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Trends in Gifted Education
Friday, January 04, 2008 - by CFertig - 564 Views - 4 Comments - Category: Art, Label of Gifted, Math, Music, Parents and Educators, Reading-Writing-L.A., Science, Social Studies, Technology, General Education, Gifted and Talented Children, Gifted Education, Parenting Gifted Children, Teaching Gifted Children
The NAGC (National Association for Gifted Children) Convention was held in November. Each year, I like to read through the entire catalog of presentations so that I can form general impressions about categories that were considered important.
Disclaimer: I do not have access to information about presentation proposals that were submitted nor do I have information about how the presentations were chosen. I do not look at this information to make judgments; only to observe trends.
Like everything else in society, certain topics wax and wane. Someone else may interpret this very differently than I do. But, for the record, this is what I see.
Some of the topics that were considered top priorities in the past 10-30 years that I see no longer getting the same attention include
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Underachievement
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Multiple Intelligences
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Pullout/enrichment
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Advocacy
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GT resource teachers
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Affective issues
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Identification
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Learning Styles
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Differentiation
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Theory of giftedness
Topic trends that I do see increasing are
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The integration of technology into the curriculum rather than treatment as a separate subject
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Interest of programs on an international level (in fact, at the NAGC convention this year, a strand was added titled “International”)
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Special schools and programs
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Less talk about specifically meeting the needs of the gifted and more emphasis on the need for an increase in general academic rigor, including the need to let students advance at a faster speed
I would love to hear the ideas of others on these trends. You can always leave a comment at this blog entry or email me if you would prefer that others do not see your comments.
Concomitant Characteristics of the Gifted
Patrick was consistently the first to raise his hand in class and he always had the correct answer. The problem was, he never gave anyone else a chance to contribute. Can we show Patrick other ways to demonstrate his knowledge? Should he be moved to a class that is more challenging?
Both at home and at school, Joslin had a terrible time moving from one activity to another. She would get so “into” whatever she was doing that she hated it when her parents or teacher would ask her to switch to something else. Would it help to give her advanced notice of when to expect a change, with several reminders?
Seneca was curious about everything, so he had lots of questions. The problem was that he had so many questions that it was annoying and often intimidating to others. Can we give Seneca projects that require a lot of idea generation? Should he be taught skills for finding his own answers rather than asking everyone else?
Every behavioral characteristic has its positive and negative side. This includes characteristics that gifted children tend to have. These two-sided attributes are known as concomitant characteristics.
While we should not excuse bad behavior, we can help direct kids to positive outcomes. We also can learn to be more tolerant ourselves by understanding that someone else’s seemingly irritating behavior also may have a very positive side.
Some examples are:
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Characteristic
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Positive Aspect
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Negative Aspect
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Dominates the conversation
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Accelerated pace of learning
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Can move through material quickly
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Gets frustrated with the pace of learning
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Ability to concentrate and persist
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Is able to focus on a task and learn in depth
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Likes to plan ahead and keep everything neat
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Difficulty with spontaneity
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Entertaining and resilient
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Uses humor in inappropriate ways that distract or offend
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Heightened self-awareness; feels different
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Realizes the potential of being unique
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Feels isolated and self-consciousness
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Critical of self and/or others when high expectations are not met
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Huge store of facts and long memory
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Becomes bored and impatient with others
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Has many possibilities in life
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Has difficulty choosing between interests
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Viewed as stubborn and inflexible
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Conceptualizes on a greater level
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Avoids tasks for fear of not doing them perfectly
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The Label of Gifted Education
About 2 ½ years ago, one of my blog entries was titled The Label of Gifted: Is There a Better Way? You might want to revisit it and also look at the reader comments that follow the article. Today I am no closer to an answer to the question about the label of “gifted.”
In a recent Washington Post article, Labels Aren’t What Kids Need, high school English teacher Patrick Welsh brought up a number of issues about identification and programming for gifted education that are worth considering.
One of the problems with the term is that educators and parents often look at kids as gifted or not gifted, rather than looking at abilities on a continuum. Can a gifted program meet the needs of all able children? Can the needs of a highly gifted child be met in a regular gifted program? What happens to the child who is very capable in math but not in language arts? What happens to the youngster who is intensely interested in geography, but the gifted program is designed for more mainstream subjects?
Kids who are selected for a particular program often are given enrichment activities, from which all students would probably benefit. While the students in the gifted program may be capable of moving more quickly or studying a topic more in depth, can you understand why the parent of a “regular student” may want his less capable child to also be exposed to this enrichment?
How does a school handle the problem of some parents regarding the label of gifted as a status symbol? (Note: I am not saying that the kids are not very capable, but I am saying that SOME parents regard the label as a status symbol without truly understanding the real needs of a small percentage of students.)
How do we handle the affective consequences of labeling, both for students who are identified and students who are not? As Welsh states in his article, “When we apply this tag to a tiny group of children . . . we are in effect saying that the rest are ungifted and untalented. We’re denigrating hard work and perseverance, telling children that no matter how much effort they put forth, they just can’t measure up to their special peers.”
“Just as bad, we’re telling those on whom we deign to bestow the coveted label that they have it made; we’re giving them an overblown sense of their intellectual abilities and setting them up to fall short when they face real challenges later . . . What most parents don’t realize is that the gifted label can harm not only those who don’t receive it, but also those who do.” (See the research of Carol Dweck.)
Welsh goes on to suggest a highly sensitive topic: “. . . school administrators are caught in a political and moral trap. They have to assure mostly white middle-class parents, who provide most of the tax dollars for the schools, that their children can progress academically without being held back by lower-income kids.” Can we be honest with ourselves? How much of this is true?
When I was a kid, the term gifted was foreign to my ear. Everyone did, however, agree that some kids were very smart in some areas. Some kids were even very smart in all areas. At least in the district where I went to school, the system may have done a better job of trying to challenge all of the students all of the time.
There obviously is no perfect solution to the controversy of the label “gifted” and how it should be handled. But, let’s not shut the door on some of the realities of the dilemma by feigning to believe that there must be a perfect solution.
New Gifted Blog from Teacher Magazine
Blogging about gifted education is growing. Unwrapping the Gifted, written by Tamara Fisher and published by Teacher Magazine, is the latest to hit the scene. Each new blog that is created (scroll down in column on left to find a list with links) approaches gifted education from a slightly different perspective, and each is a valuable resource for a different reason. I really encourage you to visit the different blogs often.
Tamara Fisher is a K-12 gifted education specialist in northwestern Montana and president-elect of the Montana Association of Gifted and Talented Education. With Karen Isaacson, she is also coauthor of Intelligent Life in the Classroom: Smart Kids and Their Teachers. In her blog, Fisher discusses news and developments in the gifted education community and offers advice for teachers on working with gifted students. She presents some interesting analogies about understanding and working with this population of kids, as well as thought-provoking questions. Her aim is to “generate some timely thought, reflection, discussion, and questions.” She does a good job of modeling higher-level thinking questions by posing open-ended questions for teachers to consider.
Be sure and read through reader comments after each post as they offer a variety of perspectives on gifted education and also offer strategies that other teachers have used successfully.
The two most recent posts on Unwrapping the Gifted are about the meaning of the term “gifted” and how gifted kids may be “shut out of class participation because they’re perceived as being ‘already where they need to be.’”
Are We Failing Our Geniuses?
The August 16 issue of TIME Magazine features an article titled Are We Failing Our Geniuses? In the article, John Cloud criticizes the American school system, saying that it “has little idea how to cultivate its most promising students” and that it spends a disproportionate amount of money on students with learning disabilities, often ignoring the need for money to meet the needs of gifted students.
He cites that “many school systems are wary of grade skipping even though research shows that it usually works well both academically and socially for gifted students—and that holding them back can lead to isolation and underachievement.”
While I agree with much of what Cloud says in this article, I do question some of his conclusions. He states that, while the most recent data indicate that U.S. universities are awarding more doctorates than ever before, the rate of annual increase has fallen dramatically. In 1979 it hit nearly 15% for the year, but for more than a decade now, the number has grown less than 3.5% a year. His assumption is that we are now coasting and the implication is that this is because we are not adequately attending to the education of the gifted. While it may be true that there was a dramatic increase in the number of doctoral candidates following the post-Sputnik era, I question whether the number of students seeking advanced degrees should be expected to increase by high percentages every year. Are there that many people who would benefit from a doctorate? Is a doctorate important to all high-level professions? Is this really a valid measure of opportunities available for gifted students?
Cloud also states that the year after President Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in 2002, Illinois and Michigan cut large amounts of funding from gifted education. Yet, he offers no documentation explaining the link between the cuts and NCLB. Although there may be a link, he did not provide evidence. He just came to that conclusion on his own.
The premises of Cloud's article revolve around The Davidson Academy, a public school for profoundly gifted students that has received a lot of press. But, this is not perfect either. The school’s admission policy relies on test scores. One consequence of this is that its population does not mirror the population of our country. Both girls and African Americans are represented in disproportionately small numbers.
One discusses the question of who should be adapting to differences in ability, geniuses or average people? “Special schools for genius children? If the genius child is not adequately exposed to the rest of society, how then will she/he cope later in life?
What about educating all of us 'average people' more effectively, so that we can learn how to live with and work with real genius, giving them adequate emotional support at least, even if we cannot quite match them intellectually? This route is barely explored anywhere in any society or school.”
The other questions some commonly used terms or phrases. “The continued assertions that a) there is some monolith called the ‘education industry’ and b) a bias against exceptionally bright students remain, as far as I can see, undefined and unsupported, especially the former.”
Autism and the Nature of Intelligence
The debate about the nature of intelligence and giftedness continues.
Led by psychologist Laurent Mottron of the University of Montreal, a team gave both autistic kids and normal kids two of the most popular IQ tests used in schools: the WISC, which relies heavily on language; and the Raven’s Progressive Matrices, which measures the ability to infer rules, to set and manage goals, and to do high-level abstractions. The Raven’s presents arrays of complicated patterns with one missing, and test takers are required to choose the one that would logically complete the series. The test demands a good memory, focused attention and other “executive skills,” but—unlike the WISC—it doesn’t require much language.
The difference between the scores of the autistic and normal children on the WISC and the Raven’s test was striking. Not a single autistic child scored in the “high intelligence” range of the WISC. In fact, a third of the children with autism had WISC scores in the mentally retarded range. Yet fully a third scored in the “high intelligence range” on the Raven’s.
The scientists ran the same experiment with autistic and normal adults, with the same result.
While it is probably true that people with autism possess extraordinary perceptual skills, and that they use unique cognitive pathways for problem solving, their intelligence clearly goes far beyond rote memory and perception to include complex reasoning ability.
I would like to know…
What implications does this research have for the education of autistic children?
Using Search Tools on Prufrock’s Gifted Child Information Blog
Thursday, July 19, 2007 - by CFertig - 637 Views - 0 Comments - Category: Art, Label of Gifted, Music, Parents and Educators, Reading-Writing-L.A., Rural Education, Science, Social Studies, Technology, Weblog for Gifted Education, Free Activities and Lessons, Gifted and Talented Children, Gifted Education, Parenting Gifted Children, Teaching Gifted Children
You may have noticed that the format of this blog changed a bit recently, and I want to make certain readers understand the search possibilities available. This is the 120th weekly blog that has been posted in more than 2 years, so there is a lot of information here. There are two ways to search.
· Categories—In the left column of the web page, you will find a section titled Categories. Within that section, you will see a list of more than a dozen subjects. If you click on any of these, all the articles that fit into that grouping will appear.
· Search—You can also search for words, phrases, or topics you do not see listed under Categories. With the new format of the blog, you will need to sign in to use the search function. There is a section on the upper right where you can register. Your user name and password are case sensitive.
Example—You might want to search on “underachievement.” To do this, click on the word Search either at the bottom of the Categories list or near the top of the page. Once you do this, a number of boxes will appear and you can fill in the appropriate information. (You do not need to fill in all the boxes.) Click on Search, and all of the articles will come up that meet the criteria you entered.
These are great tools, so make sure you take advantage of them.
Finding a Qualified Person to Test Your Child
Parents have a variety of reasons for wanting to have their child tested. Some want to better understand their child’s strengths and get recommendations for providing the best educational environment. Some need to supply a certain aptitude score for their child to enter a gifted program. Still others see that their child is very bright but also has some pretty significant problems. They want to see if there is some type of diagnosis and get suggestions for helping the child. Finding a qualified person to provide an appropriate evaluation for any of these dilemmas may be a difficult hurdle.
Typically, a psychologist will administer necessary tests and interviews, but it is best to find a psychologist who really understands gifted issues, including various levels of giftedness and the pros and cons of the spectrum of tests available. I receive e-mails from parents asking for recommendations of people they might contact in their area. While I cannot give specific recommendations, I often refer them to their state gifted association or the gifted arm of their state education department. Another resource for parents to consider is a list on the Hoagie’s Gifted Education Page.
When considering a specific psychologist, find out what tests he or she offers and how information will be presented to you. Will the tester make recommendations? Make certain that the psychologist has experience working with gifted children who are of the same age as your child. Find out as much about the tester as possible, including his or her fees. If your child needs to provide a score on a specific test to be admitted to a gifted program, make certain the appropriate assessment will be administered.
The Label of Gifted Child--Is There a Better Way?
Saturday, April 16, 2005 - by CFertig - 597 Views - | | |