Why We Love Teaching Gifted Children

I'm Stacey Spears, Arts Specialist Teacher at Vanguard Gifted Academy. I have 20 years experience teaching music and drama to gifted kids of all ages. I have a passion for inspiring kids to find creative ways of expressing themselves. Today, we will be talking about why we love teaching gifted children.

When you think about the teachers that had the most impact on you as a child, do you consider those who were experts in their subject area or those who were expert at making connections with you, at building your confidence and inspiring you? I spoke in a recent episode about the need gifted children have to be in a supportive community that acknowledges their challenges and honors their growth process.

Family is the obvious cornerstone of this supportive system, but it's also very important to find peers and teachers that can become embedded in the fabric of your community.

What we have noticed here at Vanguard, now that we're in our fourth year, is that the model is set up very well to foster an authentic sense of community between teachers and students, and also among the students. When this kind of environment is in place, students feel encouraged to try, take risks, succeed to varying degrees, reflect, tweak and try again. In this environment, fear, which is the great stopper of all progress, falls away. You now have students who are willing to take risks, who buy in, who are invested, and that's when amazing things start to happen.

I had the opportunity to support a student who was challenged by learning math facts. Math facts are not the inspiring hands-on, project-based activity that inspires gifted learners. Math facts still need to be learned in order to move on to higher, more challenging activities. Now, this could have been a discouraging situation for her and even embarrassing, but it wasn't. It was actually a joyful process, and I attribute this to two things. One, her Band 2 level teacher was very accommodating in giving her multiple strategies, and they were very creative strategies, to see which ones worked for her. This student wasn't beholden to any one or even two strategies. She was encouraged to think of strategies that worked for herself on her own or modify the ones that were given to her. There was a point at which I was brought in, and, because I had worked with her in music and drama situations in the past, I had some ideas to work with rhythm and movement. Pretty soon we were having a party with math facts every day. That was one prong of her success, being supported and being allowed to use the strategies that worked best for her.

The other element that I attribute to her success was the student interaction. This is a very open classroom setting; she wasn't working in isolation. She didn't get sent to the library to go work with somebody on this. This was happening in an open space where there were a lot of students doing what they needed to do. She was jumping, she was dancing, she was singing, she was running from room to room, touching things and calling out numbers — joyfully — giggling. There was no eye-rolling. There was no judgment. There was very much a feeling of “you do you.” It's easy to get used to that because that's the environment we have here, but it really is a very unique situation. And it was critical to her success to feel free to do what she needed to do.

When she did achieve mastery of her goal, her friends celebrated with her, and there was no judgment about when she accomplished her task. So, she also wasn't constrained by time — needing to have learned her facts by the end of a certain grade level or a certain month. She learned them when she learned them. Without having a deadline imposed on her, the stress was just gone. She could learn on her own timeline. We all know that everyone has strengths and challenges. There are things we can accomplish very quickly and intuitively, and there are things that will take longer for us. Our students can either miss the deadlines and feel badly about it, or they can just work until they get it. Either way, they're going to take the time they need. But one way they feel like failures, and the other way they just focus on what they need; and they get there when they get there, and they can celebrate those successes.

In addition to supporting students working hard to achieve a goal, we also love to plan a rich curriculum. In order to engage students in the projects we plan, we have to have buy-in, we have to have trust. When students are in a trusting environment, we can offer and they can participate in activities such as being asked to sit in a wheelchair for half a day and experience what it's like and handle all the challenges that a differently-abled body would have to handle. That might mean asking to have their coat hung up for them; that might mean asking a friend to help them with a restroom door, which can be really uncomfortable. Being willing to dive in and experience that, and then to talk about their experience and reflect on it afterward, is a really rich experience for students that requires trust up front.

I also can ask students to compose their own music. But instead of stopping there, I ask them to gather a group of friends and then be the teacher. I tell them, “You wrote the music — now direct it, teach it. Teach them how to play your song so it can be recorded and later used in a documentary presentation.” I can present a group of young students with an engineering challenge, but with no supplies.  I tell them what they need to learn, how to build, and then set them loose in the building. I let them see what they can come up with. It's really inspiring to watch them try to build an entire tower, using scotch tape to hold it together, and then watch the pieces come tumbling down and see their reaction of laughter, followed by “no, guess that didn't work — what else do we have?” then witness their joyful scrambling to go find the next thing.

These are the reasons we love teaching gifted children. They want to learn. They just need a supportive environment in which to grow and thrive. We are privileged to be able to provide that supportive environment and honored to be able to witness the growth that comes out of it.