In Gifted Children Quarterly (October 2019), there is an article by Jonathan Wai and Jeff Allen on what boosts the talent development of gifted students in secondary education. They look at 21 years of data to determine what are effective ways to help gifted students develop their talents. There are your usual suspects such as STEM, AP courses, and post-secondary classes that are proven to increase a student’s educational growth.

Wai and Allen also look at extra-curricular activities and the affect they have on academic growth. The results here were a little mixed. Activities such as community service, debate, performing arts, or cultural clubs were found to have positive effects on a student’s academic growth. Non-academic clubs such as social clubs, radio/tv, or sports were shown to have a negative impact on student achievement growth.

The conclusion they draw about extra-curricular activities is “how academically talented students allocate their time is of potential importance.” In other words, some extra-curricular activities will develop talent better than others, students just need to choose the right ones. This begs the question of what are worthwhile extra-curricular activities in which students wishing to develop their academic talents should participate?

Here are five suggestions of possible programs and the benefits these activities may provide:

Model United Nations/YMCA Youth and Government

The basic premise of these programs is that students explore a problem and try to create a viable political solution. It usually breaks down into two parts: 1. The writing of a resolution or law framing the issue, and 2. The solution. Next, there is an oral defense of this solution usually given in front of peers.

Professional development is a tricky thing. Districts are often times charged with the mammoth task of trying to provide PD for an entire building or even district. This can be a daunting order and pleasing everyone is never going to happen. There is the extra added challenge of trying to meet the district’s mandates as well as maneuvering around the union contract.

Because time is such a valued and rare commodity, some districts bring in a keynote at the very beginning of the year to perform from the stage. This person gets up and gives his or her routine, the people laugh, cry, ohh, and ahh as the speaker takes everyone through a roller coaster of emotions, and hopefully, at the end everyone applauds and leaves the auditorium with a renewed sense of purpose, never to see the speaker again. The question I always have is, what is the shelf life of this PD kick in the butt? How far does each teacher take this second wind and run with it? It, of course, varies. Some teachers use it to transform their classroom while others are complaining that they had to sit for an hour straight (even though that is what their students have to do all of the time), as well as everything in between. And yet some districts are paying tens of thousands of dollars for these speakers, not really measuring what sort of impact it has and whether there would be a better use of the money.

Then there is the sit and get. This is where teachers attend sessions where someone tries to fit an entire curriculum worth of lessons into a single one hour presentation. It would be the equivalent of trying to fit in an entire unit plan into a single class. Not only that, the format severely limits what the person can do. I remember a teacher came up to me after a PD and said, “I’m tired of being shown PowerPoints on how I shouldn’t be giving PowerPoints in class.” I’m as guilty as anyone. When I only have a short period of time, I often espouse a very non-traditional teaching strategy, using a traditional strategy to convey this. Nothing like getting up and telling people not to be a sage on the stage, as I deliver it as a sage on the stage.

There are conferences. This is usually a collection of speakers with a couple of keynote addresses centered around a central niche of education. These can be exhausting and overwhelming, though. By the time you get to the third speaker of the day, it is difficult to give your full attention. Not only that, trying to pick a session that is useful to you can be a challenge. The single paragraph descriptions that often accompany the conference program are not always reflective of what you are going to see. I often have buyer’s remorse when I get into a session and find it is not going to be useful for me, but I’m stuck.

You could do a book study. Trying to find a single book that can be useful to multiple people can be somewhat of a challenge. Add to the fact that not everyone is doing their reading (imagine if our students did that), and so the discussion cannot be as rich as it needs to be.

Of course, in many cases, you have the professional development you need already in your district.

In the August 2019 edition of Teaching for High Potential, Tara Nyikos, Dianna Mullet, and Anne Rinn from the University of North Texas, wrote an article about executive dysfunction and strategies that can be used to help gifted students overcome them.

Executive dysfunctions are a lack of executive functions which are things such as flexible thinking, taking initiative, prioritizing skills, planning, self-monitoring, and organization. What the dysfunctions look like  in gifted students are backpacks exploding with papers, a constant scrambling to find things, students who, if you turn your back for even a second, will be off task by the time you turn back around, or the student who lacks grit and will not persevere when things become challenging. In other words, these students lack discipline—Not discipline in that they misbehave or don’t follow rules, rather the discipline it takes to learn about something. “Students with higher self-discipline habits, regardless of intellectual ability, tend to have higher levels of academic performance” (Renzulli, 2012).

The question then is how do you teach a gifted child discipline? The article provides many suggestions including:

• Early bilingual training

• Scaffolding

• Authentic assignments

• Mentors

The one I would like to put into practice is inquiry-based learning. Inquiry-based learning acts as an umbrella over such teaching strategies as project-based learning, problem-based learning, and case-based learning. The general idea of all of these is you give students something to explore and they must come up with a product that demonstrates what they learned from this journey.

I was walking the other day and passed a skateboard park. In the park was a lone kid, probably no older than 14, and he was trying various tricks on the concrete structures placed in the park for skateboarders to work with. What I was amazed at was how many times this kid tried to grind his board on the edge of a concrete wall, only to fail. Yet he would relentlessly try again, determined to get the move down, until after about fifteen, twenty minutes, he successfully planted the edge of the skateboard on the wall and slid down it a few feet. The look on this kid’s face spoke volumes about how happy he was about his accomplishment. I couldn’t help but wonder if he had that same dedication to a math problem, or a particularly difficult essay. How many times would a kid be willing to fail? I’m not sure he would have the endurance for that.

Why is this? One of the problems is that we don’t let kids fail enough. I’m not saying allowing kids to flunk a class. I mean creating a classroom environment where students are encouraged to try something outside of their comfort zone that they may fail at. Give them something that is above their head and see how they respond to it. It would be the equivalent of noticing that a 2nd grader is really good at addition and subtraction so you give her a few multiplication problems to see how she handles them. She might be completely stumped and unable to comprehend how to multiply. She may surprise you, though, and get a couple of them. The point though it not that she succeed, the point is that she be challenged.

As learners, we tend to do the best, more effective learning when we feel a little uncomfortable. In fact, being pushed to the brink of failure causes a lot of people to be very innovative and come up with things they would not have had, they had it easier or more resources. Take James Dyson, for example. You hear the name Dyson, and you think of one of his innovative products such as the bagless vacuum cleaner, the automatic hand dryer, or the bladeless fan. However, it took him 5126 failed prototypes before landing on the idea of his vacuum. That’s a lot of failure. But he learned from each one of them before he produced the bestselling vacuum in the world.

Kids come by this naturally too. Think about how many times a child fell while trying to walk but got right back up and tried again. Could you imagine if that child simply folded his arms and said, “Na-ah. Not going to try to walk anymore.” 

The tricky thing about teaching politics to any grade level of students is leaving your own politics out of it. I always knew I had taught a successful unit if by the end, students still did not know which way I leaned politically. I have had colleagues who make it very clear which way they lean, even going so far as to have bumper stickers or signage touting specific candidates hanging in their classroom. This always bothered me because although I think teachers are responsible for influencing our students to be learners, there are certain topics we have no business influencing. I subscribe to the Linus theory:

“I’ve learned there are three things you don’t discuss with people: religion, politics, and the Great Pumpkin.”

Linus Van Pelt (Charles Schultz)

This does not mean ignoring the issues altogether though. It is important for students be aware there are religions that are different than the one they practice just as there are different stances on politics. You also want to mine student interest whenever it rears its head so whenever the presidential election rolls around, I would always have my students participate in an election of their own.

This article appeared originally in the Fall 2018 issue of OAGC Review.

Why are there so many women in gifted education? Case in point, I am the only male who serves on the Coordinator Division. Same goes for the HQPD committee I am a part of for OAGC. At our Gifted Coordinators of Central Ohio meetings, the ratio is 1 male for every 7 females. This being vastly outnumbered does not bother me in the slightest. I live in a household with a wife and two daughters. I am used to being the odd man out (pardon the pun).

If you do not believe me, next time you go to a gifted conference, when there is a lull in the keynote play the game I always do of looking around the room to try to spot how many men are in the crowd. It is like a Where’s Waldo because there are usually few to be found. When I attended the National Association for Gifted Children Annual Conference in Orlando, Florida, they had turned most of the restrooms in the conference center into women’s restrooms, striking out the pair of pant legs and adding the skirt. The lone male restroom was at the other side of the center. A first I was miffed at being inconvenienced but soon saw that after using the restroom and returning to the conference hall, there were women still waiting in their lines.

It still begs the question of why are most folks involved in gifted education female? There are a couple of possible explanations for this. One would be that most services in gifted occur in the younger grades of elementary and middle schools. On average, there are far more women teaching at these levels than men, with junior highs and high schools typically having a majority of men. Since there are not as many gifted services at the higher levels other than Advanced Placement Courses and College Credit Plus, there are not any gifted intervention specialists in those buildings typically.

A second reason would be that women are usually better at naturally going to higher level questioning. My reasoning for this is that whenever I am telling my wife something, her first response to me is always “why” or “how”. And yet when she tells me something, I just accept it at face value. I see this in my students as well. Girls are just better at questioning things. This works well with gifted students who need to be asked these higher level questions to push their learning to a deeper level.

A third reason would be because women are generally a more patient lot than men which is better for working with gifted children. One might wonder, why would you have to be particularly patient with gifted students? Doesn’t everything come quickly to them? The answer is yes, but what also comes quickly to them is any inquisitive thought that pops into their head which they are usually keen on sharing. This lack of impulse control can try the patience of many a teacher, but there is usually a nugget of wisdom contained in the comment that only a patient person would be willing to explore for its full value.

For the longest time, I thought the reason why there were not more men in gifted education is because we cannot say Woodcock-Johnson without giggling. I believe though the reason there are so many women in gifted education is because in order to meet the needs of the whole gifted child, you have to address their academic as well as social/emotional needs. Male teachers/coordinators often times focus just on the academic aspect and address the social/emotional only when it rears its ugly head. I know because this was the approach I took for several years. Women on the other hand are very astute at seeing the social/emotional need before it becomes an issue and head any potential problems off at the pass.

Of course there are exceptions to this rule. Some male coordinators/teachers are excellent at sniffing out the social/emotional needs while some female counterparts do not address it. However, having worked with both women and men in gifted education for several years, it just seems to come more naturally to women.

Tracy Alley, in the June edition of Parenting for High Potential (PHP), has a very good article concerning the use of picture books to meet the social-emotional needs of your elementary aged students. She throws out several suggestions for books such as I Am Enough by Grace Byers, The Girl Who Never Made Mistakes by Mark Pett and Gary Rubinstein, and We’re All Wonders by R.J. Palacio.

This process is known as bibliotherapy, and Alley sets the mood in her classroom by having the students gather around on the floor in a mock campfire setting. She also provides some general questions you can ask of students when talking about the book:

1. How did the character resolve or fix the situation?

2. Could you connect with the main character’s feelings? If so, when did you make the connection?

3. Many events happened in the story. Has anything similar happened to you or a friend?

4. Have you ever experienced (insert emotion, like sadness, happiness, guilt, regret, jealousy) like the character in the story? Do you want to share what that experience was like?

5. Did the character in the story handle the situation in a good way? If so, how? If not, what could have changed the outcome– through action or emotional response?

6. How would you have handled the situation?

Lots of great tools for doing this with students in the classroom. In an effort to turn theory into practice, here is a lesson plan of what you might do with students concerning bibliotherapy specific to gifted students.

Learning objectives:

To have students ponder why someone might not want to use their gifts as a learner (underachievement).

Oftentimes, gifted kids are referred to as being bright. We want to be careful when labeling them with this because it is not always accurate. You see, a bright child is someone who has the following qualities:

• Is attentive

• Works hard

• Learns with ease

• Enjoys peers

• Love school

• Is a people pleaser

• Is good at following direction

• Is compliant

That’s a pretty good list and one that any teacher would give part of their paycheck if all students in their classes were of this quality. But this is not necessarily the gifted child. In fact, many times the gifted child can have a clear distinction to the quality:

There are a few clear distinctions between the two. For instance, the bright child is a hard worker, while the gifted child tests well. That does not mean that all gifted children do not work hard, but what it does mean is that some gifted children do not have to work hard in order to achieve good grades. As a result, some of these gifted children have learned not how to work hard, but how to hardly work. And who can blame them?