Chair: Victor Muller-Oppliger

Being a teacher has always been a challenge. I just received an e-mail of one of the teachers who were trained by the CBO, citing Albert Einstein: "I can't make anybody learn. All I can do is create an environment in which people are challenged to learn”.  Imagine how demanding and exiting it is nowadays to create that challenging environment, having to ‘compete’ with (or make use of?) all the social media our students have access to.  We demand a lot of our teachers, knowing that they should teach who they are rather than merely teach what they know (Palmer, 1998). The Center for the Study of Giftedness (CBO) offers the ECHA teacher training for more than 20 years. In those years we saw wonderful people, passionate to create a challenging environment for their students. It is them I will talk about in this presentation, their experiences, passion and enthusiasm to help students, including the gifted ones, to grow up to be happy and autonomous adults. An overview of the research they did in all those years will reveal the questions they are confronted with and their ways of dealing with them.