Grappling with Giftedness

I've only worked with a handful of truly gifted students in all my years as an educator.They stand out.  I remember something wonderful and exceptional about each of them.

The first was a young man in my grade three class during my first full year as a teacher.  We were working on our "Wild Animals of Canada" unit....I was super excited about the animal track prints we were making on our giant story boards-  the kids were all pumped up about painting their stories onto their maps and creating tales that showed how the various animals in their chosen region interacted.  We were all busy drawing ponds and forest trails. A parent helper was helping us to carve florist sponges into stamps for making tracks.    My young naturalist approached me, with a hand painted map that could have been produced by the National Geographic,  to ask if it was important to label the 14 varieties of vole in the Northern Boreal region of Saskatchewan with their Latin names.

Next came my wonderful historian.  During his grade four year, he was struggling, often being sent to work where he "wasn't causing a disturbance." (His words).  I was his support teacher at that time. We decided it would be good for him to have an independent project to work on for the days that the classroom wasn't a good fit.  Over the next four months, he spent many of his afternoons working on a scale model of the Parthenon.  Out of toothpicks.  It was fantastic, and, although my math wasn't as good as his was,  I'm pretty sure was accurate.

Another student who stands out was a young man whom I first met when he was in first grade.  I had an "enrichment" group at that time, and he came along for the period of time we were working on PowerPoint.  It was pretty new, cutting-edge stuff at that time, and adding motion paths and animations was pretty exciting.  I quickly moved him from the primary group to the intermediate one.  To this day, I've not seen a PowerPoint quite that masterfully created.  He had icons dancing all over the place, interesting facts about space peppered in.  He finished it after only a couple of sessions, which was great, because then I had all kinds of help showing the other kids stuff I had no idea about.  That was fun to experience, but the deeper learning for me came many years later-  I next crossed paths with him in his grade 7 year, while working at the high school. Where he explained to me that he'd been riding his bike between buildings every day for a full semester, and was there to write his Math 10 Provincial exam.

While I have worked with many other gifted students over the years, these three stand out for me, because, with each one, I learned something tremendously important about how to meet the needs of gifted students.  Each one illuminated something critical about the ways that gifted learners are significantly different from the other bright, talented students I have met over the years.

1.  My naturalist taught me that being gifted isn't necessarily about being the best at everything.  Or really at anything.  He was a pretty average guy in math, and his writing was pretty messy and disorganized.  He seemed happy enough to work along at the pace of the rest of the class most of the time, and he worked pretty quietly and with apparent engagement most of the time.  His parents reported he enjoyed school, although they worried a little that he didn't seem to have any good friends.   I had to really talk with him to find out what he was passionate about.  Voles weren't high on my Top 10, but he could chat about them for hours. 

I'm sorry to say that the fact that he was successful and content was enough for me most of the time.  It was my first year teaching, and I really had no idea what the options were.  I tried to engage him in conversation about the things he liked, to stock books in our classroom library that were at a higher reading level and would engage him with respect to his topics of choice, to let him go off on his own exploration every once in a while if he expressed that he was bored or finished early and wanted something to do.  He did ok that year, but if I were to get another shot at it, I'd hook him up with a resource person in the community, or excused him from some of our more straightforward projects to really explore the stuff that excited him. 


2.  My historian taught me that sometimes, it's all about process.  (And that with gifted kids, it's rarely about product.)  He did make a fantastic model of the Parthenon.  It just wasn't the whole Parthenon.  That's because his exploration took him on a lot of bird walks.  I'd pop into the area he was working and hear tons of details about Aquaducts.  Or birds.  Or the number of soldiers in Athens vs. Rome.  Or about the way that the ancient Egyptians (yes, Egyptians) made bread.  For this young man, one question led to a thousand others.  And they were all equally exciting and distracting.  He just loved learning about the antiquities.  He couldn't get enough of it.  He also loved the math.  The endless calculations and re-calculations, adjustments for this little extra bit of height, or wondering if Roman's had created green space around their buildings that needed to be considered.

There was never a time when I walked in to find him doing nothing, but there were many times where it didn't look like any progress had been made on "the project" at all.    I'm so grateful that I was usually popping in between other things and didn't have too much time to "redirect" him.  He often reminded me that it was his project, and I had promised it could be self-directed.  He was self-directing himself all over the place, and he loved every minute of it.  After a few weeks, I settled into this rhythm of having him share his discoveries with me, rather than pulling out our criteria sheet and project plan.  I loved hearing the excitement and pride in his voice when he figured out a new angle or discovered some interesting new facts.  His class was completely enraptured when he finally felt ready to present his project to them.  He answered every question confidently.  But that wasn't the best part.  The best part was that his mornings also became a lot more successful, and that his peers started to seek him out on the playground because they found the nice guy who was fun to play with under the troublemaker.  Grade four ended in a much better place than it had started.

3.  My mathematician taught me about the importance of carefully crafted opportunities.  That, for gifted learners, these opportunities need to be fostered, and sustained.  While it was wonderful for the other boys to explore areas of personal interest, and to be given opportunities to explore "instead of" rather than simply being provided "more of"  -  for our truly exceptional learners, this isn't going to sustain them forever.  When I worked with this young man, I created opportunity by bumping him up to a group of older learners.  This worked for a bit of an enrichment opportunity in first grade, but my learning about how to really support him didn't come until much later, when I saw the opportunities others crafted for him.

The middle school did the heavy lifting that made a real difference.  They connected not only with the math department at the high school to allow him to work on advanced math, but also with the physics teacher, who put him in touch with NASA, where he could really talk with someone at his level.  He ran through all of the offerings in the secondary school math and science departments when he was in 10th grade, and had begun college-level work.

I asked his mom about that one day, wondered if he was missing opportunities to connect with same-age peers by being so connected with the college already.  (That's a worry we'd often had at the school level, as we saw so many gifted students struggle with friendships, often demonstrating an immaturity in their interactions with others).  His mom wondered why I had that concern.  She asked me a couple of questions about how I chose my friends, and I countered with the usual-  people I have things in common with, people who are fun to spend time with.  She asked how many of us are the same age.  Before I had a chance to stumble out a response to that, she gently pointed out that I had described "intellectual peers."  She wasn't worried about how old his buddies were.  She was worried that he had friends who "got him,"  Friends he could engage in stimulating conversation with and feel at home.   That had been really hard for him over the years, and was actually getting easier now that he wasn't trying to find them all in his classes at school.


There is some scary research out there regarding gifted learners.  Truly gifted kids often struggle with anxiety and depression, and find connecting with peers really difficult.  Lots of gifted kids are twice-exceptional-  they also have learning disabilities, or autism, or attentional challenges.  Often, they struggle with relating with peers, finding it difficult to sustain friendships, or to relate to their teachers.  Too often, we hear the word "gifted," and assume this means school should be easy for them, that if they're not succeeding it must be laziness or lack of engagement.

Gifted learners have special learning needs.  They need our support, our encouragement, and our time, as much as any other learner with challenges.   It's up to us to keep listening, keep exploring, keep planning, to keep creating vehicles to engage and sustain their learning.  The good news is that, if were providing differentiated, open-ended learning opportunities for everyone, our gifted students will help us create these opportunities for themselves.   And we don't have to do it alone.  Reaching out to community resource people and other institutions will help us.  We're in it together.  After all, "They're all our kids!"

Resources and Links for Gifted Learners:

Toolkit for High-End Differentiation  (Lannie Kenevsky, SFU 2013)

Possibilities for Learning:  Planning For and With Highly Able Learners

Bright vs Gifted Learners (chart)

Links for Parents 

The Dark Side of Being A Gifted Kid (Calgary Herald, Feb. 2015)