That’s really the thing. My mother (a 25 year early childhood special education teacher who had two AIG sons) always held the opinion that AIG/GT/whatever ought to be treated very similarly to the special education on the other end of the academic capability spectrum, as it is very similar in the sense of both have populations of students who have unique educational needs outside of the mainstream.
And I agree… having one son who’s both in AIG classes (at the same school that @mandajo’s son went to FWIW) AND some special ed classes (dysgraphia & very mildly autistic), it’s kind of remarkable to see the difference- the disability type classes have a VERY formal learning plan and skills assessment, etc… while the AIG stuff is very much more centered on creativity and thinking outside the box, but doesn’t really do much else- it seems like it’s not intended to drive them forward academically, so much as it’s like enrichment; mental fertilizer if you will. Stuff that may help them in the long run with their normal classes, but not something that’s directly teaching them MORE than they’d otherwise learn.
But the language of the GT/AIG paradigm we currently operate under still focuses on the idea of some kids are inherently different and that is immutable. I can’t tell you how many students I’ve taught whose parents were still convinced their kid was inherently 5 years more advanced than all the others, because they tested like that in 2nd grade. They thought that differential just stayed.
Thank you. That’s what I was trying to describe. It felt like they just messed around and got out of doing the boring stuff in the regular classroom. But there was little opportunity to accelerate. It wasn’t challenging.
There was an article I read, many years ago, that was an epiphany for me. It described a classroom, I think in Japan, where a student who wasn’t understanding a math problem was instructed to work on it on the board at the front of the room, in full view of the class, until she solved it. Other students meanwhile worked at their desks on independent work.
This sounds like public humiliation, right? Except that when she eventually solved the problem, everyone applauded and cheered. The point wasn’t to show she couldn’t do it (achievement): the point was to show that she’d lean into the struggle and not give up (behavior).
Ever since, I start every year, and reiterate through the year, with the idea that I value struggle more than achievement. I have no interest in the right answers being on the page; I already know the right answers, they’re not what’s valuable to me. Instead, I have interest in students who find the place where it’s a struggle to learn but they can do it, and who leave every day with a slightly achy brain and a knowledge that they’re smarter in the afternoon than they were in the morning.
Students who master material quickly don’t get that feeling, unless they’re given different material.
I understand why most of you think that one of the problems is that the parents of white children tend to push their kids into gifted education even when they aren’t quite at that level and parents of black children tend to not push them, even if they clearly are at the level where they could benefit from gifted education. I suspect that most of you went to schools in cities or suburbs. I went to a small rural high school (which was entirely white). Very few parents of any of the students had ever spent any time at a college. No parent pushed their kids into gifted education. There was no such thing in my high school or in any nearby one. Nobody took A.P. tests. Nobody skipped grades. I suspect that if I had suggested any such thing to any parent, student, teacher, or guidance counselor at my or any nearby high school, they would have said, “What are you talking about? You’re just making this stuff up, right?” Almost nobody went to any college above the level of a second-rate state university or local college.
So is gifted education necessary to do better than the low level of achievement that nearly everyone else in my high school or nearby ones thought was the best anyone could get? Well, despite not doing anything like gifted education up through high school, I managed to get out of there. I spent my sophomore through senior years in college at a first-rate college and went on to get two master’s degrees and then a job that was comparable. So, no, it’s not necessary.
The problem was that my elementary and high schools were too small and too poor to have anything remotely like gifted education. And virtually nobody cared. The attitude that they nearly all took toward anyone who wanted anything more than scraping through a second-rate state university and getting a job only a tiny bit better than their parents had could be summarized as “If you want to do anything better than we expect to do, then you’re a snob and a traitor.” So how did I manage to get out of there? Well, it was because I learned to ignore what anyone else like my classmates and my teachers thought about me. I decided what I wanted to do and didn’t even discuss my plans with them.
Unless you can somehow guarantee that every school can afford gifted education classes, it’s nice that you will make it possible for big high schools to offer it to everyone who wants it, but what about small rural high schools like mine? Ideally what we need is individual education for absolutely everyone.
Everyone should be taking the highest-level classes they can at that particular time. The problem is that we live in a society where there is a highest expected level of achievement in life for anyone based on how you grew up, and it’s difficult to get past that. Partly this is because much more is spent on schools in some places than in others.
Where I come from gifted means one of two things. Top X%ile on some standardized test (the much more common variant for education purposes) or profoundly gifted, not necessarily in academics, it could things like music. Neither fits your description. I don’t think I’ve seen gifted described as a prediction of potential without any current evidence of academic accomplishment.
I think it is fairly well acknowledged that the kids in the program are there because of some combination of talent, effort and environment.
Do you mean something like “profoundly gifted” above?
These kids are so rare that the public school system doesn’t account for them. I think your only real option is to “little man tate” the situation. Private schools will accept and invest in a profoundly gifted child at no cost to you.
I wish they’d do it more like we did in elementary school. We did some of the enrichment type stuff, but we had the AIG stuff in place of our normal language arts/reading/social studies block, and our teacher took advantage of that- we read more challenging books and had more challenging assignments for writing, book reports, etc… than our peers in the regular classes. Weirdly, the advanced math curriculum was a separate track- you could be in advanced math, but not the AIG courses, and vice-versa, although the vast majority of kids were in both.
These can be misleading, though, under a guise of objectivity. We administer the CogAT as a way of getting a nationally-normed test that’s fair to all students and doesn’t have any built-in bias.
Hey, didja follow that link? You know, the one to “testingmom.com”, where you can find out about the CogAT and purchase programs to help your kid ace the test, so they can get into the AIG program thanks to the totally unbiased tool we use?
Historical inequity begets present inequity. Parents whose parents gave them every academic advantage tend to give their kids every academic advantage, fair or not.
We need to figure out a better way to identify kids.
I know what she’s talking about; it’s not a formal thing, or anything written down. It’s a sort of vague concept that gifted kids are somehow different in a way above and beyond being able to perform better in academic subjects, and that this difference somehow permeates everything- like a gifted kid is somehow going to be different in other undefinable ways, like they are going to be better at everything that’s not some kind of physical endeavor.
You see it on TV whenever there’s a “genius” involved. They’re never just intelligent with some ability to do some things a bit better than a normal person. They’re always suffused with some kind of unearthly ability to be some kind of polymath and figure out everything. It’s the same thing, but people push it down to gifted kids.
And it’s not really fair to them. It sets up a lot of unrealistic expectations that they should be good at everything, or understand everything quickly and completely, or whatever.
I myself struggled with this pretty hard in my youth; math is not one of my stronger academic subjects relative to language arts type stuff which is where my AIG gifts lie. So I had to really work at math, and was never “good” at it in the way that classmates were, and I always felt like something of a failure in that regard. It took me until I was out of college to realize that I was not “bad at math”, I was simply not particularly gifted in it. I mean, I’ve always scored around 80th percentile on every standardized test I ever took (ITBS, TASP, GMAT, SAT that I can remember), and I got a STEM degree that required 16 hours of math classes 8 of which were upper-level, and another 12 or so of upper level math-adjacent courses (linear programming, database programming, analysis of algorithms). I had to struggle in some of those, but I ground my way through. And STILL felt like I was “bad at math” because I didn’t excel at them. It took a while to realize that “not excelling at upper-level undergraduate math courses” doesn’t translate into “bad at math”, for example.
But that’s totally a side-effect of this sort of Magic Stamp, or vague nimbus of “Giftedness” that people assume surrounds gifted children.
I don’t know if that’s it, so much as I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding about what “giftedness” actually means, or how it plays out. I mean, it’s not only the parents who have this idea; it’s teachers, administrators, classmates, etc… Pretty much everyone, except maybe the kids themselves, and if they do, it’s some vague imposed-from-without feeling that they’re different, and that there are higher expectations on them as a result.
Not per se, but look at the first four items under “cognitive”:
Especially the first two items have a very high overlap with academic ability. Especially when coupled with
Other items on the list seem more like symptoms than a root definition.
Overall, though, I have pretty serious distaste for the word “gifted,” even though I use it. It’s passive-voice, for one, and passive-connotation, for another, like we’re not talking about something you do so much as something you’re given. And it’s talking about something inherent, not something you can work on.
This conversation is helping me clarify some of my own ideas about my own job; thank y’all!
Can you unpack that a bit. Are there clearlry gifted kids of color that are not being identified as gifted or are the students of color because there is some subjective element to the process that is letting bias creep in or are the students of color not meeting objective criteria to be identified as gifted.
If the former then it seems like getting rid of subjective criteria would go a long way towards getting rid of the bias.
If the latter, then I have to ask, why you think they are gifted. How do you identify a gifted student that cannot meet performance metrics? Do they have it stamped on their soul or something?
The only thing I can figure is that gifted student tends to learn faster than other kids and will pick up concepts in minutes that takes the rest of the class a couple of hours to kinds sorta get. Teacher’s should not have a problem identifying this. Or do they?
Putting these students in the same classroom might alleviate this overconfidence they get from being big fish in little ponds.
I don’t know about that. I went to a high school where almost everyone went from being a big fish in a little pond doing work that was too easy for them to being a small fish in a big pond and getting their first Cs or Ds in their life. And the students adapted just fine, sure it’s a bit of a shock but every time you move up a level, there is a shock.
This is something kids have to get used to, isn’t it? I mean how do you protect them from that?
My kid’s local travel team dominates the local baseball scene. When we got to state level competitions, it is really touch and go. When we have to compete with teams from north carolina, we just promise everyone ice cream after the game.
That pace differs for different kids.
This is easier to do in population dense cities where you can have 4 different elementary schools all within blocks of each other. Much tougher to do in suburbs or rural areas.
But if you tries this in large cities, the charges of racism levelled at GT programs generally would be equally applied to this scheme.
Gifted is almost exclusively used to indicate academic ability/potential NOT academic achievement. Remember it’s tied to IQ (or some other related measurement) which is not a measure of achievement.
Okay, a conversation I had with a girl a few years ago at recess. She’d bombed a math assignment and was insisting she was stupid. I was talking to her about how she had a great brain–and she kept interrupting me and countering every point I made, suggesting inconsistencies and hypocrisies and demanding evidence. Finally l was like, “Kid, do you even hear yourself? You’re on the verge of out-arguing a teacher here, and you really think you don’t have a good brain?” It brought her up short.
She never scored well on tests. Our district has an enormous racial gap. She barely passed the end-of-grade test. She didn’t get along with most teachers: she was quick to argue, quick to break school rules, quick to show her dissatisfaction with us.
But I recommended her for the AIG program, based on her quickness. She was witty, sharp, perceptive. And she got in the AIG class based on that recommendation, and while she struggled, she learned a ton from being in there.
I absolutely think there are gifted kids of color whose mental acuity doesn’t show up on standardized tests. The standardized tests are designed to capture specific manifestations of mental skills under specific circumstances. And if they’re resulting in a massive disparity in identification between white kids and kids of color, either the kids are broken or the test is.
I agree, but they seem to carefully avoid including actual achievement in the definition: it’s like they want to keep it more about temperament, some innate, immutable quality, than actual acquired skills.
No one dropped out? You graduated 100%? And all those kids met their full potential?
Because I know a lot of people who dropped out of college because they didn’t know how to study and had a complete collapse of ego when faced with the prospect. You protect kids from that by not tying their sense of self to the ability to learn quicker than their classmates. By teaching them, as LHoD talks about, to take pride in struggling, not at having better grades.
I think this is really a part of the discussion: what is giftedness? The people in my generation really seem to want to hold on to the “special stamp” theory, the “I coulda been somebody, but I was too cool to apply myself” mindset. I think that, specifically, is really toxic. So I am very FOR having advanced academics and very AGAINST having a GT label that is attached to the student, not the skills.
That seems to be the current trend in GT programs. Everybody learns everything at the same pace, the GT kids just learn more of it. A deeper understanding of stuff that requires a very rare breed of teacher to do this well.
This.
Selective online nationally accredited high schools. If this pandemic has taught us anything about gifted kids it is that they don’t lose as much as other kids by learning online. In fact there is an online magnet school that has been doing exactly this for over a decade.
