This is something I have wondered about a few times... Does it matter if the gifted ed teacher is not very gifted? I suspect the gifted ed teacher at our school thinks gifted children are wonderful and genuinely wants to help them do well, but I don't know that she "gets" it. ...
I would think it would depend on the level of giftedness. My guess is that it might matter a lot more for profoundly gifted children because their trajectory is so unique. At other levels of giftedness, I suspect that as long as the teacher is bright, knowledgeable and (perhaps giftedly) intuitive, it is not necessary that they are themselves gifted. If we take it to the other extreme, a teacher does not have to have a disability in order to effectively instruct someone with a disability--although they do have to be bright, knowledgeable and intuitive to do that well too. Teaching students who are gifted and/or have disabilities requires an ability to tune in and identify learning and emotional needs at a different level than is needed for more typically developing children. Of course we want all teachers to be bright and knowledgeable--but working with students who are gifted or who have disabilities takes a particularly high level of intuition, because these students are more likely to be at the margins of what is considered mainstream where there needs can easily be missed/overlooked.
I wonder though even at the PG level whether it matters across the board for academic learning. Perhaps it depends on how the needs are being met. If the instruction is being delivered specifically to a cluster of PG kids, I think it would be very important. If the child's needs are being met through radical acceleration, maybe it's important to have a gifted counselor to recognize and provide for social emotional needs, but not for content instruction since content instructors at upper middle/high school should be experts at the subject and level they are teaching regardless of giftedness. Thoughts?
