Watching Gifted Kids Flourish

Welcome to Vanguard Gifted Academy's blog. I’m Shannon Holub, the Intermediate Level Master Teacher here at Vanguard. I have a lot of background with gifted education, having worked in the field for 20 years at various public and private schools. I've learned a lot about the specialized needs gifted children have and the special joys you have when you teach them. Today, I'll be talking about something I really love - watching gifted kids flourish!

Let's start by recalling some of the common things that can hold gifted kids back in school. The first thing most people are familiar with, and that's perfectionism. That can really haunt the gifted mind. The second thing is when others have expectations of them that give them an undue sense of performance pressure. The third thing is a very common occurrence amongst gifted students, and that is boredom and even cynicism, which can really throw a wrench in the whole works. 

In order for a gifted student who experiences perfectionism to thrive in an educational setting, the whole context has to change.

There can be no home for thoughts such as, “I must be a failure because I don't have an answer to that question.” Instead, there needs to be constant, authentic modeling of things like facing challenges, knowing oneself and accepting oneself, and characterizing setbacks as hurdles rather than brick walls. 

While teaching at Vanguard, I've noticed a language cropping up amongst the children as they work on projects. They'll ask each other, “What plan are you on? A, B, C, D?” They're not talking about curricular plans. They're talking about how many times they have started a project and then gone back to the drawing board to start over because it didn't work. This is encouraging to me in the field of gifted education because right away that dismantles the sense that you have to be perfect the first time. Here’s an example:  One of my students wanted to make a project where she was designing a version of coconut shoes from Thailand. So she started off with cardboard, and she folded the cardboard, and every time she stood on them, the cardboard caved in. So there goes plan A, B and C. She switched over to wood, but the wood was hard to shape. Enter plans D, E and F. Finally, she happened upon Styrofoam. This was a substance that could hold her weight and could be painted and shaped to look exactly like the coconut. She was proud of her project, but she was even more proud of the fact that it took her through plan K to finish it and that she had persisted through all of that. Her peers were excited for her as well, and that's the kind of support and environmental setting that a gifted student who suffers from perfectionism really needs in order to fulfill her own sense of satisfaction and success in school. 

The expectations of others can also provide a tripping hazard for gifted children. Here at Vanguard we don't use report cards; we use progress reports.  And we don’t just hand them out and move on. What we do is sit down and talk through these reports with each of the students one-on-one.  At the end of the discussion, I'm not going to ask them, “Are you happy with your grades?” What I'm going to ask them is, “Do you think this accurately describes yourself?” This leads to conversations about goal setting and about areas where we can shift approaches and help improvements occur toward independent learning. 

This kind of thinking can also translate into self-advocacy. I had one student who saw his math results, agreed with them, and wasn't happy with them. He took it upon himself at the age of nine to type a note to me that said, “Could you assign me some websites that I'm familiar with? I think it would really help me get over my aversion to math and help me see the fun and excitement in it.” Well, I assigned it, and he did overcome his challenges, and that was by his own hand, not because anybody else came in to save him. He approached it as his own problem to solve and was very happy with the results. 

One of the worst challenges faced by gifted children in school is a sense of boredom or cynicism that the activities they're doing are merely contrivances and that they really don't matter. The one thing you can do to combat that feeling is you can surround the students with truly meaningful activities. Take, for example, the student who already knows his simple machines while entering into a physics unit. He might feel afraid that the rest of the unit is going to be so dull and boring that he doesn't even want to engage. But when I come along and say, “Hey, I was out on the school property, and I noticed a misplaced manhole cover that's so far aside that little animals could fall down into the pit that's left open. I think we better use our physics knowledge to correct that situation,” that’s much more meaningful.  We can get outside and work together to actually shift that heavy, heavy manhole cover using our knowledge of the simple machines — that is when the student becomes fully activated, engaged and excited by learning. A fringe benefit of this is the feeling that we're all in this together.  That is something that's lacking when students are merely asked to perform projects to prove their understanding for a grade. 

Another example is the tangible difference between knowing a fact and truly understanding that fact. For example, You might tell a student there are 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body. Great. Now what? Well, actually now what could be that you actually realize what that length is. You take some yarn and you start unspooling it and you wrap it time and time and time again around cones that are set up around the perimeter of the classroom. And you start realizing, “Wow! To a certain mathematical factor, 60,000 miles is an awfully long amount. And that is all packed inside my little body!” And don't forget that you also have to learn how to keep your “blood vessels” from tangling as you do this activity. 

If gifted children are going to move from challenge to success, then these are some of the types of things that teachers can do to facilitate that change. As long as these efforts are perceived as meaningful, not only personally but also in real life, gifted students will flourish. 

Thank you for listening. I hope you'll join us next time when Stacy Spears talks about why we love teaching gifted children.