I’m guessing there’s a fair amount of research being done in education, perhaps especially for special ed for students with major difficulties or remedial ed for students with minor difficulties. Genius students must also get some research or at least book deals.
What about research into the best way to teach students who are 1 or 2 standard deviations above the mean? Better than average but not one-in-a-million. Does that type of education sub-field have a name?
What have we learned about how to best teach them? Anecdotes are welcome in addition to any data or insight you may have.
I was on the board of a support group for parents of GATE students in our district, and the district psychologist gave several talks including the results of research on just this. Nothing very detailed though. I’m sure we have specialists around here who can give some cites.
The broad category you’re talking about is called “exceptional education.” It’s supposed to include both ends of the bell curve, wink,wink. But any large-ish school district has what we call enrichment programs that address bright but not supergenius students.
I’ve got a dual teaching license, in K-6 education and in Academically/Intellectually Gifted (AIG) education. It’s been about 4 years since I got that certification, and I’ve spent that time in a general ed classroom. It’s a pretty interesting field. Do you have particular questions?
Yes. I understand that anything you’ll answer isn’t meant to put anyone in a box, we’re talking about tendencies, not every individual.
How would you explain how a computer works (or another highly cognitive and logical topic you know about) to a non-gifted student vs a gifted one? Please show your work by writing two example explanations.
Would the way you would explain emotionally-charged topics like racism or terrorism differ?
I presume that gifted students tend to be more open to new experiences and to seek them out. How does their creativity and ingenuity tend to differ from the norm?
What sorts of things gets gifted students the most enthusiastic? What gets them the most reflective? How about the most focused?
Are there things at which gifted students to tend fare worse than average, for whatever reason?
One of their major points is that gifted kids need enrichment, not acceleration. It is better for them to explore an area in depth as opposed to rushing through it. So, for your computer example, you might go into the architecture of the computer as well as simple programming.
Not all gifted kids are gifted in everything. They tend to get on one subject and explore it deeply. Just make sure they keep up with all the other subjects.
The GATE administrator was very firm that gifted kids should have enhanced things to do and not spend their time teaching the other kids in the class, even if that made it simpler for the teacher. They were very big on differentiated education, in other words treating each student individually. (I’m sure this was easier to mandate than implement.) The example they gave was spelling. A kid who got all the spelling words right on the pretest should not have to do the standard use them in sentences and write them five times homework, but should be given something more interesting.
As for my kids, we used the improv philosophy - always say yes. It paid off. We also had enough background in things to enrich their education where necessary.
Bump–Michael just reminded me that I never came back to this thread. Sorry!
Heh. There’s not always a really clear difference like this. At my grade level, I might be chatting with the gifted kid at recess and explain what I know of computer working to the gifted students, while the other kid is off playing soccer. But that depends on the gifted kid.
Another thing that might happen, and that has happened in the past, our team of third grade teachers has had a twice-weekly intervention block, where kids get to work with a teacher on the skills they need. One teacher might have a group working on equivalent fractions, another is working on finding the main idea in nonfiction, etc. When we’ve done this, I’ve often taken an AIG group, and I developed a unit on game theory and binary numbers. It starts with a riff on this method for teaching about binary number theory using the Socratic method, explains some simple game theory to students using both a highly solvable game and then a variant of the Prisoner’s Dilemma which I developed to teach both game theory and some ideas about why to act kind even if you’re a sociopath (note that it’s a variant, as the standard prisoner’s dilemma has a different lesson), and ends with teaching Nim.
If I were teaching binary number theory to kids who aren’t gifted, I’d probably engage in a lot more explicit teaching: here’s the idea, here’s a fun way to practice the idea. With gifted students, often they’re more successful with guided exploration. But again, it’s not cut-and-dried.
Hmm. I don’t think so. I’d probably work with these through a combination of eliciting personal experiences (for racism) and some curated reading; and kids who are more proficient readers would be able to access more complex texts. But the teaching style would remain the same. Where I live, there’s a pretty high achievement gap between white and black students, resulting in a lot of black students not valuing their own contribution to discussions, so I work pretty hard to bring their voices forward. In a discussion of racism, I’d want to make sure that my AIG kids (who are overwhelmingly white) shut up for a bit to listen. But again, that’s true in other circumstances as well. AIG kids need to learn they don’t have all the answers, even if they often do.
Creativity tends to be a sign of giftedness, and it’s one we’re trying to focus on more. A kid who scores low on tests, but who is quick with verbal quips, who creates songs, who can lead the other kids in an activity, has some talents we need to recognize. So it’s not that gifted kids are more creative, it’s that creative kids are definitionally gifted, if that makes sense.
These kids tend to be better at working independently, especially on projects that attract their attention. They often enjoy creating their own projects–but again, not always. They often enjoy showing up the teacher, and a good teacher delights in that when it’s done legitimately and appropriately.
God yes: they often suck at failure.
My go-to story is about the kids who came the first day of third grade reading The Hunger Games. Very strong reader, good at math, good at all academic subjects, believed he walked on air.
One day I conferred with him over his reading, a Percy Jackson novel that I’d read. “You’re near the end,” I said. “Chiron the centaur has gone through some pretty big changes in this book, hasn’t he? I’d like you to take some time to write about how he’s changed from the beginning of the book to the end.” He agreed he could do that.
I came back half an hour later, and he hadn’t written a single word. “What’s going on?” I asked.
“Well,” he explained, “I’m not very good at that kind of thing, so I decided not to do it.”
That, in a nutshell, is a major failing of a lot of AIG students. They’re very comfortable with being awesome at school stuff, but they see failure as a sign of stupidity, so they’ll refuse to try something difficult rather than risk failure. Or they’ll jump straight to answering a question without taking any time to wrestle with it, to work on it, because smart kids don’t have to work at getting answers.
One of my main jobs as a teacher of AIG students is to give them problems that they can only answer with a lot of work, to teach them that the highest compliment I can give them is to call them a struggling student.
Of course I cannot comment on how LHoD teaches (other than to say that I like what he has to say in general), but I think that another thing the teacher would have to keep in mind is that many AIG kids are unusually sensitive. (I’ve seen a bunch of theories about why, but I think the bottom line is that no one really knows.) So the teacher would want to be keeping a little more eye out for kids who were getting overwhelmed or dysregulated by the subject matter (although these can of course be upsetting subjects for any child, or adult, for that matter).
The prospect of failure threatens their self-image/esteem which they’ve mainly/only built on their intellect?
It does if creativity requires giftedness. If B can only be true if A is true and we know that B is true, we can infer that A is true.
What might underlie that? I understand that any answer concerning the components and underlying principles of creativity is likely to be speculative and approximative and that’s ok; It can still be informative.
I’ve heard that too. It was referred to as “emotional depth”. While we don’t know for sure, what are some the more probable causes of that?
Sort of. It’s more that the prospect of struggle threatens their self-image.
I remember myself in the third grade, being sent to the library to work on a super-early educational software program on one of my school’s two student computers, an amber-screened Apple Plus or something. I can back to the room absolutely sobbing because the computer was giving me long division, and nobody had taught me how to do that, and I was getting these funny little ASCII birds on the screen saying, “Try again!” or something. I was unprepared for academic struggle/failure.
That’s very common among AIG kids. A lot of my work, and this sounds terrible but I really don’t think it is, is to let them fail. They should realize, in doing so, that failure doesn’t mean they’re stupid or worthless; it just means they gotta get back up and keep trying. The path of failure–>work hard–>succeed is critical for these kids to travel on, so that they don’t hit college thinking that the “work hard” step is optional.
Rather, I’d say that creativity is a type of giftedness.
When I was in elementary school (70s), I and a few other colleagues were bused away from our regular school for a few hours each week to a “gifted” program off-campus. There, we did things two, three, four grade levels above us, including the basics of research, divergent thinking, a mock trial, and similar concepts. Of course, it ended after budget cuts, as is oft the case with such things.
I have few good memories of growing up in the public school system. The gifted program is one of those few good memories.
Yeah, same–the gifted classes were definitely a highlight of my childhood in school. One of the major questions facing educators is whether it’s because gifted kids need a different sort of education, or whether all kids benefit from the sort of high-creativity education that’s usually delivered to gifted kids.
Don’t different kids need different kinds of instruction? That seemed to be what the differentiation the school psychologists in my district talked about.
I had a 2 year AP history class in high school. After the first month or so we had no tests and no homework besides reading Morrison & Comager and watching history lectures on the NYC education channel. We all did fine on the AP test and the history Regents test. I can’t imagine that every class in my high school could survive using that method.
My understanding is that the research actually points to the opposite conclusion: gifted kids benefit more from acceleration than enrichment, when compared to the general population. That is, all kids benefit from enrichment, and that should be happening as much as possible. But gifted kids can sometimes learn in a single week a set of concepts that take most kids a month to learn. If the gifted kids stay in the general classroom, they get three weeks of instruction that’s not especially useful to them.
The ideal setup is that gifted kids get to move through the materials as quickly as they can (well, that everyone does, but gifted kids would move faster). Unfortunately, that’s REALLY REALLY difficult to set up in our current educational system, which may be why the experts you talked to advocated enrichment over acceleration.
What is it that allows them to move faster? The obvious answer is “being gifted” so I mean the intermediary steps between being gifted and moving faster. What is gifted students do more or less of than an average student that allow them to move faster?
At the risk of humblebragging, I think about my older kid, for whom math comes pretty easily. Even from kindergarten, she could solve most mathematical puzzles I threw at her, breaking numbers apart mentally, noticing relationships between numbers, and creating novel ways to solve problems.
I think a few things hold true:
-Gifted kids can store things in long-term memory more easily.
-Gifted kids can hold more ideas in working memory.
-Gifted kids can synthesize ideas, and otherwise work with ideas, more quickly.
-Gifted kids enjoy this sort of work and will stick with it for longer periods and will engage in it voluntarily.
With my third graders, one of the more difficult math concepts I teach is equivalent fractions. I teach it through a lot of means: drawing pictures of pizzas and candy bars, using number lines, imagining division of larger numbers (3/4 = 6/8 because if you divided 24 into 4 groups and then took 3 of those groups, you’d get the same number as if you divided 24 into 8 groups and took 6 of them). One method I teach a bit is multiplication: if you multiply the numerator and denominator of a fraction by the same (non-zero) number, the result is equivalent to the original fraction.
This is an idea that a lot of kids absolutely don’t get, and that’s okay because fraction multiplication is more of a fourth grade concept. But my math-gifted students glom onto it pretty quickly, and I’ll see them using it successfully after a single lesson and for the rest of the unit.
I don’t think we disagree. Gifted kids should learn the material in a week and then be given enriched material for the other two weeks. That’s differentiation, which is easier said than done.
In New York when I went to school we were tracked. By fifth grade there was a big difference among the classes, and in junior high and high school it was explicit. It worked very well, for me at least.
That reminds me of something from the 3rd or 4th grade: The teacher would line us up in two groups aligned in two rows. We would go down the line and ask each other math questions like “What is 2+4=?” and then the student in front of you would have to answer and ask a question which you would have to answer.
One time, a girl asked a question like “What is 3-6=?”. We hadn’t be taught negative numbers. A few of us started asking negative number questions but the teacher put a stop to that because too many couldn’t answer. Would that be the sort of thing you see in gifted education?
The ability and willingness to engage in abstract or lateral thinking seems to come up often.
To be clear, the specific recommendation I got was that, after the week was up, they should get the next unit’s information, so that they can continue progressing through the regular curriculum. They shouldn’t spend two weeks in enrichment.
I think back to one of the best math students I had, who finished assignments quickly and accurately. I set him up with Khan Academy, and by October, he’d finished the entire third grade curriculum in KA. He asked for permission to continue on to the fourth grade curriculum, which of course I granted. By April (I think), he’d finished the fourth grade curriculum, and finished the third grade year sinking his teeth into the fifth grade curriculum. I really hope his fourth grade teacher let him continue at this pace.
Definitely. I have a conversation with my class every year that goes something like this:
Student: 42-18=36, because 40-10=30 and 8-2=6.
Me: Wait, it’s 2-8, not 8-2. Are they the same?
Student: Yes?
Me: Hold up 2 fingers. Now put down 8. Can you do that?
Student: (often after trying) no.
Me: So can you do 2-8? (I’m getting ready to show them how to regroup)
Student: No
AIG Student across the room: YES YOU CAN! IT’S NEGATIVE SIX!
Me, suppressing a sigh because I don’t want to crush their spirit: Absolutely, that’s right. However, for now, we’re working with whole numbers, not negative numbers. Lemme come over in a couple of minutes and talk with you about how you could use negative numbers–but in whole numbers, you can’t do 2-8.
AIG Student: OKAY!
Other student: Huh?
