Abstract
The invitation to write a brief summary highlighting Belin-Blank Center partnerships that support talent development in youth led my mind to channel the 1946 Frank Capra movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The existential storyline from that classic film reveals the merit of relationships when considered from the vantage of nonexistence. The moral? In life, what counts is the relationship—the partnership—between individuals and among organizations because it is the partnership that contributes to an individual’s, as well as an organization’s, “wonderful life.” Five lessons, each with specific recommendations, emerge from this review of Belin-Blank Center partnerships.
“ . . . relationships that became ongoing partnerships aimed at inspiring excellence and nurturing potential in tens of thousands of young talented people and their educators.”
Memorable movies not only convey an enduring moral, they offer timeless settings and fascinating characters who demonstrate personal characteristics to be emulated or, sometimes, eschewed. Together, the setting and characters reveal compelling storylines. The setting for the Belin-Blank Center’s wonderful life starts in one state and the early cast of characters includes just a few individuals whose first action is an initial act of collaboration. That action evolved into more complex and deeper relationships that became ongoing partnerships aimed at inspiring excellence and nurturing potential in tens of thousands of young talented people and their educators.
The Setting
Setting: State of Iowa, University of Iowa College of Education 2 Belin-Blank Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development (B-BC). Named for the founding families (Belin and Blank), the University of Iowa’s Belin-Blank Center would not exist were it not for the prescience, philanthropy, and partnership between the two founding families, the Belin family, headed by David and Connie Belin, and the Blank family, headed by Myron and Jacqueline N. Blank. In the late 1970s, these four individuals, all of whom lived in Iowa’s state capital of Des Moines, recognized that in Iowa, like most states at the time, there were few services or programs for gifted children. Not willing to maintain the status quo, the two couples set out to find a university partner to collaborate on the development of gifted programming that would result in talent development.
Characters
Serendipitously, Connie Belin had been recently appointed by the governor to serve on the State of Iowa Board of Regents, the governing agency for the University of Iowa. In her role as a regent, Connie Belin had reviewed the curriculum vitae (CV) for a newly appointed College of Education assistant professor of counselor education, Dr. Nicholas Colangelo. One line in Professor Colangelo’s CV, the recently edited book, New Voices in Counseling the Gifted (Colangelo & Zaffrann, 1979), caught Connie’s eye. Dr. Colangelo was invited—and agreed — to meet with Connie and David Belin and Myron (Mike) and Jacqueline (Jackie) Blank to discuss the lack of programming for Iowa’s bright students. Other members of the cast would soon include graduate students, faculty researchers, professional staff, and pre-college gifted students. Each individual offers a unique perspective that contributes to the overarching theme of this story of partnership and collaboration.
Introduction to the Storyline and Cast
On that serendipitous day in Des Moines, IA, Dr. Colangelo, representing the University of Iowa, met the Blanks and Belins, private philanthropists with an enduring passion for service. Together they established a partnership that aimed to assure the development of talent in the state of Iowa. On that day began the alignment of stars for a bright future for gifted education in Iowa. The day would extend to decades and the impact would expand well beyond the borders of Iowa.
The partners’ early focus was on professional learning because the founding families and the founding director all recognized that to do anything for gifted students required doing something with their educators. The early days of the partnership established a 3-week summer residential fellowship program designed to promote the professional development of classroom teachers. In today’s parlance, we speak of the goals of such programming as a “disruption” to foster change.
That 3-week summer residential workshop for small groups of teachers represented disruption in two significant ways. First, the emphasis was on the classroom teacher because of the underlying wisdom that bright students needed educational interventions throughout the day, not just during specified hours of the week. The second disruption was that the workshop was on-campus, providing a residential learning program that was highly interactive and responsive to the teachers’ cognitive and social-emotional development. This model of professional development worked and that successful endeavor with teachers became the impetus for the establishment by the State Board of Regents on July 1, 1988, of the Connie Belin and Jacqueline N. Blank International Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development.
The fact that this original professional development program continues today is testament to the validity of putting the educator at the heart of gifted education and talent development (Croft & Wood, 2015). Benjamin Bloom’s (1985) retrospective study of talented and successful adults, followed by Csikszentmihalyi’s et al. (1993) in vivo study of talented teenagers, substantiated the complex interactions among multiple variables that influence teaching and learning. These variables include content expertise, use of time in and out of the classroom, and general teaching behaviors, which either promote or impede talent development.
Beginning Scenes—State and Federal Partnerships
In the early years, the center’s focus was on programming for teachers and students in Iowa. Quickly, these collaborative efforts would expand and involve new partners who, in turn, would contribute to the center’s impact on talent development. However, the Belin-Blank Center’s first partner was the State of Iowa, which provided funding to support a 3-week pre-college program, referred to as the Governor’s Institute, for junior high school students. The state funding seeded the program; however, when Iowa’s state funding for this programming ended, the Blank family endowed a Belin-Blank Center summer program for middle-school students that would sustain this opportunity for Iowa’s talented seventh and eighth graders.
Federal grants also represent a component important in the center’s programming. At the beginning of the 20th century, the center, through the Iowa Department of Education, was awarded a very significant federal technology grant to initiate a statewide Iowa Online Advanced Placement Academy (IOAPA) designed to serve Iowa’s high school students, especially those living in rural areas where access to Advanced Placement remains limited (LeBeau et al., 2020). Today, IOAPA, which is administered through the Belin-Blank Center, is a significant component of the State of Iowa’s support for talented students and their teachers. In addition to the service provided to students, teachers, and schools, IOAPA includes an important research agenda focused on increasing awareness about identification and intervention for talented students who live in rural communities.
Intermediary Scenes—Partnerships Through Philanthropy and Private Foundations
State and federal funding often stimulate new research and programming. The Belin-Blank Center’s online AP academy offers access to advanced coursework to some of Iowa’s highest need students, those who live in rural areas (Baldus et al., 2009). IOAPA became a benchmark of access for rural students whose high schools could not sustain an AP class, let alone an AP program.
However, preparation for high school AP begins well before middle school. A small pilot program, Iowa Excellence (Assouline et al., 2009) in the early 2000s, federally funded by Funds for the Improvement in Education (FIE), revealed that out-of-school programming could improve STEM achievement and aspirations in middle-school students. The results from the pilot program formed the foundation for a proposal to the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation’s (JKCF) highly prestigious Talent Development Award. The JKCF funding led to a modest scale-up of Iowa Excellence through a new program, STEM Excellence and Leadership (STEM Excellence) designed to support middle-school students in pre-advanced high school coursework. STEM Excellence takes a three-pronged approach to talent development by focusing on the discovery of academic aptitude of students through above-level testing (Assouline et al., 2017; Assouline & Lupkowski-Shoplik, 2012), professional development for the STEM Excellence facilitators (Ihrig et al., 2018), and a place-based program for the students. The early findings from the STEM Excellence intervention were presented in a grant proposal to NSF and in July 2017, the grant was approved. The JKCF publication included a description of STEM Excellence in the 2019–2020 report, Small Town, Big Talent: Identifying and Supporting Academically Promising Students in Rural Areas (Lynn & Glynn, 2019).
Subplot: Role of Other Foundations and Organizations
It is common knowledge that Harry Truman served the United States as President Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president; it is less commonly known that he served the last two of President Roosevelt’s four terms. President Roosevelt’s Vice President for his second term was H. A. Wallace who founded, in the late 1920s, one of the first commercial hybrid seed companies, Pioneer Hi-Bred Corn. In the late 1950s, H. A. Wallace and his wife, Ilo, established the Wallace Genetic Foundation as a philanthropic branch. H. A. Wallace’s son, H. B. Wallace, would follow in his father’s footsteps with respect to research and philanthropy, 3 but would not follow in his father’s political footsteps. Of note, H. B. Wallace and his wife, Jocelyn, made two significant gifts to the B-BC. They endowed the Belin-Blank Center’s Assessment and Counseling Clinic. They also endowed the Belin-Blank Center’s Wallace Research Symposium as a way of supporting research and advocacy.
It was during the 2002 Wallace Research Symposium when a representative from the John Templeton Foundation suggested that we submit a proposal that would tackle a “big problem.” The problem referenced the robust research supporting the academic intervention of acceleration and the relative lack of implementation of acceleration, especially whole-grade acceleration, in schools. From this initial contact came the two-volume watershed publication, A Nation Deceived: How Schools Hold Back America’s Brightest Students (Colangelo et al., 2004). Ten years later, Assouline et al. (2015) published another two-volume publication, A Nation Empowered: Evidence Trumps Excuses Holding Back America’s Brightest Students. These publications not only changed the conversation about academic acceleration, they were an impetus for change in state policy regarding academic acceleration (Lupkowski-Shoplik et al., 2018).
In addition to the Wallace Research Symposium, the Wallace Foundation gift established the Wallace Assessment and Counseling Clinic in 2003–2004. During the clinic’s nascent months, we submitted, in collaboration with Iowa’s Department of Education, a proposal for a federal Javits grant to investigate the characteristics of twice-exceptional students. Receiving this grant in 2005 launched the B-BC’s work in the area of twice-exceptionality, which was grounded in the clinical work from the assessment and counseling clinic. Through a research lens that focused on gifted students with specific learning disabilities (SLD), attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and autism spectrum disorder (ASD), we have added to the growing base of literature that describes best practice for identification and intervention (Assouline & Whiteman, 2011; Doobay et al., 2014; Foley-Nicpon & Assouline, 2015, 2020; Foley-Nicpon et al., 2017).
Ending Scene—Higher Education’s Mission and the Belin-Blank Center
Ever prescient, David Belin recognized that respecting the mission of institutions of higher education, which focus on the intersection of teaching, service, and research, was essential to the success of an endeavor that involved teachers and students. But, what if philanthropists Connie and David Belin and their generous friends, Mike and Jackie Blank, had not sought a university partner? The Belin-Blank Center, housed in the University of Iowa’s College of Education, would not exist. One need only to review the record to understand what could have been lost. The record is proof of the power of partnerships. Private philanthropists, with a passion for service and a goal of developing the talent of young students and their teachers, provided an initial investment of time and private funding to a public university’s faculty and staff who passionately adhere to the university’s three-prong mission of teaching, service, and research. The initial investment has grown, been re-invested, and continues to impact thousands of lives.
Conclusion: This Wonderful Life
This is a true story, and as such could never be replicated exactly because not only have times changed, time marches on. Nevertheless, we can still look to the past for general lessons that can be replicated by individuals and organizations in their quest to nurture potential, inspire excellence, and develop talent through partnerships:
Focus on the intersection of a core mission that includes teaching, service, and research because that mission is the heart of talent development.
Specific recommendation: Review the mission of your organization and that of the potential partner to understand how the two missions intersect and where there is opportunity for growth for both partners. It’s important that both organizations recognize the potential for growth.
Listen—and learn—when private partners seek your professional expertise because private philanthropy has the power to impact your efforts to advocate and change policy.
Specific recommendation: Whether you are being sought for your expertise, or you approach an organization because of your expertise, it is still important to remain open to learning and exploring new ideas, especially about your specific area of “expertise.”
Start with partners who share a common ideology, yet remain creative, curious, and open to new ideas because that is the only way to engender change.
Specific recommendation: In addition to building on your expertise, as mentioned above, invite those with alternative perspectives to share their expertise and or junior colleagues who, by virtue of their more recent training, will have new perspectives on old problems. In addition to experts, advocacy involves stakeholders. Stakeholders are not only those individuals who fit our ideology; those who do not match an ideology are also stakeholders.
Consider natural endings, for example, specified grant periods, as opportunities to seek new partners and expand your programming because fortune favors those who are active and willing to take risks.
Specific recommendation: All grants have a natural ending; however, do not wait until the final year of a grant to consider new funding sources. One of the most important—and difficult—things you can do is to submit grants to multiple organizations so that you can build upon the comments of reviews to improve your chances of success.
Recognize the role of documentation of the products of your partnerships through research, teaching, and service; that documentation is evidence for advocacy and policy changes.
Specific recommendation: A grant proposal and the agreement between partners are often good starting points for the documentation. Artifacts of your teaching and service as they pertain to the partnership are important components of the historical record, often serving as primary sources. Articles that are written for local news sources or local publications help to tell the story of your partnership and the work accomplished. Peer-reviewed articles of the research, including the evaluation of a specific project, remain the gold standard for documentation. Consider each form of documentation as the ringing of a bell.
Supplemental Material
sj-pdf-1-gct-10.1177_1076217520964200 – Supplemental material for Inspiring Excellence and Nurturing Potential Through Partnership and Collaboration: It’s a Wonderful Life
Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-gct-10.1177_1076217520964200 for Inspiring Excellence and Nurturing Potential Through Partnership and Collaboration: It’s a Wonderful Life by Susan Assouline in Gifted Child Today
Footnotes
Author’s Note
A full listing of the Belin-Blank Center’s faculty and staff appears in the Supplemental Appendix. This article is a direct reflection of their efforts as colleagues.
Conflict of Interest
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
Bio
Susan Assouline, PhD, is the director of the University of Iowa Belin-Blank Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development. She holds the Myron and Jacqueline N. Blank Endowed chair in Gifted Education. She is interested in twice-exceptionality and the academic talent development of elementary students. She is the lead author of The Iowa Acceleration Scale (2009). Dr. Assouline is co-author of Developing Math Talent: A Guide for Educating Gifted and Advanced Learners in Math and co-editor of A Nation Empowered: How Evidence Trumps the Excuses Holding Back America’s Brightest Students.
References
Supplementary Material
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