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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
