The Challenges of Educating Gifted Children

Welcome to Vanguard Gifted Academy’s podcast. I'm Stacy Spears, the Arts Specialist teacher here at Vanguard, and today I’m going to be speaking about the challenges of educating gifted children. 

I'd like you to imagine for a moment witnessing a group of three kids playing a board game. If you were asked to pick out the gifted child among them, based on your observations, who would you choose? The disorganized child who has trouble even assembling the pieces of the game to get started? The intolerant child who is frustrated and showing anxiety with the way the other children are playing the game? Or the enthusiastic child, who's completely engaged, completely energized, happy to be there, and is imagining more complex and challenging ways to play the game? If you've got your answer, hold that thought. 

Working with gifted children requires knowing what giftedness looks like as the child interacts with their world.

When, as a teacher, you can connect a trait of a child to a negative presentation of that trait, you're in a much better position to begin to work with the child to help them understand themselves, and also eventually to understand their peers, and then to work with them to manage how that trait is presented for better outcomes. 

Consider that gifted children will often have gifted areas of high strength and confidence and a disparity to areas of challenge, as well as sometimes coming with intensities. The challenges are present in isolation, but when gifted children get together and work in groups, those challenges can become heightened. And of course, it's important to learn how to work in groups. 

Recall your experiences as a child. I think we can all relate to being asked to work in groups in elementary school. Those memories are not often of the outcomes of the content that was being taught or the final product that we achieved together. They are often about our interactions with others, the power struggles and the need for equitable division of labor.

Now think, were you ever intentionally taught how to interact in those groups, who you were as a person, who your peers were as people, why you came together differently, and why you worked differently and came into conflict? To me, these are really critical questions teachers need to ask in order to create an environment to overcome these challenges. 

I was guiding a group of children who were working on a project, and the task was to assemble a product that they didn't have written directions for. One of the members of this group had, as a trait, a strong sense of independence. He didn't always welcome or encourage direct instruction or assistance. He had a strong vision. He felt an intuitive sense of how to do things, especially when they were engineering-related. In this instance, he was working with peers and he knew what he wanted the next step to be. The other members of the group also had ideas about how they wanted the next step to go. Their ideas did not align with his ideas. Now, while he had as a strength the ability to envision the next step, what he lacked in experience, exposure, and training were the ability to take in and value the perspectives of others and the ability to present his ideas in a calm and concise manner to others. So, you can imagine how this played out, how his ideas were presented to his friends, how their feedback was taken by him. It was not one of their finer moments of productivity for the day. 

In that moment, it's very easy to see what this child can work on in terms of social skills. What may not be as apparent is the opportunity the teacher has to not only see the meltdown but to consider the trait of the child, which has both positive and negative presentations, and to see where that trait led to the friction and the challenge, not only of that child, but of the people he was interacting with. 

A child with a strong sense of independence will do really well in a leadership role, but, when asked to give up that role and to become a follower, it can be a very scary and unsettling experience. Without the toolbox to know how to handle that challenge, a child can lose confidence in even those things that are their strengths and feel very uncertain. 

So who was the gifted child playing the board game in the beginning scenario? It could have been any one of them. It even could have been the same child on three different days. 

Gifted children are complex people who are just learning to navigate their world. They have strengths that can make them feel very confident and very in control of their universe, and then they have challenges that are so disparate from their strengths that they can feel out of control of the universe in a second.

This can be a very unsettling, very scary place to be, and what they really need is an environment where they are not only allowed, but encouraged and invited to fail—even fail spectacularly—knowing they are in a place where they are not only understood, but they will be taught to understand themselves so that they can be successful in their lives. 

Thanks for listening. And we hope you'll tune in next time when we talk about seeing the gifted child flourish.