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.