Talbot S. Hook

Background: When I was in college, I ignored my parents’ advice to get my teaching license. They were both teachers, and I thought that career choice was a bit too close to home, so to speak. It was only after I graduated that I realized I was in fact interested in education. So I got a Master’s and spent five-and-a-half good years at a rural school in Iowa, finally realizing that I needed to expand my scope. To that end, I began applying to doctoral programs and landed at the University of Connecticut’s Renzulli Center for Creativity, Gifted Education, and Talent Development. My time there shaped the trajectory of my professional ambitions and convinced me that I ultimately wanted a clinical professorship—in short, I wanted to work with current and future educators. When this job came open at UGA, I pounced on it, and, now that I’m here, I hope to bring my knowledge and skills to bear on bettering the landscape for advanced learners in Georgia and across the United States.

Research: Overall, I find myself interested in making sure that research makes its way into practice. Research that remains in the Ivory Tower is functionally inert. Only when it makes its way into practitioners’ hands is it significant. To that end, during my doctoral studies, I studied practitioners’ and researchers’ beliefs about giftedness, gifted students, and gifted education to detect paradigmatic differences between the two groups. Beliefs drive education at all levels, and differences in belief may shape potential gaps between research and practice.

Beyond that, I have studied stress and anxiety management in honors students, professional learning for educators of the gifted, gifted rating scales, technology pedagogy, and second-language learning (both Chinese and English as a Second Language). I am currently developing an instrument to gauge beliefs in gifted education, and my future research will likely play out in that arena. I am also interested in education writ large—specifically the beliefs, assumptions, and goals that force it into tensions between competing but legitimate values (for instance, between individual interest and educational standards). The basic thread through all these investigations is formed from the belief I have in equitable excellence for all students.