Behavior or Boredom?

Behavior or Boredom?

by

Jessica Arnold

We often hear about the reciprocal relationship between behavior and grades; we associate poor academic achievement with carelessness and poor behaved students are the ones teachers never want in their class. But…what if there was a reason for these undesired behaviors and lack of achievement? This blog focuses on gifted students who are bored in the classroom and result to acting out and avoiding all work for several reasons.

Not only are several students at risk in the schooling system, when a student is labeled as gifted they are automatically expected to reach high levels of learning, have no behavioral issues and be the perfect student; but what parents and educators may fail to realize is that setting such high expectations for school aged children could potentially be just as dangerous.

It is important to provide counseling to students who show the need for it; a few examples of this are misconduct, inconsistent work completion and lack of motivation. Individual counseling allows students to share feelings about their home lives, schooling experiences and give reason as to why they are not motivated to do well in school. Through counseling, solutions can be created to avoid the misconduct and boredom in class.

What To Do When Outbursts Occur:

1. Start early by helping the child talk about his or her emotions.
2. Held the child to discover their escalation style. Helping them to determine this pattern can give them a chance to redirect their feelings and manage them.
3. Create a plan for waht to do when s/he is overwhelmed.
4. If the the escalation and explosion happen anyway, remain calm and stay emotionally natural.
5. Breathe. You and the student.
6. Focus on the good behavior you want to see instead of focusing on the negative.
7. Use the events (good or baad) as a teachable moment.

For additional ways to reduce behavior problems check out this article from ByrdSeed.

Being Proactive:

Ultimately, we’d like to see this never happen. One way to be proactive to avoid those behaviors and escalated situations, is to simply place a student in the courses that appropriately challenge them. It is important that gifted students are put into classes with other gifted students. When gifted students spend time with others who share their abilities, they are happier and enjoy academic and social adjustment. Gifted students cognitively function at a different level than peers, and when surrounded by students who act similarly to them, it is a much safer and comfortable environment for them. Click here to read more about four teachers who adjusted their teaching styles and relationship building to accommodate those learners. According to Tanner, Stoll and Anway in School Psychology Quarterly, “research suggests that twice-exceptional students, or those who are highly gifted yet demonstrate a learning or behavioral disability, often underachieve in school.” It’s imperative to stop this cycle and educate students in the environment that best suits them.

Meeting the Unique Needs of Gifted Students:

Just as educators and parents ensure that struggling students have an individualized education, gifted students deserve the same. Not only does this eliminate boredom turning into behavior issues, it pushes students to their full potential which is a major goal of educators.

The educators in the classroom can mainly focus on pushing high levels of rigor as opposed to differentiating several levels of instruction, where some could be extremely low. The National Association for Gifted Children gives a great article as to the true importance of individualizing gifted students education here.

Resources for Teachers:

• 15 Ways to Help Gifted Students Thrive in School
• Gifted Kids at Risk
• Ways to Challenge Gifted Learners
• 50 Tips Tricks and Ideas for Teaching Gifted Students
• Strategies of Teaching Gifted Students
• Social and Emotional Issues in Gifted Children

Resources for Parents:

• Overall Information About Being Gifted
• This article is a platform for many other educational websites and articles to educate you! 

Join us this fall for our Camp Innovation Pathways to College Program at Northern Kentucky University! 

Our Fall Camp Innovation Program, Saturdays, October 31-November 1, 9:00 - 11:30 am, features classes for students in grades K-9. The program is designed for youth to discover and explore advanced content and engaged learning.  All classes provide the opportunity for students to share interests with other children while exploring pathways to intellectual development, academic enhancement, career exploration, and creative artistic fulfillment. Camp Innovation offers courses infusing entrepreneurship, science, mathematics, social studies, technology, visual and performing arts, and original interdisciplinary studies. 

From classes such as Zoo Explorations, Grossologists, Ozobot and Sphero Robotics to CSI Investigators, Crack the Code, Camp Break-A-Leg, and The Magical Marketing of Disney, we have an amazing selection for this fall!

For registration and a full list of classes, visit our website or Facebook page.

Fall 2018 Camp Innovation Program for Students in Grades K-9

Great news! NKU's Camp Innovation Program returns once again this fall with new classes and some of your favorites!

Who:  All students in grades k-9 are welcome!

When:  Camp dates will be Saturdays, September 15-29, 9:00-11:30 am EST.

Where:  Classes will be located in Landrum Hall at Northern Kentucky University.

What:  Check out the course brochure here.

Camp Innovation Program Summer 2018

The Power of Debate

Washington, Adams, Lincoln. What do these three names have in common? 

They have shaped the course of history with the power of debate. Debate is a key component to the advancement of society, policy, and the world. With so many different viewpoints, ideas, and people involved, it is very easy for meaningful debate to be lost and for ideas that would better the world, to be lost. The ability to debate and to feel comfortable doing so is what turns bright minds into those who will change the world.

In today’s world a dwindling amount of people are willing to thrust themselves into conversations about intense issues and say what is on their mind. It is critical that the next generation abandon their comfortable entrenchment to advance conversation and the world. Placing an emphasis on debate is how our global community will grow stronger economically, socially, and technologically. In every career, meaningful debate is a quintessential component of excellence.

Camp Innovation: Pathways to College at Northern Kentucky University is offering “Debate Club” this spring as part of our catalog of courses. Debate Club will help to develop the minds of tomorrow into compelling debaters and leaders in their future careers. Courses like this are how young minds turn into those who will change the world. For more information, visit http://gifted.nku.edu.

Gifted Students are Not Crockpots

Elaine Dillard

What a gift to a busy mom--a crockpot.  Throw a few ingredients in on a hectic day, set it to cook low and slow, and--like magic--a home cooked meal awaits a hungry family after a long day of school, work, soccer, ballet, and piano. 

With so many needs in the classroom, it can be tempting to treat gifted students like a crockpot--throw a few activities at them, let them simmer for hours--voila!--an “independent study.”  Unfortunately, this is the scene in many classrooms, but it isn’t the recipe for engaging and rigorous instruction.

While it is true that gifted and talented students need freedom, choice, space to be creative, and challenging work, it doesn’t mean that they should be separated from class to work on their own in an “educational crockpot.”  Gifted students need structure, instruction, and clear expectations just like a typical student in our classroom.  With that in mind, here are four things to keep in mind when planning instruction for gifted students:

1. Gifted students don’t come to school to be tutors.  Many of my gifted students are helpful, complaint, generous people, many of whom would make excellent teachers someday.  They master content easily, and are caring people, who do not want to see their classmates struggle.  It is tempting to use these students as a tutor.  After all--when there are sometimes dozens of students asking for help at once, it seems like a logical solution.  While heterogeneous grouping has its time and place, gifted students should not be seen as a teacher in your room.  These students deserve to be challenged, too.

Flexible grouping is an effective solution that uses pre-testing to identify the readiness of students with a particular skill.  Students who show they are ready to work at high levels can be grouped together so that they may work at a pace and level that is comfortable and challenging to them.  When I teach geometric transformations, I ask that all of my students learn to rotate a figure by 90 degrees around the origin.  Others of my students learn to rotate a figure any number of degrees around any given point.  I would be doing a disservice to the second group if I didn’t give them this advanced learning opportunity and instead ask them to teach their struggling peers to rotate a figure 90 degrees.

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2. Gifted students may exhibit behavior problems.  It seems to be a common misconception that gifted students exhibit gifted behavior.  I wonder if this is partly because bright students are often mistaken for gifted students, and gifted students are overlooked. (PDF)  Bright students are teacher pleasers who may have to work very hard to understand the material, whereas gifted learners may learn the material quickly, but be too bored or disengaged to communicate their learning clearly.

My gifted students tell me they have spent considerable time during their school years filling their time after finishing work or mastering a standard.  They feel like some assignments are a waste of their time if they are too easy or lack complexity.  This can cause them to act out or be distracting.  Gifted students are often highly creative, and their ways of expressing their thinking or their learning may not fit with what we had in mind.

I have found that when my gifted students are highly engaged, their behavior improves.  Our relationship improves also.  They appreciate being challenged, and they respond to work that is presented at their level.  It’s also important, to note, however, that gifted students may not be used to being challenged or being wrong, so it is important to coach GT students through the process of asking for help or persevering through challenging content.

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3. Gifted students still need to experience productive struggle.  While at first, it may seem like a blessing that a gifted student can breeze through the lesson and quickly show mastery of standards, this should be a red flag to us that we are not meeting the student needs.  As Thomas Sowell pointed out in his blog post., “high potential will remain only potential unless it is developed.”  If the standards presented to the class are too easy, more challenging ones should be in place. 

Tiered assignments are an excellent way to present the same material to the class in varying levels of difficulty, appropriate to the students’ readiness.  Think about your own baking skills.  Some of you can bake and decorate a wedding cake from scratch.  Others of you might feel comfortable baking a birthday cake from scratch, but not a wedding cake.  Others of you are out-of-the-box cake bakers, and still others prefer to let Kroger bake your cakes for you.  If you are capable of baking a wedding cake from scratch, it would be mightily insulting to you if I asked you to make a cake out of the box as I was teaching you to bake.  It’s also important to note that if I were testing your baking skills, I would never ask you to buy a cake, bake one out of the box, and bake a cake from scratch, but that is often what we ask our gifted students to do.  We need to be providing students with different (not extra) work that challenges students to think at levels where they are ready.

4.  Independent studies ARE valuable tools--with structure.  This is not to say that we should abandon the independent study.  Independent studies can be highly valuable instructional tools when used thoughtfully and carefully.  Gifted students still need expectation, structure, and deadlines--perhaps even more than typical students.  Creative and inquisitive minds can wander and projects can become elaborate and needlessly overwhelming (and never-ending).  Student-led conferences can be a valuable way for a teacher to check in with students and provide guidance and redirection during an independent study.  Gifted students, like all students, value choice, and independent studies are excellent ways to allow students to explore a topic of interest, as long as there are appropriate measures in place to ensure that students are challenged and productive.

When I establish behavior expectations at the beginning of the year, I ask that they be thoughtful.  I believe that is all our gifted students ask of us.  While a gifted student might produce a delicious product from a crock-pot style teaching approach because they are creative and inquisitive hard workers, GT students should be successful because of us, not in spite of us.  Gifted students deserve our time and attention, and strategies like independent study, flexible grouping, and tiered assignment can give students the direction they need to be engaged and challenged.

Roaming with the Dinosaurs!

Dinosaurs continue to fascinate the young and old alike which makes them a great educational tool. They provide unique research and thinking opportunities.

Dinosaurs were marvels of size, speed, versatility and power who reigned the earth unchallenged for the better part of 165 million years. Dinosaurs roamed the earth and dominated the planet. Today we can visit their bony remains in museums or peer into the past by looking at their fossils. "Dinosaurs pushed the envelope of physiological possibility, broke record after record and were paragons of success by almost any measure," says Kenneth Lacovara. Dinosaurs had breathtaking adaptations, gigantic sizes, razor-sharp teeth, devastating power, extravagant plumage, bizarre spines, horns, plates, and even clubs.

All of these characteristics make for an inspiring learning hook and instant introduction for paleontologists and educators to get students interested and involved in science content while developing inquiry and critical thinking skills. Students can even touch the bones of an animal that lived two hundred million years ago! They can see skeletons of animals that weighed upwards of 75 tons and can see predators that are 15 times as big as the most massive predators that still walk the earth! Even learning the names of dinosaurs can add a fun challenge for students: tyrannosaurus, triceratops, stegosaurus, velociraptor, allosaurus, diplodocus, ankylosaurus, iguanodon, and so many more! All of this combines for a great way to incorporate transdisciplinary learning that includes creativity, critical thinking, writing, geography, and so much more.

Engaging students as future researchers through the study of paleontology helps to energize to explore scientific concepts and explore ideas as true scientists. Studying dinosaurs provides a wonderful way for students to learn how sciences like biology and geology are interrelated and to teach about life on Earth.

Are you interested in engaging your child in learning more about dinosaurs and paleontology? 

Check out our Paleontologist Interns class with this spring's Camp Innovation Pathways to College Program at NKU. Students will put on their paleontologist hat and discover what the world was like for these magnificent ancient reptiles. How did they live? How did they become extinct? Do they roam among us today? Registration is limited and available at http://gifted.nku.edu.