The Heart and Dream of Educating a Gifted Child

Hi, welcome to Vanguard Gifted Academy’s podcast. I'm Elizabeth Blaetz, head of school and founder of Vanguard Gifted Academy. This, our fourth series, is about teaching gifted children. 

I want to tell you a little bit about the journey that I've been on as I've been exploring gifted education and gifted learners, and I want you to think a little bit about the life of a helium balloon. So you get that helium balloon and it's pushing at the top of the string, right? It's trying to get out the car door windows, and you’ve got your other balloons and they're settling down. They're doing a good job. And the party is great. The kids play with all the balloons and the helium balloons are floating and the other balloons are bouncing and having a great old time and time passes and the party's over and the balloons are on the floor and they're scooting about, and day after day, the helium balloon is floating further and further from the ceiling until eventually, it's on the floor with all the other balloons.

I was so discouraged as a gifted educator to find out that this is what was happening to our gifted children, so I looked at gifted children and I looked at the fact that there are structures in gifted education and structures in regular education, and I said, “Well, what's the problem?” 

So think about your gifted learner. Think about your child's asynchronous development, and you're going to notice that they just don't fit in the structures that are in the traditional school system. Gifted learners don't learn at the age level of their peers—sometimes they're way above age level academically. Sometimes they like to zip through the material really fast, but also, sometimes they're at grade level and they want to dig down deep and they want to spend time and they want to explore every aspect of the topic. 

In the structure of a traditional school, they don't get the chance to do either. They need to stay on topic for 45 minutes on the subject area and then move on to the next subject area. All learning is based on their age, the problem is they intellectually are not their age. So this is what's letting the helium out of their balloon. 

I also looked at the structure of learning in education. The idea that you spend 45 minutes on one topic, and then you move to the next topic and you spend another 45 minutes, then you move to the next topic and you spend 45 minutes...gifted learners don't think this way. Gifted learners really think about big ideas conceptually, and they want to integrate. They want to think across topic areas, but the math teacher doesn't want you talking about your science experiment, and the language teacher doesn't want you talking about mathematics, yet they're all linked. And that's how Vanguard Gifted Academy became an idea, something that came from me saying, “Gifted learners really just need a different learning model.”

And I said, “What do they need?” They need to take away those structures. They need for the curriculum to meet them where they are, not for them to have to be patient and wait for the curriculum they're ready for. They need big ideas and concepts that they can really explore through all the domains and not just funnel through one domain. 

So Vanguard Gifted Academy was born, but it wasn't just me. It was also Shannon Holub and Stacy Spears, because as I talked about this idea with them they brought their ideas too, and their experiences, and together we were able to grow the idea. We were able to talk about both the social-emotional needs that gifted children need and how do you make a school that doesn't have those structures? Together we built Vanguard Gifted Academy.

I feel like this is a school that was made with gifted learners in mind, rather than a school that tried to fit gifted learners into it.

Albert Einstein once said, “Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by an individual who can labor in freedom.” I feel like gifted children need the freedom to work, and they get that freedom at Vanguard Gifted Academy because the school model takes away the structures that inhibit their learning and allows them to really grow. 

Thank you so much for reading. I hope you'll join us again for Shannon Holub. She's going to talk about teaching gifted learners in a different model and how that's different for teachers, too. It's not just different for children. I appreciate you reading, and I hope you enjoy this series.