Tag Archives: Highly Capable

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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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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