Who's Gifted?

By Rena

According to the August 2009 Draft of The State of Washington OSPI Committee for Gifted Education, the purpose of gifted programs is to provide all highly capable students, including those at-risk, with differentiated opportunities for learning. Programs shall be designed to identify, nurture and encourage students who posses extraordinary talents and abilities.

My district uses the pull out program. Once a week for half of the day those students identified leave the building to go to another building.  As one of the identified explained the situation, "We go there, because, that is where the smart kids go." The teachers of the identified students have expressed dissatisfaction with this design because when the students return, the teacher then needs to teach the students the concepts they missed during their absence. This is not a satisfactory situation for the teachers involved.

So what is giftedness?  According to the National Association for Gifted Children, there is, as yet, no universally agreed upon answer to the question.  A person's giftedness should not be confused with the means by which giftedness is observed or assessed.  Parent, teacher or student recommendations, a high mark on an examination, or a high IQ score are not giftedness; they may be a signal that giftedness exists. Some of these indices of giftedness are more sensitive than others to differences in the person's environment.

Having said all that let's consider the purpose of a gifted program.  According to the state, the gifted programs shall provide activities and opportunities to help students assess their needs and capitalize on their unique abilities, interests and strengths.  Such students are expected to become:

• Independent learners
• Lifelong learners 
• Sensitive to self, others and environment 
• Responsible, competent and influential members of their community and nation
• Active participants in the international community 
• Creative problem solvers and decision makers
• Capable of adapting to and influencing change   

Aren't these things we want for each student?  Not just certain students that have been identified through testing, teacher or parent recommendation?  Most programs have limits such as only 25 students are funded.  What happens for the 26th student?  What if you miss getting into the program by one point? When I asked our district personnel this question, I was assured that all teachers provide opportunities for students working above standard levels.  

It seems we could better serve each student if the state would use the funds to develop suggested curriculum to offer those students who show giftedness. Actual challenging work that aligns with the State Grade Level Expectations. Currently that is left up to individual teachers to design and gather materials within their already busy schedule as they try to teach and assist each student.

Comments

[Kristin]

In my district we have a gifted program that the top 1% or 1% test into. Actually, they use test results and teacher recommendations. These kids are so capable that they don't even fit in with the kids in the mainstream classes. Then, there's a second tier of giftedness that a greater number of kids get into. These kids move into the honors classes in middle school and high school. The top tier kids move as a group into a different middle school and high school program.

I'm not arguing that they aren't gifted and ready for a personalized program of instruction that challenges them, but they are mostly white, financially comfortable, and come from educated households.

I had a student once who, at 14, was selling enough pot to support his family of 5. He even bought his mom a cadillac. That takes a certain kind of math ability and business sense, but he wasn't interested in applying his gifts at school.

So I don't know how to create a desire to succeed academically in kids who don't get it from home, or a patience to succeed academically. In my district the ethnic lines between who's considered gifted and who's not are embarrassing.

By high school, it's awfully hard to recognize a superior mind and move that child into the gifted programs. I agree with Bob that there are strategies to bring out the best in each child at any point along the way, but for a child to sustain the work and stay patient for that distant pay-off, I think parents play a bigger part than schools.

I wouldn't go so far as to call the parents of kids in the gifted program "rabid," but they are motivated, and they are a powerful force behind their child's academic success.

[Kim]

In my district, we don't have a "gifted" program at the secondary level. Instead, we have "Honors," which is self-select and based more on work ethic and desire to succeed than intellectuality. Unfortunately, they've decided to go to a blended model, so we now have full inclusion, which means we have intermediate ELL and SE kids in the same classrooms as our honors kids. Without any training or additional resources, our teachers are expected to serve every student equally (which is absolutely ridiculous when we have a first-year teacher, a second-year teacher, and a third-year teacher in those positions). I completely agree with Mark that at secondary, kids should be ability grouped. Otherwise, the more advanced kids and the kids who need serious remediation are the ones who suffer. A truly gifted kids falls under the auspices of special education, and they, too, deserve a least-restrictive environment.

[Kristin White]

Highly capable students need to have time with their intellectual peers, not necessarily moving them to higher classess where the students in those classes are older. These kids learn quickly and need to be pushed by a trained, gifted education teacher who understands how to challenge them, not for more work, but different learnings to gain a deeper understanding of the concept.

Gifted students do think differently and often have other issues which involve social and emotional domains. When they are together, as a group, they have the opportunity to relate to each other.

I'm thinking about the billions of dollars we spend every year on our students who aren't achieving the state standards (as evidenced by the snapshot WASL, now MSP/HSPE)with programs; special education, ELL programs, interventions, instructional aides, professional development geared to increase student achievement. I'm wondering if we had made an attempt to assist our highly capable population to increase their ability, with even a fraction of the funding we provide for other populations, where might we be? Yes, our highly capable students might "get it anyway", but why settle for less than they can achieve?

[Mark]

And clearly, I'm not gifted with skills of proofreading. TOO far beyond...

[Mark]

What about those gifted kids whose gift is not measurable by a standardized test? Are we only concerned with kids whose gifts give good data? Many a standardized test (including the state writing assessment in my state) penalizes kids for going to far beyond.

[Bob Heiny]

Thanks for sharing your insights, Rena. Your and Mark's comments remind me of what T. Earnest Newland used to repeat to the chagrin of teachers. I offer it respectfully, so your readers need not take offense to his insight.

"It takes a gifted person to recognize and teach a gifted student." Newland was a student of Maude Merrill who was a student of Lewis Terman of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale. All three were early advocates of gifted education programs in public schools.

The relevance of Newland's point to your points: gifted students are not all the same, except that they can say even as preschoolers how much they will learn when given a chance with and without instruction and when to get out of their way so they can learn even more, frequently more than most teachers will direct, provided teachers support that kind of interaction.

I use non-PC examples, the portrayal of Jaime Escalante in "Stand and Deliver" and the Zig Engelmann PK-12 Direct Instruction processes as archtypes of hands-on gifted teachers working with previously unidentified gifted students.

My instruction was less direct, but moved students along about 50% faster than through regular classroom instruction.

Standardized test scores support these observations.

Kudos for more programs offering room for students with special gifts and talents to learn more rapidly through public schools.

[Mark]

I agree that the bullets you list above are what we should be doing for/with every student. But some are not there yet.

I'm a proponent of homogenous groupings (tracking) at least at the high school level, in all core classes, not just mathematics. If they're not ready, the need to be somewhere which will get them ready. If they're beyond ready, they ought to be somewhere else where their skills can be further enhanced.