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Collaborative Relationships on the Path to Greatness
Stories of Eminence
This inquiry into great achievement utilized the narratives of scholars who are eminent in the field of gifted education. They each veered away from focusing on IQ and instead considered the creativity and strong abilities that reside in every child.
Music
Shannon and the Clams. (2018). “The boy,” Onion. Easy Eye.
Music
Shannon and the Clams. (2018). “The boy,” Onion. Easy Eye.
Dr. Joseph Renzulli
Dr. Joseph S. Renzulli is a leader and pioneer in gifted education and applying the pedagogy of gifted education teaching strategies to all students. The American Psychological Association named him among the 25 most influential psychologists in the world. He received the Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Award for Innovation in Education, considered by many to be “the Nobel” for educators, and was a consultant to the White House Task Force on Education of the Gifted and Talented. His work on the Three Ring Conception of Giftedness, the Enrichment Triad Model and curriculum compacting and differentiation were pioneering efforts in the 1970s, and he has contributed hundreds of books, book chapters, articles, and monographs to the professional literature, many of which have been translated to other languages. Dr. has received more than $50 million in research grants and several million dollars of additional funding for professional development and service projects.
Dr. Renzulli established UConn’s annual Confratute Program with fellow Educational Psychology Professor Sally Reis. This summer institute on enrichment-based differentiated teaching has served more than 35,000 teachers from around the world since 1978. Dr. Renzulli also established the UConn Mentor Connection, a summer program that enables high-potential high school students to work side by side with leading scientists, historians, and artists and other leading edge university researchers. He is also the founder along with Dr. Reis of the Joseph S. Renzulli Gifted and Talented Academy in Hartford, Connecticut which has become a model for local and national urban school reform for high potential/low income students.
His most recent work is an online personalized learning program that provides profiles of each student’s academic strengths, interests, learning styles, and preferred modes of expression. This unique program also has a search engine that matches multiply coded resources with student profiles. Teachers also use the program to select and infuse high engagement enrichment activities into any and all standardized curriculum topics.
Music
Hot Chip. (2007). “Boy from school,” The warning. EMI; Astralwerks.
Dr. Renzulli established UConn’s annual Confratute Program with fellow Educational Psychology Professor Sally Reis. This summer institute on enrichment-based differentiated teaching has served more than 35,000 teachers from around the world since 1978. Dr. Renzulli also established the UConn Mentor Connection, a summer program that enables high-potential high school students to work side by side with leading scientists, historians, and artists and other leading edge university researchers. He is also the founder along with Dr. Reis of the Joseph S. Renzulli Gifted and Talented Academy in Hartford, Connecticut which has become a model for local and national urban school reform for high potential/low income students.
His most recent work is an online personalized learning program that provides profiles of each student’s academic strengths, interests, learning styles, and preferred modes of expression. This unique program also has a search engine that matches multiply coded resources with student profiles. Teachers also use the program to select and infuse high engagement enrichment activities into any and all standardized curriculum topics.
Music
Hot Chip. (2007). “Boy from school,” The warning. EMI; Astralwerks.
Dr. Sally Reis
Sally Reis is a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor and a Teaching Fellow in Educational Psychology at the University of Connecticut. She previously held the Letitia Neag Chair in Educational Psychology. She was a public school teacher and administrator for 15 years, prior to her work at UConn. She has authored more than 250 articles, books, book chapters, monographs and technical reports. She has traveled extensively across the country conducting workshops and providing professional development for school districts on enrichment programs and gender equity programs. Sally serves on the editorial board of the Gifted Child Quarterly, and is a past-president of The National Association for Gifted Children. She is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and was named a Distinguished Scholar of the National Association for Gifted Children.
Music
Zombies. (1968). “Time of the season,” Odyssey and oracle. EMI.
Music
Zombies. (1968). “Time of the season,” Odyssey and oracle. EMI.
Bob & Don
Dr. Sternberg and Dr. Ambrose have collaborated on several edited chapter books and their stories unpredictably overlapped in my interviews. Below are just a few of these collaborative creations.
Ambrose, D., & Sternberg, R. J. (Eds.). (2016). Creative intelligence in the 21st century. SensePublishers.
Ambrose, D., & Sternberg, R. J. (Eds.). (2016). Giftedness and talent in the 21st century: Adapting to the turbulence of globalization. SensePublishers.
Sternberg, R. J., & Ambrose, D. (Eds.). (2021). Conceptions of giftedness and talent. Springer International Publishing
Sternberg, R. J., Renzulli, J. S., & Ambrose, D. (2024). The field of giftedness—Past, present, and prospects: Insights from Joseph S. Renzulli and Robert J. Sternberg, Roeper Review, 46(3), 233245.
Music
Gossip. (2009). “Heavy Cross,” Music for men. Columbia Records.
Ambrose, D., & Sternberg, R. J. (Eds.). (2016). Creative intelligence in the 21st century. SensePublishers.
Ambrose, D., & Sternberg, R. J. (Eds.). (2016). Giftedness and talent in the 21st century: Adapting to the turbulence of globalization. SensePublishers.
Sternberg, R. J., & Ambrose, D. (Eds.). (2021). Conceptions of giftedness and talent. Springer International Publishing
Sternberg, R. J., Renzulli, J. S., & Ambrose, D. (2024). The field of giftedness—Past, present, and prospects: Insights from Joseph S. Renzulli and Robert J. Sternberg, Roeper Review, 46(3), 233245.
Music
Gossip. (2009). “Heavy Cross,” Music for men. Columbia Records.
Dr. Don Ambrose
Author, Speaker and Award-Winning Teacher Seeks Solutions to Longtime Challenges
Dogmatic beliefs can lead to serious consequences – disastrous wars, economic collapse, genocide and authoritarian rule, to name a few. Dr. Don Ambrose, Professor of Graduate Education in the College of Liberal Arts, Education, and Sciences, has published numerous books, including two on dogmatism – How Dogmatic Beliefs Harm Creativity and Higher Level Thinking (with Robert Sternberg) and Confronting Dogmatism in Gifted Education (with Robert Sternberg and Bhararth Sriraman). They include chapters by leading thinkers from multiple academic disciplines. Some collaborators in these projects include psychologists Howard Gardner, Dean Keith Simonton, James Kaufman, Mark Runco and Bob Altemeyer; historian Andrew Bacevich; sociologist Daniel Chirot; legal scholar Meir Dan-Cohen; political philosopher Kristen Renwick Monroe; and educational researcher David C. Berliner.
These books and his other work will be highlighted on the Routledge Education Arena Expert Panel website throughout 2014. Each year, Routledge selects a few scholars to feature in this way. This work has led to invitations for Ambrose to speak at academic conferences around the world. Recently, he presented keynotes in Dubai; Istanbul; Jerusalem; Ulm, Germany; and Winnipeg, Canada; and he will be doing another in Kraków, Poland. His appearances at these conferences illustrate the recognition he has as a leader of interdisciplinary scholarly work and as the editor of the Roeper Review, a leading journal in gifted education.
This past fall, Ambrose also received Rider’s Frank N. Elliot Award for faculty in recognition of his outstanding work at the University. Ambrose views this scholarship as a way to generate positive change and dialogue among disciplines that otherwise operate in silos. “It’s hard to understand any of the big issues without looking at them from an interdisciplinary perspective. Dogmatism pervades everything: academia, the newsroom, politics, our personal lives. When we start to exchange ideas, we begin to create solutions.”
Music
Sierra Ferrell. (2025). “Years,” Something borrowed, something new: A tribute to John Anderson. Easy Eye Sound.
Dogmatic beliefs can lead to serious consequences – disastrous wars, economic collapse, genocide and authoritarian rule, to name a few. Dr. Don Ambrose, Professor of Graduate Education in the College of Liberal Arts, Education, and Sciences, has published numerous books, including two on dogmatism – How Dogmatic Beliefs Harm Creativity and Higher Level Thinking (with Robert Sternberg) and Confronting Dogmatism in Gifted Education (with Robert Sternberg and Bhararth Sriraman). They include chapters by leading thinkers from multiple academic disciplines. Some collaborators in these projects include psychologists Howard Gardner, Dean Keith Simonton, James Kaufman, Mark Runco and Bob Altemeyer; historian Andrew Bacevich; sociologist Daniel Chirot; legal scholar Meir Dan-Cohen; political philosopher Kristen Renwick Monroe; and educational researcher David C. Berliner.
These books and his other work will be highlighted on the Routledge Education Arena Expert Panel website throughout 2014. Each year, Routledge selects a few scholars to feature in this way. This work has led to invitations for Ambrose to speak at academic conferences around the world. Recently, he presented keynotes in Dubai; Istanbul; Jerusalem; Ulm, Germany; and Winnipeg, Canada; and he will be doing another in Kraków, Poland. His appearances at these conferences illustrate the recognition he has as a leader of interdisciplinary scholarly work and as the editor of the Roeper Review, a leading journal in gifted education.
This past fall, Ambrose also received Rider’s Frank N. Elliot Award for faculty in recognition of his outstanding work at the University. Ambrose views this scholarship as a way to generate positive change and dialogue among disciplines that otherwise operate in silos. “It’s hard to understand any of the big issues without looking at them from an interdisciplinary perspective. Dogmatism pervades everything: academia, the newsroom, politics, our personal lives. When we start to exchange ideas, we begin to create solutions.”
Music
Sierra Ferrell. (2025). “Years,” Something borrowed, something new: A tribute to John Anderson. Easy Eye Sound.
Dr. Robert J. Sternberg
Robert J. Sternberg is Professor of Psychology in the Cornell Human Ecology college at Cornell University. He was previously Provost, Senior Vice President, Regents Professor of Psychology and Education, and George Kaiser Family Foundation Chair of Ethical Leadership at Oklahoma State University. He also is Honorary Professor of Psychology at Heidelberg University.
He was previously Dean of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Psychology and Education at Tufts University, and before that, IBM Professor of Psychology and Education, Professor of Management, and Director of the Center for the Psychology of Abilities, Competencies, and Expertise at Yale University. He is a Past President of the American Psychological Association, the Eastern Psychological Association, Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and the International Association for Cognitive Education and Psychology, as well as Treasurer of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. He has been Editor of Perspectives on Psychological Science, Psychological Bulletin, and The APA Review of Books: Contemporary Psychlogy. He holds 13 honorary doctorates and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Education.
His awards include:
William Stern Award, Institute of Psychology, University of Wroclaw, 2023; Florence L. Denmark Award for Significant Contributions to Psychology, Psychology Department, Pace University, 2019; Grawemeyer Award in Psychology, 2018; William James Fellow Award, Association for Psychological Science, 2017; Ernest R. Hilgard Award for Lifetime Contributions to General Psychology, American Psychological Association, Division of General Psychology (1), 2017; Distinguished Service Award, International Association for Cognitive Education and Psychology, 2011; Presidential Award for Distinguished Lifetime Contributions to the Public Understanding of Psychology, American Psychological Association Division of Media Psychology (46), 2008; Sir Francis Galton Award, International Association of Empirical Aesthetics, 2008; E. Paul Torrance Award, National Association for Gifted Children, 2006; Interamerican Psychologist Award, Interamerican Society of Psychology, 2005; Arnheim Award, Division of Psychology and the Arts (10) of the American Psychological Association, 2005; Anton Jurovsky Award, Slovak Psychological Society, 2004; Arthur W. Staats Award, American Psychological Foundation and the Society for General Psychology (American Psychological Association Division 1), 2003; Farnsworth Award, Division of Psychology and the Arts (10) of the American Psychological Association, 2003; E. L. Thorndike Career Achievement Award, Division of Educational Psychology (15) of the American Psychological Association, 2003; Positive Psychology Network Distinguished Scientist and Scholar Award, 2002; Outstanding Academic Title, CHOICE (American Library Association) for International handbook of giftedness and talent, co-editor, 2001; Distinguished Lifetime Contribution to Psychology Award, Connecticut Psychological Association, 1999; Palmer O. Johnson Award, American Educational Research Association, 1999; James McKeen Cattell Award, Association for Psychological Science, 1999; Distinción of Honor SEK, Institución Educativa SEK, Madrid, 1997; Sylvia Scribner Award, American Educational Research Association (Division C), 1996; International Award, Association of Portuguese Psychologists, 1991; Award for Excellence, Mensa Education and Research Foundation (MERF), 1989; Citation Classic Designation, Institute for Scientific Information for Intelligence, information processing, and analogical reasoning: The componential analysis of human abilities, 1987; Outstanding Book Award, American Educational Research Association for Beyond IQ: A triarchic theory of human intelligence, 1987; Research Review Award, American Educational Research Association (co-recipient), 1986; Distinguished Scholar Award, the National Association for Gifted Children, 1985; Cattell Award, Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology, 1982; Boyd R. McCandless Young Scientist Award, Division of Developmental Psychology (7) of the American Psychological Association, 1982; Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology, American Psychological Association, 1981; Sidney Siegel Memorial Award, Stanford University, 1975; Wohlenberg Prize, Berkeley College, Yale University, 1972.
He is a member of the National Academy of Education and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He also is a member of the Society of Experimental Psychologists.
Sternberg's Google h index is 237, his i-10 index 1227, and he has been cited roughly 240,000 times in the scholarly literature.
He has been listed #1 lifetime ranking in the field of Human Development and Family Studies by ScholarGPS, 2023; He has been listed #15 in the world and #7 in the United States for “Top Scientists in the Field of Psychology” by research.com, May 2023; He is the #1 cited author over the past 10 years by global h-index corrected for self-citation and local g-index in the Journal of Intelligence; #2 in global h-index in the journal Intelligence, in which he does not regularly publish (J. Intell. b, 11(2), 35); He has been listed in the Top 25 Influential Psychologists 2010-2020; He has been listed in the top 2% of scholars in citations in the field of education by Stanford University, November 2020, ranked #3 in citations in the field of education; He has been listed as one of the "30 Most Influential Psychologists Working Today", 2019; He has been listed as one of the “The 50 Most Influential Living Psychologists” by The Best Schools, 2018; listed as one of the “Top 33 Psychologists for Psychology Textbook Citations”, Griggs & Christopher, Teaching of Psychology, 2016, 43(2), p. 114 (ranked #5); listed as one of the “Top 100 Psychologists of the 20th Century,” APA Monitor, July/August 2002, p. 29 (ranked #60); listed as one of the 200 most eminent psychologists of the modern (Post World-War II) era by Diener, Oishi, Park survey in Archives of Scientific Psychology (ranked #61); ISI Highly Cited List in Psychology/Psychiatry (2003–) (based on scientific citations 1981–1999); listed in the Esquire Register recognizing the achievements of outstanding American men and women under 40, 1986; Listed as one of the 100 “Top Young Scientists in the U.S.,” Science Digest, 1984.
He was previously Dean of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Psychology and Education at Tufts University, and before that, IBM Professor of Psychology and Education, Professor of Management, and Director of the Center for the Psychology of Abilities, Competencies, and Expertise at Yale University. He is a Past President of the American Psychological Association, the Eastern Psychological Association, Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and the International Association for Cognitive Education and Psychology, as well as Treasurer of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. He has been Editor of Perspectives on Psychological Science, Psychological Bulletin, and The APA Review of Books: Contemporary Psychlogy. He holds 13 honorary doctorates and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Education.
His awards include:
William Stern Award, Institute of Psychology, University of Wroclaw, 2023; Florence L. Denmark Award for Significant Contributions to Psychology, Psychology Department, Pace University, 2019; Grawemeyer Award in Psychology, 2018; William James Fellow Award, Association for Psychological Science, 2017; Ernest R. Hilgard Award for Lifetime Contributions to General Psychology, American Psychological Association, Division of General Psychology (1), 2017; Distinguished Service Award, International Association for Cognitive Education and Psychology, 2011; Presidential Award for Distinguished Lifetime Contributions to the Public Understanding of Psychology, American Psychological Association Division of Media Psychology (46), 2008; Sir Francis Galton Award, International Association of Empirical Aesthetics, 2008; E. Paul Torrance Award, National Association for Gifted Children, 2006; Interamerican Psychologist Award, Interamerican Society of Psychology, 2005; Arnheim Award, Division of Psychology and the Arts (10) of the American Psychological Association, 2005; Anton Jurovsky Award, Slovak Psychological Society, 2004; Arthur W. Staats Award, American Psychological Foundation and the Society for General Psychology (American Psychological Association Division 1), 2003; Farnsworth Award, Division of Psychology and the Arts (10) of the American Psychological Association, 2003; E. L. Thorndike Career Achievement Award, Division of Educational Psychology (15) of the American Psychological Association, 2003; Positive Psychology Network Distinguished Scientist and Scholar Award, 2002; Outstanding Academic Title, CHOICE (American Library Association) for International handbook of giftedness and talent, co-editor, 2001; Distinguished Lifetime Contribution to Psychology Award, Connecticut Psychological Association, 1999; Palmer O. Johnson Award, American Educational Research Association, 1999; James McKeen Cattell Award, Association for Psychological Science, 1999; Distinción of Honor SEK, Institución Educativa SEK, Madrid, 1997; Sylvia Scribner Award, American Educational Research Association (Division C), 1996; International Award, Association of Portuguese Psychologists, 1991; Award for Excellence, Mensa Education and Research Foundation (MERF), 1989; Citation Classic Designation, Institute for Scientific Information for Intelligence, information processing, and analogical reasoning: The componential analysis of human abilities, 1987; Outstanding Book Award, American Educational Research Association for Beyond IQ: A triarchic theory of human intelligence, 1987; Research Review Award, American Educational Research Association (co-recipient), 1986; Distinguished Scholar Award, the National Association for Gifted Children, 1985; Cattell Award, Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology, 1982; Boyd R. McCandless Young Scientist Award, Division of Developmental Psychology (7) of the American Psychological Association, 1982; Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology, American Psychological Association, 1981; Sidney Siegel Memorial Award, Stanford University, 1975; Wohlenberg Prize, Berkeley College, Yale University, 1972.
He is a member of the National Academy of Education and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He also is a member of the Society of Experimental Psychologists.
Sternberg's Google h index is 237, his i-10 index 1227, and he has been cited roughly 240,000 times in the scholarly literature.
He has been listed #1 lifetime ranking in the field of Human Development and Family Studies by ScholarGPS, 2023; He has been listed #15 in the world and #7 in the United States for “Top Scientists in the Field of Psychology” by research.com, May 2023; He is the #1 cited author over the past 10 years by global h-index corrected for self-citation and local g-index in the Journal of Intelligence; #2 in global h-index in the journal Intelligence, in which he does not regularly publish (J. Intell. b, 11(2), 35); He has been listed in the Top 25 Influential Psychologists 2010-2020; He has been listed in the top 2% of scholars in citations in the field of education by Stanford University, November 2020, ranked #3 in citations in the field of education; He has been listed as one of the "30 Most Influential Psychologists Working Today", 2019; He has been listed as one of the “The 50 Most Influential Living Psychologists” by The Best Schools, 2018; listed as one of the “Top 33 Psychologists for Psychology Textbook Citations”, Griggs & Christopher, Teaching of Psychology, 2016, 43(2), p. 114 (ranked #5); listed as one of the “Top 100 Psychologists of the 20th Century,” APA Monitor, July/August 2002, p. 29 (ranked #60); listed as one of the 200 most eminent psychologists of the modern (Post World-War II) era by Diener, Oishi, Park survey in Archives of Scientific Psychology (ranked #61); ISI Highly Cited List in Psychology/Psychiatry (2003–) (based on scientific citations 1981–1999); listed in the Esquire Register recognizing the achievements of outstanding American men and women under 40, 1986; Listed as one of the 100 “Top Young Scientists in the U.S.,” Science Digest, 1984.
The Excitables - Dr. Linda Silverman, Dr. Michael Piechowski, Dr. Frank Falk, and Dr. Nancy Miller
Linda Kreger Silverman, Ph.D., is a licensed clinical and counseling psychologist. She directs the Institute for the Study of Advanced Development, and its subsidiary, the Gifted Development Center in Denver, Colorado, which has assessed over 6,500 children in the last 40 years. This is the largest database on the gifted population. She and her colleagues at Gifted Development Center have developed 40 instruments. For 9 years, she served on the faculty of the University of Denver in Counseling Psychology and Gifted Education. She developed a course on Assessment of the Gifted at University of Denver, which was also a short course taught abroad. She has been studying the assessment, psychology, and education of the gifted since 1961 and has written over 300 articles, chapters, and books, including the textbook Counseling the Gifted and Talented, adopted at 50 colleges.
Michael M. Piechowski, Ph.D., received his M.Sc. in plant physiology from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, his hometown in Poland. After a year of study in Belgium, he came to the United States, obtaining a Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He taught at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, where he met Dr. Kazimierz Dabrowski. They worked together for 8 years. Not interrupting their collaboration, Piechowski returned to the University of Wisconsin to obtain a Ph.D. in counseling psychology. Subsequently, he taught at the University of Illinois, Northwestern University, and Northland College. He is a Senior Fellow of the Institute for Educational Advancement and Professor Emeritus, Northland College, Ashland, Wisconsin, where he introduced an experiential course in transpersonal psychology. His studies of self-actualizing people and moral exemplars led him to the study of emotional and spiritual giftedness. He has taught at the Honors Summer Institute at Ashland University in Ashland, Ohio, and has lectured in New Zealand and Australia. He has been involved for many years with the Yunaska summer camp for highly gifted youth, organized by the Institute for Educational Advancement. Dr. Piechowski has been honored with a Supporting Emotional Needs of the Gifted Lifetime Achievement Award.
Nancy B. Miller, PhD., is a social psychologist and editor of Advanced Development, a journal on adult giftedness. She does research and testing at the Gifted Development Center in Westminster, Colorado. She has taught sociology at the University of Denver and the University of Akron. For many years, she served as Executive Officer of Sociologist for Women in Society. She discovered Dabrowski’s theory as a graduate student and developed a coding system to assess levels of emotional development. She has worked and published with Dr. Linda Silverman and Dr. Frank Falk for over 30 years. Her publications focus on emotional development, gender and giftedness, social support and adjustment to stressful life events, family processes and child outcomes.
R. Frank Falk, Ph.D., was the Director of Research of the Institute for the Study of Advanced Development. Dr. Falk received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Minnesota and for many years taught and served as an administrator at both the University of Denver and the University of Akron. He has authored numerous books, monographs, chapters, and peer-reviewed journal articles and delivered frequent presentations at professional meetings including )the annual NAGC conference, Supporting Emotional Needs of the Gifted, and the World Council on Gifted & Talented Children. In 2007-2008, he served as statistical consultant to the NAGC Task Force on a national study of WISC-IV performance of gifted children. He has conducted data analysis for hundreds of publications in all areas of giftedness and continues to assist and provide information to professionals in the field. He is currently collaborating on work identifying the relationship of brain structure to the gifted and associated characteristics with fMRIs. Frank’s narrative is reported posthumously in this story. He was a core member of the Excitables and in the background of every memory.
Music
The Chocolate Watchband. (2018). “Baby blue,” Onion. Tower.
Michael M. Piechowski, Ph.D., received his M.Sc. in plant physiology from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, his hometown in Poland. After a year of study in Belgium, he came to the United States, obtaining a Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He taught at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, where he met Dr. Kazimierz Dabrowski. They worked together for 8 years. Not interrupting their collaboration, Piechowski returned to the University of Wisconsin to obtain a Ph.D. in counseling psychology. Subsequently, he taught at the University of Illinois, Northwestern University, and Northland College. He is a Senior Fellow of the Institute for Educational Advancement and Professor Emeritus, Northland College, Ashland, Wisconsin, where he introduced an experiential course in transpersonal psychology. His studies of self-actualizing people and moral exemplars led him to the study of emotional and spiritual giftedness. He has taught at the Honors Summer Institute at Ashland University in Ashland, Ohio, and has lectured in New Zealand and Australia. He has been involved for many years with the Yunaska summer camp for highly gifted youth, organized by the Institute for Educational Advancement. Dr. Piechowski has been honored with a Supporting Emotional Needs of the Gifted Lifetime Achievement Award.
Nancy B. Miller, PhD., is a social psychologist and editor of Advanced Development, a journal on adult giftedness. She does research and testing at the Gifted Development Center in Westminster, Colorado. She has taught sociology at the University of Denver and the University of Akron. For many years, she served as Executive Officer of Sociologist for Women in Society. She discovered Dabrowski’s theory as a graduate student and developed a coding system to assess levels of emotional development. She has worked and published with Dr. Linda Silverman and Dr. Frank Falk for over 30 years. Her publications focus on emotional development, gender and giftedness, social support and adjustment to stressful life events, family processes and child outcomes.
R. Frank Falk, Ph.D., was the Director of Research of the Institute for the Study of Advanced Development. Dr. Falk received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Minnesota and for many years taught and served as an administrator at both the University of Denver and the University of Akron. He has authored numerous books, monographs, chapters, and peer-reviewed journal articles and delivered frequent presentations at professional meetings including )the annual NAGC conference, Supporting Emotional Needs of the Gifted, and the World Council on Gifted & Talented Children. In 2007-2008, he served as statistical consultant to the NAGC Task Force on a national study of WISC-IV performance of gifted children. He has conducted data analysis for hundreds of publications in all areas of giftedness and continues to assist and provide information to professionals in the field. He is currently collaborating on work identifying the relationship of brain structure to the gifted and associated characteristics with fMRIs. Frank’s narrative is reported posthumously in this story. He was a core member of the Excitables and in the background of every memory.
Music
The Chocolate Watchband. (2018). “Baby blue,” Onion. Tower.
Joe Renzulli & The Potato Story
September 9, 2024 interview with Joe Renzulli
Dana: So, I do want to make sure that I honor your, you know, everything that you did. Because I know at this point in my career, if I were to meet someone later on, I don't want this part to be forgotten, you know, this is a really big part of it. So, it's really important to me to make sure that your story is in there and you feel like it accurately represents all of the work that you've done, you know.
Joe: I think [the potato story] gets a certain point across that, you know, people always ask me, first, they ask me where, where my ideas come from. But secondly, they ask where my motivation comes from, and I guess it's just from all the kinds of experiences that I talk with you about. I have an urgency to make something happen, not to get something done and say, well, good, I'm finished now…And so I believe that Sally and I have made a lot happen because of Confratute.
Dana: I heard that when you were younger, you were quite the entrepreneur and that you had taken potatoes from a neighbor's yard and then gone back and sold it to them. I don’t have to put this in.
Joe: Well, you can put it in. I grew up in very poor circumstances. My father died when I was eight. My mother, who was an Italian immigrant and learning English, and we were on welfare and on fear. On welfare, your mother can't work, and so things were pretty rough. And my father was a big gardener, and so I took over some of the gardening. And what I would do, I had a wagon. I put a second, I built a second deck on the wagon. It was during the war so you couldn't get steel wagons. You could only get wooden wagons. And I would go from door to door. Well, my stuff ran out pretty quickly. And so, at nighttime I would crawl over the fences and under the hedges and all of that, and borrow just a few items from people's gardens, and I take them home and wash them and weigh them on my mother's kitchen scale. And then I would go around the neighborhood. And so, I was walking down Roosevelt Avenue one day, named after Franklin D., and Mrs. Hutchinson stopped, and she was this big, scary woman. We also, we were also scared of her because her husband blew his brains out with a shotgun in the garage, and she refused to clean up the back wall where all the blood was. So, she says,
"boy, boy, can I see you?"
And I’m thinking, “oh, boy, this is it.”
She said, "you know, those potatoes you sold me yesterday? They were so good. Could you get me some more of those potatoes?"
So, I had to do a lot of things when I was a kid… I lived near the beach, not the rich side, that over the track side, the people who clean their houses. And I would go down to the beach when it closed, there were beaches that you had to pay to get into, and then they closed the fence and stuff. So, I'd hop over a fence at the fish market, crawl under the pier, and I go down the beach with a sack, and I would pick up all the bottles kids parents left on the beach and take them for the two cents deposit. Remember when I was a kid, 10 cents would buy a loaf of bread, and so those things.
But we couldn't make it on welfare, so my mother started cleaning houses. There was a very rich ocean front houses on the other side of the tracks. And she used to get a ride home from the chauffeur after cleaning these houses, and my brothers and I had to watch for the well, the welfare woman. Her name was Mrs. Welch. If she was in the neighborhood and saw my mother being driven home in a limousine, we would have been in big trouble…. And so those are the kinds of things that you do to learn to survive, and they might be a little bit questionably illegal, but you know, why can't a Welsh welfare mother earned a few extra bucks. We were just getting by. The first of the month came, and if mom didn't have whatever it was, $39 to go and pay her our mortgage, we would have lost our house.
If I wanted a new pair of sneakers or something like that, I had to figure out a way to get them. In the spring, there was a great big field across the railroad tracks from our house, and it grew masses and masses of wildflowers. And I used to go over there with a pair of scissors and a pail and cut the wildflowers and mix them all up and then tie a rubber band around them and go door to door selling them because I needed a new pair of sneakers. You know that's the only place they were going to come from. And I think that these are all things that have been good lessons in life for me. You know that sometimes they border in a semi-illegal, I don't know whose field it was, but no one ever came out and basically said, “Get out of my field”. And so, you know, you do those kinds of things.
Another thing I did there was an old, abandoned mansion in the rich town deal. A lot of the people that owned those mansions went broke during the Depression, and they had a greenhouse, and outside the greenhouse, they had rows and rows of clay pots, and so I would go and take some of the clay pots, and I would dig some of the flowers out and put them in the pot to be so that people could not they couldn't just be flowers for your kitchen counter. They would actually grow all kinds of things like that. And I guess it's probably an example of the Not My intelligence, but the other two rings, creativity and task commitment. You know, you just gotta, you have to do what you gotta do to survive.
Dana: That's pretty intelligent. There's nothing like logic when you're trying to take care of yourself.
From Lockhart, 2025, Appendix D.
Music
Hot Chip. (2007). “Boy from school,” The warning. EMI; Astralwerks
Dana: So, I do want to make sure that I honor your, you know, everything that you did. Because I know at this point in my career, if I were to meet someone later on, I don't want this part to be forgotten, you know, this is a really big part of it. So, it's really important to me to make sure that your story is in there and you feel like it accurately represents all of the work that you've done, you know.
Joe: I think [the potato story] gets a certain point across that, you know, people always ask me, first, they ask me where, where my ideas come from. But secondly, they ask where my motivation comes from, and I guess it's just from all the kinds of experiences that I talk with you about. I have an urgency to make something happen, not to get something done and say, well, good, I'm finished now…And so I believe that Sally and I have made a lot happen because of Confratute.
Dana: I heard that when you were younger, you were quite the entrepreneur and that you had taken potatoes from a neighbor's yard and then gone back and sold it to them. I don’t have to put this in.
Joe: Well, you can put it in. I grew up in very poor circumstances. My father died when I was eight. My mother, who was an Italian immigrant and learning English, and we were on welfare and on fear. On welfare, your mother can't work, and so things were pretty rough. And my father was a big gardener, and so I took over some of the gardening. And what I would do, I had a wagon. I put a second, I built a second deck on the wagon. It was during the war so you couldn't get steel wagons. You could only get wooden wagons. And I would go from door to door. Well, my stuff ran out pretty quickly. And so, at nighttime I would crawl over the fences and under the hedges and all of that, and borrow just a few items from people's gardens, and I take them home and wash them and weigh them on my mother's kitchen scale. And then I would go around the neighborhood. And so, I was walking down Roosevelt Avenue one day, named after Franklin D., and Mrs. Hutchinson stopped, and she was this big, scary woman. We also, we were also scared of her because her husband blew his brains out with a shotgun in the garage, and she refused to clean up the back wall where all the blood was. So, she says,
"boy, boy, can I see you?"
And I’m thinking, “oh, boy, this is it.”
She said, "you know, those potatoes you sold me yesterday? They were so good. Could you get me some more of those potatoes?"
So, I had to do a lot of things when I was a kid… I lived near the beach, not the rich side, that over the track side, the people who clean their houses. And I would go down to the beach when it closed, there were beaches that you had to pay to get into, and then they closed the fence and stuff. So, I'd hop over a fence at the fish market, crawl under the pier, and I go down the beach with a sack, and I would pick up all the bottles kids parents left on the beach and take them for the two cents deposit. Remember when I was a kid, 10 cents would buy a loaf of bread, and so those things.
But we couldn't make it on welfare, so my mother started cleaning houses. There was a very rich ocean front houses on the other side of the tracks. And she used to get a ride home from the chauffeur after cleaning these houses, and my brothers and I had to watch for the well, the welfare woman. Her name was Mrs. Welch. If she was in the neighborhood and saw my mother being driven home in a limousine, we would have been in big trouble…. And so those are the kinds of things that you do to learn to survive, and they might be a little bit questionably illegal, but you know, why can't a Welsh welfare mother earned a few extra bucks. We were just getting by. The first of the month came, and if mom didn't have whatever it was, $39 to go and pay her our mortgage, we would have lost our house.
If I wanted a new pair of sneakers or something like that, I had to figure out a way to get them. In the spring, there was a great big field across the railroad tracks from our house, and it grew masses and masses of wildflowers. And I used to go over there with a pair of scissors and a pail and cut the wildflowers and mix them all up and then tie a rubber band around them and go door to door selling them because I needed a new pair of sneakers. You know that's the only place they were going to come from. And I think that these are all things that have been good lessons in life for me. You know that sometimes they border in a semi-illegal, I don't know whose field it was, but no one ever came out and basically said, “Get out of my field”. And so, you know, you do those kinds of things.
Another thing I did there was an old, abandoned mansion in the rich town deal. A lot of the people that owned those mansions went broke during the Depression, and they had a greenhouse, and outside the greenhouse, they had rows and rows of clay pots, and so I would go and take some of the clay pots, and I would dig some of the flowers out and put them in the pot to be so that people could not they couldn't just be flowers for your kitchen counter. They would actually grow all kinds of things like that. And I guess it's probably an example of the Not My intelligence, but the other two rings, creativity and task commitment. You know, you just gotta, you have to do what you gotta do to survive.
Dana: That's pretty intelligent. There's nothing like logic when you're trying to take care of yourself.
From Lockhart, 2025, Appendix D.
Music
Hot Chip. (2007). “Boy from school,” The warning. EMI; Astralwerks
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