Tag Archives: gifted

Identifying Students for Highly Capable Programs

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Assessment, Education Policy, Equity | ,

It’s hard to identify students for gifted—or Highly Capable (HC)—programs.

I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s 2009 book What the Dog Saw. One chapter was called “The New-Boy Network: What Do Job Interviews Really Tell Us?”

Gladwell explained that people can give a terrific interview and be bad at the job. Why? Because people’s traits and abilities are task-specific. Someone may have the characteristics of a great interviewee and the ability to answer interview questions well, but that same person may not have the temperament or personality or skills to perform well at the job. An interview and a job are different situations, and the person will respond differently to the two types of situations.

How does that apply to gifted identification? Imagine that a district limits itself to a single test. You may have a child who delights in that type of test question and who is comfortable with that type of testing situation. On the other hand, you may have a child who finds that kind of test question boring or who is distressed at the testing situation. If those same children have identical abilities, the first child is going to have a higher test score.

A psychologist in New York state gave a 4-year-old girl an individual IQ test that took over an hour. When the test was over, the psychologist came out and said the child missed the cut-off score by one point. However, he added, the score wasn’t valid because the girl got hungry halfway through the test.

He never gave her the chance to take a snack break.

In a district in North Carolina, the means of identification was single creativity test: “Draw a person.” Of course, the more detailed the drawing, the more creative the student. One child barely drew a stick figure, so was not identified as gifted. His mother said they should have had him draw a map. He would have been working on it for over an hour. 

He needed a different prompt.

In Washington state, districts are required to use multiple criteria for identification.

  • The more points of information, the better. Having just three items is ridiculously low, especially if two of them are subjective.
  • The more diverse kinds of information, the better.
  • The more familiar the setting for data collection, the better. Assessing kids in their own school during the school day is the best.
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Perfectionism in the Highly Capable Classroom

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Elementary | , , , ,

In a Vox article giving reasons why kids are anxious, one significant reason was, “The constant pressure to optimize their futures.”

I admit, I’ve talked college with my elementary students for 40 years. I try to keep some perspective, though.

I loved one conversation with a gifted eighth-grade student. Filling out her high school paperwork, she struggled to tell what she wanted to be when she graduated.

She wanted to major in English, Spanish, French. Math and science. History. Art.

She looked at me, distraught. “How am I supposed to know what I want to be when I graduate?” I looked at her page and offered, “A well-educated adult?”

“Yes!” she chortled and wrote that.

Highly-Capable kids can be gifted in more than one area. I have students in my HC class who also play team sports. Or participate in the local theater group. Or take music lessons. Or do everything!

Such children can feel overwhelmed with all the things they have on their plate. Add to that the expectation that they will excel in every endeavor. Otherwise, how will they get into that top college and achieve that career success that everyone expects?

Here are some ways my kids agreed with points made about perfectionism in an article I had them read.

  • I agree that trying to be perfect stresses me out.
  • Perfectionism is not quite the best idea.
  • Mental health comes first.
  • We shouldn’t be so hard on ourselves.

Perfectionism robs students of the joy of their accomplishments. A student in my middle school social studies class for gifted students was an outstanding artist and used her talent in a class project. After her oral presentation, students lavishly praised her artwork. She deflected all the compliments, telling everyone her art wasn’t good and pointing out all the mistakes.

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Anxiety in the Highly Capable Classroom

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Current Affairs | ,

One afternoon we read the poem “Thumbprint” by Eve Miriam. We talked about the metaphor in the poem, comparing the uniqueness of the thumbprint to the singularity of the individual. Suddenly one of my fifth-graders “Edward” blurted out in panic, “What if I’m all there is? What if everything is just projected inside my head and nothing else is real?”

Calmly, I reassured him, “That’s a philosophical position called solipsism.” I quickly googled solipsism, showing him the definition and that the term had been around since the ancient Greeks. “This is an idea that people have thought about for a long time.”

“Oh,” he said. “Ok.”

“By the way,” I added as I walked him back to his seat, “questions about what you know and how you know it are part of a branch of philosophy called epistemology. If you are interested in questions like that, you might want to study philosophy.”

“Ok!” Now he looked interested instead of like his world was caving in.

Of course, the boy next to him said, “I want to study science!”

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The Need for Novelty

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Education | ,

As I’ve said before, the first and most important need for truly gifted students is quality time with their intellectual peers. Second, they need increased depth and complexity. Third, they need a faster pace.

I haven’t spent a lot of time talking about their need for novelty. Honestly, teachers can help meet that need by increasing the depth and complexity of content and increasing the pace of instruction. After all, if more challenging information comes at a faster pace, chances are you—the teacher and the student—will move into the territory of new information pretty quickly.

That’s where Highly Capable students want to live.

According to Charlotte Akin (retired administrator, HC program director, and WAETAG past president), “Gifted kids want to learn something new every day—and they would love to learn something new every period.”

As the NAGC STEM Network Working Group said, “Productive struggle is especially important for these students. They need to be challenged to make continuous progress and learn something new every day if we are going to foster their brain growth, persistence and resilience.”

My very first year teaching gifted students, I worked in a district with a pull-out program. I met with students one day a week. Kids came to me for advanced content instruction and intensive independent projects. One day, as a group was working diligently in the library, I asked them, “Is what you do in here harder than what you do in your regular classroom?”

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Baby/Bathwater

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Current Affairs, Education, Education Policy | ,

The recommendation from the New York City School District’s “School Diversity Advisory Group” has sparked a national conversation, one that’s erupted right here in the Seattle Public School District. The NYC advisory group claimed that the best way to desegregate NYC schools was to eliminate most gifted programs. In their reply, the National Association for Gifted Children pointed out that NYC’s history of using a single test “actually exacerbated under-identification.”

Denise Juneau, the new superintendent at the Seattle Public Schools, is also pushing to phase out selective programs for advanced kids although she’s currently being blocked by two school board directors.

Juneau called the HC classes “educational redlining.”

Let’s all agree that the demographics of most gifted or Highly Capable programs in the nation—or in Washington state—don’t closely match the demographics of the districts at large. For example, in Seattle, the stats look like this:

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Why Self-Contained Gifted?

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Earlier this year a friend of mine, a colleague, a coworker I admire, told me she loved me, she thought I was a great teacher, but she didn’t believe in self-contained gifted classes. She didn’t support what I do as an educator.

She believes my students belong in gen ed classes with everyone else.

At the WAETAG conference some of us on the board overheard attendees talking about differentiation: “This is just good teaching. We can do this in regular classrooms. Why would we need special classrooms for highly capable students?”

Everything I do IS just good teaching. It’s the good teaching every teacher does in their classroom, just meeting the needs of their students.

Here’s the difference. What I do is good teaching at the academic and intellectual depth my students need. It’s good teaching at the pace my students require.

Think about Zones of Proximal Development.

Think of putting fourth graders into first grade classrooms. That would be ludicrous, right? While the teacher is working with the first graders on “What I can do with help,” the fourth graders are well past the “What I can do” and into the “I’m bored and trying to amuse myself” zone.

That example may seem like hyperbole, but in a very real way it is not. Students who test two standard deviations above the norm, who are in the top 2% of the population, who historically received (from the world of psychology) the unfortunate appellation “gifted”—those students are not just bright kids in a gen ed classroom. They are children who, intellectually, belong grade levels above.

One traditional solution is acceleration. It’s well researched and demonstrates good outcomes. It works well with students who are not just academically advanced but socially and emotionally mature as well. Illinois recently signed into law the Accelerated Placement Act which “requires Illinois public school districts to adopt and implement policies on acceleration that, at minimum, provide opportunities for early entrance to kindergarten and first grade, opportunities for accelerating a student in a single subject area, and opportunities for “whole grade” acceleration (sometimes referred to as ‘grade skipping’)” [emphasis mine].

Another solution is self-contained classrooms.

Every year I have several students who are academically advanced but who are socially and emotionally immature. In some cases very immature. One of the defining characteristics of gifted is “asynchronous development.” Gifted students are out of the norm in terms of their development when compared to their age peers. That can mean they are out of the norm in more than just the realm of intellect. Which is why you can have a fifth grader working at the intellectual level of a 15-year-old but acting emotionally like a five-year-old.

Whole grade acceleration would not be appropriate for those immature students.

In the self-contained classroom, we provide academic acceleration within the classroom while students stay at their grade-level school and continue to interact with their grade-level peers. More important, our program allows them “to learn with and make social connections with same aged peers who think and learn in the same ways they do” (National Association for Gifted Children) in ways that can’t be replicated in a gen ed classroom, where there just aren’t enough of them in one place to achieve critical mass.

In my classroom, my students not only find the depth and speed of delivery that meets their intellectual needs, but they also find their tribe. They find peers who understand their advanced vocabulary. Who get their quirky jokes.

Meanwhile they enter a world where they aren’t always the first one done or the one with the right answer or the one with the best grade or the one who leads the group. Instead of being the “best” in the class, they become “normal.” It’s a humbling experience.

So let me share some other conversations, also from this fall.

Early in November I asked my students, “What do you like about this class?” There were lots of specific answers, but about half repeated a single theme: “It’s hard.” “It’s challenging.” “I’ve never been so stretched.” Some students raving about how challenging the class was were new to the program this year.

A couple of weeks later in mid-November I got a connect request on LinkedIn. I didn’t recognize the name or photo. So I went to the profile page.

“Robert” was the CEO of an IT company in Seattle. I was really confused. What did a CEO of an IT company want, connecting with an elementary teacher? I googled the company. It was an awesome company. Oh, what the heck, I thought, and I clicked “accept.”

The next day I got an email, not from “Robert” but from “Bobby,” a former student from 1990. He invited me to a party where I could see him and a bunch more of my former students. Of course I said yes!

At the party there was lots of reminiscing about the class they remembered from 27 years ago. Everyone had a different story to tell. But the one thing they all agreed on: “You made us work hard.” “I’d never worked so hard.” “I learned how to work hard in your class.” “After that, everything was easier—because I knew how to work hard.”

By the way, they just remember me as the one who made them work the hardest because I was the last teacher they had in the self-contained program. Then they went to junior high where they no longer received services all day, every day.

Finally, at the end of November, the mother of a new student in my class came to talk with me. Her husband is in the Navy, so the family moves a lot. She says she’s already dreading their next move because, “I’ve never found a program the caliber of this one. We’ve had our children in cluster groups in regular classes, and we’ve had them in one day a week enrichment programs, but we’ve never had them in self-contained gifted classes. The difference is stunning. This year my kids don’t just get piecemeal support. They get all-day every-day stretching in every subject. It’s amazing! I never want to leave.”

My students, my former students, and my parents all agree on the value of self-contained programs.

Not just this year, but every year.