness, but without consistent long-term changes on the same measure. Additionally, GRTs showed growth in identifying characteristics of gifted Latiné bilingual students. Qualitative data resulted in four themes: understandings, outcomes, barriers, and needs. Mixed methods analysis contributed to the discussion of white exceptionalism and adult learning theory. Results provide continued empirical support for the Four Zone Equity-Driven Professional Learning Model (4ZEPL).