Unwrapping the Gifted

Hello from the Ice Cream Capital of the World!

On the morning of July 7, I had my TV on in the other room while I was getting ready for the day. I overheard an interview on the Today Show that Matt Lauer did with swimmer Dara Torres. The day before, she had managed to qualify for her fifth Olympics at the age of 41, even breaking an American record (for the ninth time in that event!) in the qualifying process.

Near the end of the interview, Matt asked Dara how she did it, noting his age and noting hers. (They know each other off-camera, it might be important to mention.) “When I turned 40,” he said, “I had trouble going up stairs. I was winded more easily.”

After describing her workout regimen and then outlining how she was proactively being regularly blood-tested to prove that she was doing all this cleanly, she said to Matt, good-naturedly and with a twinkle in her eye,

“And besides, you know, maybe I’m a little more athletically gifted than you are.”

It was funny! She pulled it off really well and I know she got a chuckle out of both Matt and me. And besides – it was true. She’s clearly far more athletically gifted than nearly all of us.

But then I got to thinking…

It’s never funny when someone – even good naturedly and with a twinkle in their eye – says,

“And besides, you know, maybe I’m a little more intellectually gifted than you are.”

Nope. That’s pretty much a party stopper. We feel offended. We can’t believe someone would have the gall to say something so arrogant. We lose respect for someone with such an “inflated ego.”

Not that I would advocate anyone go around actually saying that! I was just struck by how okay it felt to hear Dara say that – and how not okay it would feel to hear it the other way.

But we have different standards, dare I say a double standard, when it comes to athletics.

Before I go any further, I want to be clear that I’m not knocking athletics. They’re important, valuable, worthwhile, and a model means of developing talent. My own sister was a high school varsity athlete, and there was nothing like the thrill of watching her team win back-to-back state championships (my vantage point was from the Pep Band section ;o)

It’s just that I’m baffled by our double standard when it comes to varsity academics.

When it comes to sports, we don’t have any trouble supporting an individual’s pursuit of greater levels of achievement. We cheer them on, we donate to the Booster Club, we raise a fuss if the football team goes on the school district’s chopping block. (It never does, but you know what I mean.) And we should do all of that. Those students have talent that most of the rest of us don’t. It’s okay to celebrate the development of their athletic talent! And it should remain so.

And yet our students who excel intellectually are – sometimes, often times? – made fun of in school, teased for being bookworms and “walking encyclopedias,” not allowed to move ahead in the curriculum because they might begin to “think too highly of themselves” (or because it’s inconvenient for the teacher), and believed to be “okay as they are” – no need to push them any further in their talent areas.

So it’s okay to develop athletic talent, but try starting a gifted program in your school to develop intellectual talent and there’s bound to be someone (or many someones) who will be opposed on grounds that it’s “elitist” or “unnecessary” (they’re “already where they need to be,” after all). How can we justify putting money into kids who are already “succeeding” when we have so many other kids who – I agree – deserve our every effort to help them learn?

*sigh* Shouldn’t EVERY child be able to LEARN to their capacity in school of all places‽‽‽ Aren’t schools for learning?

Maybe we can use the vocabulary of talent development to help ourselves explain why it’s necessary to put effort into kids who have already met (or more typically far surpassed) grade-level expectations. The Olympics don’t inspire us because the bar is set at an average level. They inspire us because the bar is set quite high and each individual is stretched to his or her capacity, often amazing us and themselves in the process! Olympic athletes don’t achieve all that they do because they stayed with the crowd and learned how to swim in the same way average a-few-times-a-summer swimmers learned. They break records and accomplish what hadn’t been accomplished before (breaking a record nine times, for example), because they and their coaches focused effort on developing the talent that was already there. Good enough isn’t anywhere near good enough for them.

There are some of us out here who recognize that gifted children tend to have natural talent in one or more areas and we want to let them develop those talents to their fullest potential. We want them to be able to GROW. Do we expect gifted athletes like Dara to learn their skills in a heterogeneous group taught at an average pace? Of course not. At some point, in order to pursue what she was capable of, she had to break away from that and follow a far more challenging course.

We send all children to Physical Education classes because we want all children to learn about and develop their physical fitness. It’s important for all on some level. However, some children have greater levels of athletic talent, and they are selected for our athletic teams so that they can further develop their talent to its fullest potential. We don’t expect them to magically develop that talent further on their own or solely through P.E. classes. We recognize that they need advanced training to polish what they begin with and to stretch them to where they are capable of going. It is (or should be) the same for our intellectually gifted children who have greater levels of thinking ability and academic talent. We can’t expect them to magically develop those talents further solely through regular education classes. We must recognize that they need advanced training to polish what they begin with and to stretch them to their fullest potential.

It’s the same philosophy! Development of talent – any kind of talent – doesn’t happen magically or on its own!

Developing the talents of our advanced learners means releasing the constraints on our teachers, too. They’re up against some tough walls! Some of them are only allowed to teach a certain page on a certain day saying only the script from the book (whether the kids are ready for it, or not, or far past that point), making differentiation near impossible – or even, in essence, “against the rules.” Most teachers have a huge range of student abilities to accommodate within their classrooms. And nearly all of them have received little or no training on the needs of gifted students. When it comes to understanding and reaching gifted learners, the deck is stacked against our teachers.

“Confine plant forms to a container and you will know exactly the dimensions they shall reach. Confine your teachers to your restricting curricula and your paperwork and you will know exactly the dimensions they shall reach. And each budding branch and each extending child shall not extend far beyond the perimeters of their confinement. Space determines the shape of all living things.” ~ Bob Stanish ~

My challenge for you this school year: find a crack in the container and start chipping away! Otherwise we will know the only dimensions that we and our varsity learners shall ever reach.

Posted by Tamara Fisher at 9:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (20)

Greetings from a knoll in Iowa! I’ve been out of town for a bit, hence my absence from this place where we all gather together. The last week of July saw me in Boise, Idaho, for the 12th annual Edufest conference, “the Northwest’s premier summer conference on gifted and talented education.” It was my 7th summer of Edufest and I’m already looking forward to going back again next summer. Being able to get together with others in the field who do what I do and who love to discuss and debate issues in gifted education is such a blast. Being a Gifted Education Specialist is a rather solitary position to hold. Yes, my District has a great track record of supporting me and my students, for which I’m wholeheartedly grateful, but I’m still “alone” there in some sense in what I do. It is at places like Edufest where I can connect with others who do the same, swap ideas, and give and receive reinforcement about the importance of what we are doing for these kids who learn so differently. A special “hello” to everyone that I saw and met at Edufest this year!

All gifted ed conferences are exciting and informative, but a unique feature to Edufest (one borrowed from Confratute), is the intense and in-depth structure to the week’s schedule. Four of the six days feature three "strands,” which are essentially mini-classes. Monday through Thursday, for an hour and a half each day, you attend a presentation by the same presenter(s) on the same topic. You end up with six hours of time per strand, over the course of the week, to learn from that presenter and to delve more deeply into that topic. The days include three strands, special topics, plus a keynote at night. The other two days consist of keynotes only, one Sunday night and another Friday morning. They sure pack it all in!

This year’s Friday morning keynote was given by Sally Reis of the University of Connecticut and the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented. She spoke about SEM-R, or the Reading research connected with the Schoolwide Enrichment Model. (I encourage you to learn more details about SEM-R here. You can see a PowerPoint of Sally’s full presentation here.) For a quick summary, SEM-R is essentially a process whereby each student progresses in reading by being given (or self-selecting) interest-based reading material within his or her zone of proximal development.

Think about it: are the advanced readers in your classroom reading books that are challenging their reading skills, or are they mostly reading books that are at or even below grade level?

Talented readers read two or more years above grade level. Many of them (although not all) begin reading early and some are more or less self-taught readers. Think of that little second grader in your classroom who is reading at a sixth grade level and figured out how to read on her own at the age of four – is she being taught to read with second grade materials or are you reaching her in her challenge zone, with reading material that is at and just beyond her ability level?

[One concern that often arises regarding young advanced readers is that the content of much of the reading material that is at their ability level isn’t age-appropriate. Do you want your 8-year-old reading the content that most 14-year-olds are reading? Not yet. But there are many great reading options available for advanced young readers. Check out Some of My Best Friends are Books for suggestions, as well as this link.]

Unfortunately, research shows that the vast majority of the time, including in reading instruction, these advanced learners are not receiving any curricular differentiation that meets or challenges their abilities. (See slides 30 and 31 here.) On the whole, we tend to think “they’re already where they need to be” because they’ve met or (more typically) exceeded the benchmarks and standards for their “grade level.” If only we would educate them by reaching them where they are and stretching them to new levels, we would discover these kids are capable of so much more than we realize.

That’s just what the teachers who were a part of the SEM-R study discovered. Check out these quotations from them as they reflected upon the process of reaching these advanced readers at an appropriately challenging level. (I’ve added the italics to highlight key phrases.)

“My average to above average readers really surprised me. They went really beyond what I ever thought they could do with advanced thinking skills and questioning skills. These readers were able to go well beyond what I had thought they could do and connect with their experiences and the challenge level really inspired them. They could read much more advanced material than I had previously assigned.” (5th grade teacher)

“In the beginning my kids looked at me as if I had two heads when I took the books away from them and told them that they were reading a book that was too easy for them.” (4th grade teacher)

“I did not realize how much middle of the road reading instruction I did and how few of my kids I really challenged.” (4th grade teacher)

When we actually make the effort to TEACH these students (i.e. reach them where they are and move them on from there), we discover that they are capable of so much more than we had realized!

But we don’t put as much effort into teaching the advanced learners as we do into teaching the struggling learners. Check out slide two here. The spring WCPM (words correct per minute) fluency rates of kids at the 10th percentile show consistent growth from grades one through seven, then stagnate at grade eight. For kids at the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles, you can see consistent growth through all grades until middle school, where they stagnate. For kids at the 90th percentile, there is consistent WCPM growth until middle school, where they don’t stagnate, they actually regress. Our most talented readers and they’re regressing‽‽‽

This is educational neglect, folks.

We have a nation-wide lack of adequate, ability-appropriate educational growth for a sizeable number of capable students and it seems no one is screaming about it!

Helen Schinske points out the absurdity in this quotation: “Closing the achievement gap by pushing down the top is like fostering fitness by outlawing marathons.”

Little Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird experienced an outlawing of her marathon. She knew how to read before entering school. One day she is reprimanded when caught reading the newspaper in class (after breezing through the reading assignment the teacher had given everyone) and is told to stop reading at home and to stop reading the newspaper in class. Scout says, “I mumbled that I was sorry and retired, meditating upon my crime.”

Her “crime” was already knowing how to read and “flaunting” that ability by - *gasp* - reading in school!

“Expecting all children the same age to learn from the same materials is like expecting all children the same age to wear the same size clothing.” (Madeline Hunter)

They differ. We need to find ways to help some educators understand and accept that fact. If we don’t, they will continue to be okay with not putting effort into reaching, teaching, and stretching the advanced learners in their classrooms. One of the teachers in the SEM-R study had the guts to come clean with the researchers and admit he wasn’t putting much effort into teaching his advanced students:

“I try to get to them (the talented readers) at least once a week, but I am not always able to do that. You see, so many of my other students read below grade level that it is hard to justify not working with them. Many of these lower readers will be retained in this grade if they do not improve. The top group already reads at grade level, so I rarely have any instructional time to give to them.”

Now, that’s understandable on some level (teachers are super busy people), but this is what that kind of thinking really boils down to:

If we don’t have time to reach every child where he or she is and move them on from there – if we don’t have time to challenge every kid at his or her learning readiness level – if we only focus on the kids who “need to get there,” – then we are deciding that some kids will not get an education that year. We are deciding that some kids will get to learn, thanks to our efforts, and others will be denied their potential degree of educational growth, thanks to our lack of effort. We’re deciding this based on proficiency of “grade level,” not based on what is actually appropriate academic growth for a given learner. Individual student growth – actual LEARNING – is an irrelevant factor apparently. All that matters, it would seem, is that they reach the bar. And if they’re already at (or beyond!) the bar, then it’s okay to not put any effort into teaching them.

Yes, I am actually saying that when we say we don’t have time to work with the advanced learners in our classes, we are in essence saying that we are choosing to not give those kids an education.

As one of my students said recently, “If learning isn’t happening, then school isn’t really a school.”

Which students will get to learn to their capacity in your classroom this year?

Posted by Tamara Fisher at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (17)