Judy W. Eby

Judy Eby began her teaching career at a Head Start program in Coronado, California. She has been a classroom teacher, a gifted program coordinator, a teacher educator (De Paul University, University of San Diego, and San Diego State University), and a mentor teacher in the Beginning Teacher Support Academy with the San Diego Unified School District. In 1983, she wrote a Master's thesis on Gifted Behavior and published two articles on that subject in Educational Leadership in 1983 and 1984. One of those articles caught the attention of Benjamin S. Bloom, who corresponded with Judy and wrote, 'I think you are on the right track.'

This led to the opportunity to do her Ph.D. at Northwestern University with Mr. Bloom as her dissertation chairman and advisor. In 1986, she wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on Gifted Behavior as a developmental process rather than an innate and unchanging trait. Essentially, she asked the question,

'What are the behaviors that people use to originate and create high quality original products in the talent area of their choice?' The ten behaviors that she found to be correlated with this type of success are: perceptiveness, active interaction with the environment, reflectiveness, persistence, independence, goal orientation, originality, productivity, self-evaluation, and communication of findings. She published the Gifted Behavior Index and her first book, A Thoughtful Overview of Gifted Education in 1990.

Turning her attention to teacher education as a professor of education at DePaul University in Chicago, Judy reinterpreted her construct of gifted behavior in terms of teacher education, and called this related construct Reflective action in teaching. This time she asked the question, 'What are the behaviors or actions that teachers use to create high quality original school curricula and programs to meet the needs of their students?' The answers to that question form the basis of her textbooks.