Roeper Review Interview with Anne Glass

Ask the Expert: Insights About Domain-Specific Expertise

Guiding a Holistic, Ethical Education System: An Interview with the Head of the Roeper School, Anne Glass

Pages 230-233 | Published online: 26 Aug 2026

Anne Glass is the Head of The Roeper School and the Executive Director of the Roeper Institute. Previously, she served as Academic Dean and Head of School at Purnell School in New Jersey, where she created the Learning + Wellness program to nurture both intellectual curiosity and social-emotional learning. She was honored as the 2019 Sam Kirk Educator of the Year for her outstanding contributions to the education of students with learning differences. Anne is passionate about engaging students in interdisciplinary, project-based learning, and community involvement.

With over 25 years of experience as a learning specialist, Anne has taught a diverse range of learners, including gifted and twice-exceptional students. She has also taught master’s level courses at Hunter College CUNY and Teachers College, Columbia University, where she supervised student teachers.

Anne holds a degree in economics with a minor in art history from Wellesley College, a Master of Arts in Reading, and a Master of Education in Learning Differences from Teachers College, Columbia University. She also participated in a fellowship at the MIT Neuroscience of Reading Institute to study the brain basis of reading development and intervention. She has a background in finance and experience working with independent school boards and business offices to maintain long-term financial sustainability.

Ambrose: Please describe some of the work an expert typically does in your field.

Glass: The work of educators in gifted education is not simply to provide accelerated learning opportunities, but to understand the complex contexts in which learning and human development occur. Throughout my career, I have focused on what we at Roeper call Learning + Wellness, that is, the understanding that cognition, affect, and motivation are inseparable from one another. I lean on the scholarship of Helen Immordino-Yang for this perspective. Effective educators of gifted learners must understand not only intellectual curiosity, but also social-emotional development, asynchronous growth, identity formation, and their impacts on gifted students’ willingness to take chances intellectually and creatively. Without this understanding, we have a limited view of aptitude and achievement.

Historically, gifted education emerged from systems designed to measure aptitude and intelligence in relatively narrow ways. These methods, including the IQ test, cause us to overlook some children. Over time, many educators and researchers—scholars such as Robert Sternberg, Tracy Cross, and James Borland—have challenged us to think more expansively about intelligence, creativity, talent, and potential. Part of this challenge requires educators to consider the impactful role of education and learning context and the idea that IQ scores—and the potential of our students—are fluid over time and subject to environmental influence. That critique, which I believe is valid, continues today in the field of gifted education.

At Roeper, we understand that gifted potential can appear in ways that can escape the measure of IQ alone. We continually ask: How do we identify potential more holistically? How do we ensure students are challenged academically while also being supported emotionally? How do we create environments where students can safely take intellectual and creative risks?

It is not enough to rely on IQ testing. These standardized tests exclude many people who are gifted in ways these tests do not assess. To put a finer point on it, IQ scores are not always stable over time. Educational context can have a measurable impact on aptitude scores over the course of a student’s education.

Ultimately, this work is deeply human and dependent on the circumstances in which children are born and educated. Our work is better defined by identifying curious students with a diversity of talents who will benefit from enriched curriculum and opportunities in specific areas.

Ambrose: What kind of knowledge, skills, and dispositions are required for success in your field?

Glass: Educators working with gifted learners need to understand the myriad ways giftedness can appear. This work requires an expansive view of talent and giftedness. As educators, this work also requires attention to the context from which a child comes and the educational environment we can provide. Intelligence is more fluid than we are trained to believe. Our work requires an understanding that education and opportunity can and will impact curiosity, motivation, and achievement.

Teachers of gifted students—in fact, teachers of all students—should understand their students as individual humans with varied strengths and areas of growth. They must be willing not only to guide students, but also to learn alongside them. Gifted students may have particular interests or passions that teachers and schools should be prepared to support.

Gifted learners often possess advanced capacities and intense interests alongside deep sensitivities and asynchronous development. Asynchronous development often appears as underdeveloped or age-appropriate executive functions and/or difficulty in seeing another’s perspective. Teachers must therefore be attuned to this possibility and have the flexibility to accommodate these students both intellectually and social-emotionally.

I often think of educators in this field as sherpas. Our role is not simply to deliver information, but to help students navigate and develop their own intellectual journeys. That requires patience, adaptability, and a willingness to support inquiry that may move beyond one’s own expertise. It is also essential for educators to model lifelong learning themselves. Students benefit enormously when they see adults engaging in research, questioning assumptions, revising their thinking, and remaining intellectually active.

Ambrose: What kind of education or preparation is important for educators in this field?

Glass: Preparation for educators working with gifted learners should be multidisciplinary and developmental in nature. Teachers can (and should) take advantage of scholarly knowledge pertaining to cognitive development, learning theory, social-emotional learning, developmental psychology, and neuroscience. A multidisciplinary lens is always powerful. Teachers should also understand the historical context of gifted education, including the ways traditional identification systems have often excluded students from marginalized backgrounds or overly relied on narrow measures of aptitude.

Equally important is learning how to see students holistically. In addition to attention to intraindividual discrepancies and social-emotional wellness, educators should recognize that many gifted learners are also twice exceptional, meaning they may simultaneously demonstrate advanced abilities alongside learning differences such as dyslexia, ADHD, or autism spectrum disorder. These students are still gifted. Supporting them effectively requires collaboration across disciplines and a deep understanding of intraindividual variability.

Roeper’s faculty place strong emphasis on purpose and contribution. Education should not merely cultivate achievement for achievement’s sake. Students should continually be asking themselves: What can I do with my abilities to contribute meaningfully to the world around me? This is the transformational model of giftedness that our founders explicated, and Roeper continues to embrace.

Gifted learners are facing the same pressures other students face. Educators today must prepare students for a world shaped by rapid technological change and artificial intelligence. For all students, this requires moving beyond rote instruction toward the cultivation of critical thinking, creativity, ethical reasoning, collaboration and intellectual independence.

Ambrose: Can you think of a teacher or mentor who helped prepare you for success in your field?

Glass: Two mentors from Teachers College at Columbia University had a profound influence on my thinking. Margaret Jo Shepherd encouraged me early in my transition from investment banking into education and helped me see teaching and learning as deeply human and relational work. She challenged me to think beyond traditional academic structures and to understand students in more holistic ways.

James Borland also had a significant impact on me intellectually. He has long challenged many of the assumptions embedded within gifted education and pushed the field to question how we define giftedness, who gets identified, and what educational equity truly means. What I most admire about him is his willingness to question orthodoxy. He has consistently reminded educators not to accept inherited categories uncritically, but instead to continually reexamine whether our systems are truly serving children well. That spirit of intellectual risk-taking and reflection has stayed with me throughout my career.

Ambrose: Describe a challenging initiative or project in which you were involved.

Glass: One of the most important initiatives at Roeper has been the continued development of our Learning + Wellness framework. The central premise of our Learning + Wellness initiative is that meaningful learning cannot be separated from emotional well-being, belonging, motivation, and psychological safety. This work draws in part on research by scholars such as Antonio Damasio and Helen Immordino-Yang, whose work demonstrates the interconnected nature of affect and cognition.

Implementing this framework has required significant collaboration across divisions and disciplines. Teachers, learning specialists, counselors, and administrators must work together to understand students as whole people rather than as collections of academic outcomes.

One challenge has been helping communities understand that wellness is not separate from rigor. In fact, authentic intellectual growth requires students to feel safe enough to take risks, fail, revise, and persist. Without that sense of belonging and support, students will not feel the sense of safety that is foundational for taking academic, creative, athletic, or leadership risks. Risk taking and resilience are essential to learning and growing. This work remains ongoing, but I believe it reflects a broader shift education must make toward more human-centered and developmentally informed models of learning.

Ambrose: To what extent does success in your field emerge from individual work versus teamwork?

Glass: I would challenge the premise of the question. I think it presents a false choice because I don’t see individual work and teamwork as mutually exclusive or as opposing forces in education. I would frame this question in a less binary way: How do we converge the fields of pedagogy, curriculum development, and educational psychology to find more students who will benefit from enriched curricula and learning opportunities?

Education is fundamentally collaborative work. No single educator can fully understand or support a student in isolation. This is particularly true in gifted education, where students frequently demonstrate complexity and variability. Collaboration among teachers, specialists, counselors, administrators, families, and students themselves is essential.

Within our own community, the work increasingly depends on interdisciplinary collaboration. Effective support for students requires us to integrate academic and social-emotional development, rather than treating them as separate domains. Intellectual progress within the field of gifted education demands that we come to terms with the limited role IQ testing should play and expand our notion of giftedness. Giftedness appears in many forms, and we should embrace this variability. The most important advances in education emerge when scholars and practitioners are willing to question assumptions, share perspectives, and rethink inherited systems.

Ambrose: What are some things about your work that you find most rewarding?

Glass: The students themselves. At every age, Roeper students are passionately invested in something—robotics, arts and music, environmental sustainability, social justice, scientific inquiry, creative writing, civic engagement. When students are given the freedom and support to pursue authentic interests, they often demonstrate remarkable depth, imagination, and commitment.

What I find especially inspiring is their sense of hopefulness and purpose. Many of our students are deeply engaged with the larger world and genuinely want to contribute to it. They organize service initiatives, advocate for causes they care about, create art and research, and continually ask meaningful questions about how society can improve.

Just this year, two Roeper students designed new curricula for our fourth and fifth graders (a chemistry unit on elements and the periodic table) and our ninth graders (intertextual analysis of Homer’s, Citation 1996). That level of intellectual and community engagement is profoundly energizing for me as an educator. It is also deeply rewarding to watch students develop confidence not only in their abilities but in their identities—to see them find allies, discover their voices, and recognize that their differences and passions can become strengths.

Ambrose: What advice would you give to a gifted young person interested in pursuing a career in education?

Glass: Remain curious, remain humble, and resist the temptation to define yourself solely through achievement. You have much more to offer! Define your own goals, even in spaces that do not yet exist. One of the dangers many gifted learners face is internalizing the belief that intelligence alone should guarantee success. Real growth, however, requires discomfort, persistence, failure, revision, and resilience.

I also would encourage young people to cultivate broad human experiences. Read deeply. Spend time in conversation. Travel to unfamiliar places. Allow yourself unstructured time to think, imagine, and reflect. Creativity and insight often emerge from moments that are free and unprogrammed.

Finally, ask yourself not only what you are good at, but what kind of contribution you want to make. Education, at its best, is about helping people use their capacities in meaningful and ethical ways and in relationship with others.

Ambrose: Is there anything else you would like to discuss?

Glass: One issue I think educators must grapple with seriously is the impact of artificial intelligence and technology on learning and human development. AI is already transforming education and society. The question is not whether students will use these tools, but how thoughtfully and ethically they will use them.

I believe schools must continue emphasizing critical thinking, discussion, writing, problem-solving, creativity, and human connection. Students need opportunities to think deeply before outsourcing cognitive work to technology. At the same time, we should not approach AI simplistically. Used thoughtfully, it can support inquiry, research, analysis, and innovation. Students must understand both its limitations and its consequences, including issues related to misinformation, intellectual integrity, environmental costs of server farms, and ethical responsibility.

Related to this is my growing concern about the loss of unstructured time in childhood and adolescence. Young people need opportunities to be reflective, imaginative and self-directed. In short, they are missing opportunities to be bored! Constant stimulation and technological mediation can undermine directed and sustained attention, creativity, and social-emotional development.

At Roeper, we continue to ask how we can preserve humanity, curiosity, and authentic intellectual engagement in an increasingly technological world. I believe that will be one of the defining educational challenges of our time.

Originally published in The Roeper Review on August 26, 2026.