The Hormel Foundation Gifted and Talented Symposium

With more than two decades of experience working in museums and informal settings, Jennifer Stancil, President and CEO of the Glazer Children's Museum, has created exhibit spaces, innovative programming, and national television for millions of kids, teachers and parents. As her informal teaching world - the laboratory of the museum - collides with the day to day learning in schools, she muses on the advances of technology, the preparation of our kids for the careers of tomorrow and our mindset to connect the two.

As we consider how our kids learn, are we able to spark - and sustain - their imagination? What helps kids grow into the imaginative, creatives we need for a future filled with coding, robotics, and much more? We'll play with the notion of how to raise the Imagination Generation, and what our educational ecosystem has to do to pivot to ensure we raise kids for the transformative and disruptive technologies that will face them.

Jennifer Stancil has worked at McWane Science Center, Marbles Kids Museum (formerly Exploris) and the Carnegie Science Center prior to moving to take the helm of the Glazer Children's Museum, named one of the top ten Children's Museums in the nation in 2016. BrainCake, a website she created to encourage girls and STEM, won the coveted Roy L. Schafer Leading Edge Award from the Association of Science and Technology Centers. She is a MacArthur Digital Media Learning Competition winner for an augmented reality-based spy school, Click!, and an Emmy Award Winner for a national parenting show she created for PBS Affiliates called iQ: smartparent. She currently serves on the National Advisory Boards of the National Girls Collaborative Project, as well as to Superhero School (working title), a PBS Children's television show in current production.

This presentation is all about redemption, adventure, and using your story to reach your learners. Steven C. Smith made a career out of using his own story to reach the young people he worked with and build relationships that were then used to make science relevant to his students as individuals. In this session, he will share his journey and preview his “rubber meets the road” approach to implementing real relevance into your own pedagogy to reach every student where they are.

Steven C. Smith is the Education Specialist for NASA's Educator Professional Development Collaborative at the Johnson Space Center. Steven helps to develop, package, and deliver professional development that translates the work and discoveries of NASA for use in the classroom and helps teachers make content more accessible for all their students as individuals. He works with educators all over the country, helping them create culturally responsive lessons that will engage students that have previously felt left out of the amazing kinds of work NASA is doing.

He holds a Master's Degree from the University of Washington, and Bachelor's Degree from Georgia College and State University. Prior to his work with NASA, Steven worked in K-12 education for nearly 20 years, most recently as Life Sciences Chair at a minority serving inner city school in Georgia. He has taught special education, regular education, honors, and AP students in Georgia, Washington, and New Jersey.

Does your program for gifted students seem merely updated or has it been truly redesigned to meet the needs of today's gifted learners? Old habits run deep and some of the ways we do gifted education have become habitual. To modernize our work, we should consider making upgrades that replace redundancy with innovative approaches in four areas. In redesigned programs, curriculum goals highlight whole child tenets, global perspectives and future work options. Instruction addresses the relationship between how we teach and how we schedule, group and use classroom space. Updated assessment types replace dated assessments. Classroom environments support new roles for developing empowered learners. The future of gifted education is dependent upon redesigning gifted programs to meet the ever-changing needs of our students.

Patti Drapeau is an educational consultant, conference presenter, and author. Patti is a consultant for the Maine Department of Education in gifted education. She serves as adjunct faculty at the University of Southern Maine where she teaches graduate courses in gifted education. As a presenter, Patti conducts keynote and workshop sessions in the United States and abroad on the topics of differentiation, creativity, and gifted education. Patti has more than twenty years of experience teaching/coordinating programs for the gifted and talented in Freeport, Maine. Patti received the New England Region Gifted and Talented award for outstanding contributions in Gifted Education. She also received the Maine Educators of the Gifted and Talented award for exemplary service. Patti is the author of five books and a variety of articles.

Hidden Human Computers, a title from ABDOPublishing, discusses how in the 1940s, Black women made critical contributions to NASA by performing calculations that made it possible for the nation's astronauts to fly into space and return safely to the Earth. Hear one of the book's authors, a granddaughter of one of these women, discuss the work that changed history but was hidden from its pages for decades.

Ayaan Natala is a young writer, organizer, artist, entrepreneur, and public speaker. She was born and raised in Saint Paul, Minnesota. At Macalester College, she studied American Studies and Political Science with a concentration in Human Rights and Humanitarianism. Her writings are published in the Huffington Post, Macalester Digital Commons, and the Human Rights Observer, tackling global governance, social movements, and revolutionary political theory. At Macalester College, she was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, Avid tutor and teaching aid in Saint Paul Public Schools (SPPS), Emerging Scholars Mentor, Department of Multicultural Life- College Access and Success Consultant, Black Women of the Diaspora (BWOD) Co-facilitator, and a Research Assistant for the Human Computers Digital Archive at the MN Science Museum. As a recent Davis Project for Peace recipient, she is collaborating with Ujamaa Place to create an art therapy and entrepreneurship summer program for formerly incarcerated men before she enters a PhD program. She is an alum of the Harvard Kennedy Public Policy and Leadership Program.