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)

Why I Love Loose Parts

This has been an interesting fall for me.   I am back in the classroom on a regular basis for the first time in many years.  Each Wednesday morning, I have the privilege of working with a group of kindergarten and grade 1 learners.

I can't really say whether or not they are a "typical" group, as it's been 15 years since I was last a kindergarten teacher.  I can say they are busy.  They're curious.  They're creative.  They're conversational.  And several of them are still learning the basics in terms of sharing their learning space with others and interacting successfully as part of a group.

I've struggled a bit to find a rhythm with them.  They've got too much energy to sit for stories and whole group lessons, they are all over the place in terms of their readiness for product-based tasks.  Solving a challenge that one is having inevitably leads to something that needs sorting with someone else.

I've been chatting with my teaching partner, who is with them for the other 90% of the week.  She has set up these wonderful morning choices for them, and she never seems to be as rattled as I'm feeling after a busy morning with our class.  She talked about provocations and seeing where their questions took them. 

I knew the feeling in the room during this choice time was lovely and productive, but didn't know that was rooted in Reggio Emilia philosophy until another teacher on our primary team came across the hall and began chatting about "Loose Parts."    She's working on her masters, and was doing a project on them.  I listened along, hearing all kinds of wonderful things about creativity, and interest, and engagement, and honoring children's passions. I admitted that I was new to this approach, but didn't confess that I had no idea, really, what a "loose part" or a "provocation" were. 

That weekend, I went home and did a whole bunch of reading.  I learned that provocations were clues alongside bits of materials or objects that are designed to inspire exploration.  Not "rules" or "systems,"  but something that can provide "an inspiration for children to express themselves." (From: What is a Provocation).  I love this idea.  We were expressing ourselves all over the classroom.  Might as well find a way to channel it for good...

I also read about how to set up a "Reggio-Inspired Activity."   From what I have gleaned through my reading, you begin first with the children.  Find out what they are interested in, what they have questions about.  Once you know that, you seek activities and materials that will "engage their sense of wonder."  How beautiful is that notion?  If we can do that, even a little bit, what a wonderful place our classrooms will be.  Kate Gribble's blog has really helped me think through this...you can find her at: An Everyday Story: Inquiry Based Learning. 

So I launched.  I was ready to start a new unit on light, so I hunted through my house for every flashlight and headlamp I could find.  We were making glow-in-the-dark slime at Scouts, so I grabbed the blue light I'd picked up for that, too. (Although it was really hot, shouldn't probably have been in a K/1 classroom...I'd skip it the next time around).  Then I went hunting for prisms and mirrors, and bits of colored plastic, and bins of "stuff" to shine lights on,  in an attempt to create some provocations. 
                                                     
I had already learned that this group works best with a tiny bit of structure, completely open-ended exploration puts us in proximity with children we don't do our best learning beside.  My solution was to structure the groups and station rotations, but not the exploration specifically.  I set up five stations with a variety of materials and let them rotate through a turn at each.  When we were done, we collected our questions.

We did a lot of thinking during our exploration.  Now my challenge was tweaking the provocations to allow us to explore our wonders.  I spent the better part of an afternoon looking for books at the public library on "light experiments," and googling for "reggio activites about light" and such.  I sorted and re-sorted my bins trying to come up with the best way to present things to answer their questions.

And then I gave up.  I had no idea how to set things up to match their questions.  These weren't my questions.  In the end, I decided to remind them of what their questions were, and to put the materials back out for them, to see what they came up with.  That was a fantastic decision on my part, if I may say so. 

During the exploration, I circulated and ask them about things.  ("Did you find your rainbow?"  "What happened when you stacked those colors together?").  We took a whole bunch of pictures, and put some drawings into our Wonder Books to record our thinking.

I am so proud of these kids.  We didn't all answer our original questions, but we sure learned a lot about light.  Ask us about reflection.  We can tell you that it can "bounce," or go in different directions.  We can tell you that it can change color if we put different, transparent, things between the light source and the place it's landing.

  We can tell you that light goes through some things but not through others, and that it looks different when it comes from a natural source versus a light in the classroom.

We can tell you that it sometimes gets hot, and
that we shouldn't put it right in our eyes or it hurts them. (But that that's better with a barrier like sunglasses).  We have made connections to summer days and solar eclipses.

I love this way of being with learners in the classroom.  It was a leap of faith based on a need to re-design my approach to meet the needs of some very busy little people, and it worked.  I'm always re-directing somebody when we're sitting at the carpet.   When we're exploring with loose parts, I get to talk about wonders and discoveries.  I pack my phone with me because we're so excited we need pictures about everything.  And when we go to put the pictures in our notebook a full week later, we can still describe what we were wondering about and what we figured out.

Thank you, Joanne and Aimee for letting me pretend I knew what you were talking about until I was able to figure out a little bit about it for myself.  It was either rattling out some Loose Parts within myself, or learning about Loose Parts with our learners.  I'm confident that I picked the right set.  I'm far from being an expert on the Reggio approach, but I'm hooked on learning more.  Meeting learners where they are at, and honoring their sense of wonder, is a lovely way to acknowledge that "They Are All Our Kids."

Understanding Intellectual Disabilities

As always, we have lots of new faces in our school this fall.  New learners have arrived at our doors from all over the province and country.  And some of these learners have additional needs that will require adult support and thoughtful planning.

In order to provide the best support we can for these new students, we've been talking lots about what we can do to get to know them and to really understand what they need.  Over the course of these discussions, I've been reminded about how profoundly different it is to provide support for a student with a learning disability than it is to provide support for a student with a more global intellectual impairment.

While both students can struggle with understanding new concepts and "hanging on" to new learning, there are very distinctive reasons for these challenges, and we are only able to provide them with the supports and structures they need if we deeply understand these differences, and why they matter.

 The term Learning Disabilities refers "to a number of disorders which may affect the acquisition, organization, retention, understanding or use of verbal or nonverbal information. These disorders affect learning in individuals who otherwise demonstrate at least average abilities essential for thinking and/or reasoning."(http://www.ldac-acta.ca).

Our learners who have been diagnosed with a learning disability will have an aspect of their learning which is more challenging- perhaps math calculation, or reading fluency, for example, but will have other areas of relative strength, which can help them to develop strategies and to employ tools, to make their challenges less impactful.  Individuals with a learning disability have average or above-average intelligence.  Where we successfully assist these students to learn compensatory skills (work-arounds), they find success with all aspects of the curriculum, heading off to the world of post-secondary education and  work to enjoy life independently and with few barriers.

Often, the tools that are the most successful for these learners are the tools that benefit all learners.  It's not about finding things that are weird or different....it's about providing access to things that EVERYONE benefits from using.  That's the beauty of a differentiated classroom community.

Examples include digital options such as word prediction, speech-to-text and text-to-speech tools, summarizing or hi-lighting tools  (aren't we lucky that between Google Read and Write, Google Chrome and the App Store that many of these things are available free or nearly free for our kids to access!).  Who doesn't want to lay on their bed with a cup of tea and an iPod recording an essay that's easily emailed to the computer for editing...but that's for another post.

The term Intellectual Disability is quite different.  It is "characterized by significant limitations in both intellectual functioning and in adaptive behavior, which covers many everyday social and practical skills." (http://aaidd.org).

Intellectual disabilities are sometimes described as cognitive impairments.  They generally fall into two categories:
Mild Intellectual Disability and Profound Intellectual Disabilities.

Diagnostically speaking, average intelligence is defined as having an IQ (Intelligence Quotient) score of 100.    Individuals with Mild Intellectual Disabilities will have IQ scores less than 70, individuals with Profound Intellectual Disabilities will have IQ scores that fall below 55.

It is easy to see that someone with a profound intellectual disability needs additional help.  These are individuals with such significant communicative and adaptive challenges that it is clear someone is needed to provide support for them on an ongoing basis.

It can be much more difficult to recognize that someone with a mild intellectual disability needs us.  Individuals with mild intellectual disabilities may be slower to acquire new skills and concepts, may find communicating with others or caring for their own personal needs difficult, or may have very short attention spans and be very concrete and literal.  At the same time, they may be quite comfortable in conversation with peers and adults, be able to navigate their school day without someone to help them work their way between environments in the school, and be quite keen to participate in class activities.

What happens sometimes, is that these students are perceived as disorganized, or distractible, or disengaged.  It may be that a student with an intellectual impairment participates in class and seems very interested in the conversation, but is not able to produce assignments without significant adult support.  Perhaps he or she is able to answer the straightforward questions, but becomes overwhelmed and lost when asked to be more reflective or inferential in his or her response.

For me, the most critical thing we can do to support these learners is to always be mindful of the difference between "can't," and "won't."   It is more difficult for learners with an intellectual disability to understand figurative or metaphoric language.  These are students who not be able to process multiple step directions, or to keep track of all of the dates/timelines/bits and pieces that we require of most students in a classroom.  If we're not really careful, it can be easy to think of them as dis-engaged or, (I cringe even typing it), lazy, without remembering all of the very real reasons they may actually be unable to do more without assistance.

These are learners who will have a gap socially with other students.  They will not understand the banter of peer interactions,  or the consequences of some of their choices, in the same way as their same-age peers.   They may be self-conscious about this, or may just become confused and frustrated.   They are definitely more prone to succumbing to peer pressure, it's harder for them to "see things coming."

Often, learners with intellectual impairments require more than differentiated environments or adaptations to their curriculum.  They need specific modifications to the content or expectations with respect to their learning.  They will simply not be able to cope with all of the material that is explored by their peers.


 
There are some specific things we can do as educators to support this group of vulnerable learners:





1.Support their language skills.  Advance load the vocabulary instruction, and carefully scaffold reading comprehension tasks.  Take time to answer their questions and help them make sense of what they are hearing or reading.  Know that they may not be able to understand or work with the same volume or complexity of material that their peers may explore.
 

2.  Make math manageable.  Basic facts such as arithmetic, time, and measurement will make more sense to students with intellectual impairments.  Problem solving and reasoning tasks will be really tough.  Use visuals, concrete examples, manipulative tools.

3.  Understand that this learner will have a short attention span.  It's not that this learner doesn't want to focus.  He or she actually CAN'T for too long.  Prompts, decreased distractions and starting with the easier bits of the task will help.

4. Directly teach "tricks" to remember things:  little rhymes for rote lists, repeating information orally to oneself, remembering bits of info in clusters, creating little pictures and diagrams.

5.  Help with the transfer of knowledge.  Learning something in English class won't necessarily mean the student can do it in Social Studies.  Wherever possible, teach with meaningful context, point out connections, remind students they learned something in another environment that can help them here. These students will learn new skills and information in little bits.  They need us to break things down, and to help "chain" the bits together. 

6.  Structure opportunities to practice social skills.  These are often learners who won't "get" the interactions of their peers or notice body language.   Coach them.  Encourage them.

(Adapted from https://www.education.com/slideshow/areas-difficulty-children-mild/language-skills/)


For me, though, the most important thing of all is missing off of this list.   Learners with mild intellectual disabilities deserve all of the success, engagement and connection with their school communities that other students experience.  Regardless of the size of their steps, or of whether they are working adaptations or modifications to their curriculum, this group of learners deserve to be working alongside their peers, and their individual learning needs to be acknowledged and celebrated.

After all, THEY ARE ALL OUR KIDS!