Whenever someone reads a book, they want to be drawn to characters who think, act, and look like they do. This goes for girls, this goes for black and brown people, and this goes for handicapped folks as well. It’s no different for a gifted person: they want to see people who are like them, whether they be awkward, brilliant, or creative. These gifts are often shown as freakish or with special powers, like in the Harry Potter series. It can be difficult to find a gifted person portrayed as a typical human being using their creative thinking abilities.

With that in mind, I would like to recommend five different book series that portray gifted people using their abilities to be creative. I chose series because it gives you so many more options to check out these books. These series range from young readers to adults.

Encyclopedia Brown (29) grades 3-4

My first series choice is near and dear to my heart. Encyclopedia Brown has been around since I was a kid (yes, that long). I loved reading about Encyclopedia Brown using his creative thinking skills to solve mysteries that his police chief father could not, or the ones that other kids brought to him in the small office he set up in the family garage. Through the 29 books in the series, Encyclopedia was allowed to let his talents fly and to use his intelligence somewhere other than in the classroom. And he made a little coin in the process (25 cents a day plus expenses). Each mystery is solved based on a lapse in logic, a piece of knowledge, or an astute observation by the ever-thinking Encyclopedia. It was his creative thinking abilities that allowed him to be so successful in solving these mysteries.

The Puzzling World of Winston Breen (3) grades 3-7

A series you might not have heard of is The Puzzling World of Winston Breen. There are three books in the series:

1. The Puzzling World of Winston Breen

2. The Potato Chip Puzzles

3. The Puzzler’s Mansion

The premise of these books is that Winston Breen is excellent at deciphering puzzles both big and small. He uses these creative thinking abilities to work his way through a scavenger hunt, take part in a puzzle hunt run by an eccentric potato chip tycoon, or work his way out of the mansion of a famous musician.

What I especially like about the series, besides the realistic way it portrays gifted children, is that the reader gets to try and solve some of the puzzles themselves. They’re right there in the book, with an answer key in the back. So you get to work on the same puzzles the main character is working on.

The Mysterious Benedict Society (6) grades 3-7

“Are you a gifted child looking for special opportunities?” What a great way to start a book series, and it’s the opening to The Mysterious Benedict Society. Answering the call is not just one gifted character, but four of them.

I listened to a recent podcast with educational thought-leader Tony Wagner. He talked about how the information age has become a thing of the past, and what we really need to be doing with our students is showing them how to be innovators. I 100% agree with this assertion. When you can use Alexa or Siri to find most information in a moment’s notice, there is no longer the need to spend time in school memorizing content. We should be using this time in school to teach students how to think and create.

Of course the fundamental problem with this is in order for students to be innovators, their teachers need to use innovative teaching methods. When you walk into most classrooms, especially the older students get, what you are met with is a traditional looking classroom with the teacher in front of the students who are all lined up in symmetrical rows pointing toward the front. The teacher is giving information to students who sit passively and take it in, occasionally applying some of it to problems, an essay, an assessment, or other. And you want to know what; everyone knows this is not the best way to teach. Why do they know it? Because it is not the best way these teachers learn themselves. If you were to ask them what the most transformative learning they participated in, I can almost guarantee it was not in this sort of setting. It was something where they got to be active participants, hands-on, involved in the learning proces

This begs the question of why do many teachers teach this way if they know it is not the best way for their students to learn? The two answers are two of the most uninspiring ones known to mediocre work known the world around; it is easier and it is safer. Let’s unpack each of these lame reasons.

I know people say this all the time, but teaching is a difficult profession. It is not just about the learning for your students, it is the management of them as well. And the older students get, the more difficult it becomes to manage (unless of course you are a kindergarten teacher, who should all be given medals of honor). Elementary teachers typically will have the same 25 to 30 kids all day, in middle school there might be two teachers sharing a group of 60 kids, but high school teachers have upwards of 150 students, rotating through every 45 minutes or so. It can be very difficult to manage so having students in neat rows, talking at them makes it much easier to manage. Of course what they don’t know is that you can manage a classroom that does student-centered learning. Innovative, student-led learning can be messy which can seem to be harder thus not as many people are doing it. We all, teachers included, are afraid of the unknown, so teaching in a way that no one else seems to be doing can be a scary prospect.

By the time summer rolls around, students are done learning and want nothing more than to spend the next three months doing as little learning as possible. However, when it comes to creativity, summer is actually the best time to be learning. After all, it’s the most sunny of the seasons, and sunnier days support brain functions and moods.

During the school year, students are often confined to four walls, whether it’s their schoolroom or the walls of their house during the cold winter and rainy spring months. Summer is when the shackles are thrown off and the sky’s the limit—literally! The ability to go outside and to look up at the sky is its own tapestry of creativity. Just having a child lie in the grass and look at the clouds, imagining what shapes she sees, is better than any math or ELA lesson. And I don’t just mean for elementary school kids. High school students, who get very little opportunity to be creative in the classroom, are able to let their creativity loose in the summer as well.

My Daughter’s Summer Project

My 18-year-old daughter came to me one summer morning and said, “I want to make a garden.”

She pointed to a bare spot in the backyard where a jungle gym had been taken down because my daughters were no longer interested in swinging or going down the slide.

I thought to myself, “This shouldn’t be so bad. We’ll get some dirt, dig some holes, and see what happens. What’s the worst that could happen?”

Little did I realize my daughter had much grander plans than I envisioned. She went on the internet and found a blueprint for a raised garden. And this just wasn’t any raised garden. This one was surrounded by a fence to keep out the many squirrels, birds, and other critters we often spied from our backyard deck I had built myself many years ago.

She threw me my keys and directed us to the local Home Depot, where she began to troll up and down the large aisles, putting planks of wood, hinges, plastic mesh, and lots and lots of screws in our cart, as easily as grabbing cookies, fruit, or bread at the grocery store. She didn’t enlist my help in any of this, having a very clear vision which did not involve my input.

All this went from the van into our garage, taking up most of its space. I went over to my workbench and, given my past experience, threw on a pair of gloves to prevent any splinters. But I was told,

“I got this. If I need help I’ll come to get you.”

I was banished inside as she rolled up her metaphorical sleeves and got to work. About an hour later I got a text asking me to come to the garage. Finally, she realized she couldn’t do it without me. When I got to the garage, she said,

“I’ve marked all of those boards there. Would you cut them with your saw?”

Seemed like sort of a waste of my handyman talents, but for the next 15 minutes, I cut board after board after board, which she promptly loaded in her arms and carried out to the backyard to begin assembling the frame.

By the time my daughter had finished her garden, it had two-foot raised flower beds surrounded by a plastic mesh fence complete with a door. But the creativity didn’t end there. She grew strawberries, corn, and attempted watermelon that first year. The following year she adjusted her crops to include more foods that she liked or could be used to cook with.

A project that I skeptically believed wouldn’t go anywhere is now in year three, and she’s expanded her garden with thigh-high planters where she grows herbs and peppers. This was a creative project that could have only been done in the summer.

Other Summer Creative Ideas

Summer is the best time to be creative because your canvas is so much more expansive. You can:

• Look at the stars and imagine your own, new constellations.

• Use sidewalk chalk to create and watch the rain wash it away for you to create again.

• Take a class from your local parks and rec, not because your school says you have to, but because there’s something you want to learn.

• Go for a walk in the woods to see the wildlife and trees.

• Lie in a hammock and imagine stories while closing your eyes.

• Read a book for pleasure, not for school/work.

• Go to the beach and create things in the sand.

• Take a nap (it’ll improve your thinking later in the day).

• Invent a new game with stuff you find in the garage or around the house.

After three grueling days it had come down to this. Starting with 24 teams on Tuesday, through a series of half hour games where scores bounced back and forth like a ping pong ball, it had been whittled down to these two teams. And they were very different teams.

One of the one side was Mr. X’s homeroom class. It was chock full of athletic kids, some of which were bigger than my 50 year-old self. I had watched them tear through team after team in the preliminary rounds, scoring sometimes 8 runs in an inning. Mr. X stood in the field with his students, instructing them to cover this base, get the ball in, and other directions that were barked out like a military sergeant. He ruled the field with an iron fist and if you didn’t follow a direction he had given, he would let you know about it by getting in your face. He gathered the team together after any tough inning and gave them a pep talk to get them back on track. He was taking this very seriously and he seemed to want his team to succeed very badly.

This also was a reflection of the classroom where Mr. X taught math with the same demeanor. He stood in front of the classroom and directed instruction on the white board, delving out step by step how students should approach a problem. Students stood in rows like good soldiers, waiting to get their next orders before moving forward. Everyone marched in step, working at the same pace and finishing at the same time. If you didn’t do as you were told you were put in your place immediately and I had heard Mr. X often chastising a student outside of the classroom about not doing what they were supposed to. It was a well-oiled machine and Mr. X’s results on the state test showed that he grew these students if he had to carry them across the finish line himself. It was a very teacher-centered way of learning.

On the other side was Mrs. Z’s team. This team was made up of the gifted students. In the few games I had seen them play, she had never even so much as stepped a foot on the field. If I heard her talking to her team, it was making sure they were all aware of the order they were kicking and done so in a very low voice. When they were on the field, she wasn’t telling them where to go with the ball. She had a very laissez faire approach. It wasn’t that she didn’t care about them. It was the fact that she trusted them to do what they needed to for themselves.

The beliefs of a gifted label and the facts of a gifted label can sometimes be two very different things. When a child is deemed to be “gifted,” people liken this to an achievement like earning a merit badge. It is easy to forget that the child was always gifted. That this was only the identification of that giftedness. It would be akin to a child who was born with the ability to jump high finally displaying it when out on the basketball court and people thinking they must have just developed that skill.

Misconceptions by Teachers

This belief manifests itself in many different ways to many different people. Teachers who get gifted students in their class might believe that these students are all compliant and love school. This is certainly not always the case. True, there are some gifted students that fall into this definition, just as there are typical students who do as well. However, just as there are typical students who appear not to care or are lazy, or who show a clear dislike for schooling, there are gifted students who can fall into this category as well. That is because we are confusing the love of learning with the love for school.

Most gifted students do love to learn as they are born with an innate sense of curiosity. Unfortunately, this might not match up with what is being taught at school. While a class is following along, learning about ecosystems, the gifted child might be learning everything he can about volcanos. He might spend countless hours at home researching these and watching programs devoted to them. But this student does not like learning about ecosystems because he cannot see the relevance to his own life.

Gifted Kids Will Be Alright, Won’t They?

Teachers also might make the mistake of thinking they don’t really need to work with gifted students. After all, can’t he do it by himself? Or that the gifted student will be fine no matter what and so devote their attention to students they consider to be more at-risk. Gifted students need to be challenged just as any child does. Their level of challenge just tends to be a little higher. A gifted child’s needs in the classroom are just as specialized as students at the other end of the spectrum. Not addressing these needs will simply leave so much untapped potential on the table.

How to Challenge Gifted Students

There are all sorts of strategies for challenging gifted students. Sometimes we accelerate or go fast. Other times we go more in-depth meaning rather than just learning the basics, students go into more detail. No matter which method is used, one thing that we have to remember is that students are gifted because of the type of thinking they are capable of. Because of this, if we are truly going to challenge them, we have to be engaging their minds in higher levels of thinking.

The Difference Between Hard and Challenging

Some educators believe the way you challenge student thinking is to make a question or task hard. Usually this involves asking something that is not well known or that is very specific. An example would be the following:

What is the capital of Turkmenistan?

Turkmenistan is not a well-known country and so is not mentioned as frequently as others in conversation or in the news. The likelihood of students knowing this without explicitly having studied it is slim. However, the level of thinking being asked to answer this question does not involve reasoning or the putting together of several pieces of information to arrive at a conclusion. There are no problem-solving skills being employed or critical thinking required. Students would have heard, seen, or read about this somewhere and then had to recall what they had already been taught. This is not challenging students. It is seeing if they are paying attention.

A better question that would challenge the level of thinking would be a question such as this:

Do you think the country of Turkmenistan was better served being a part of the Soviet Union or as an independent nation?

Usually, when people hear the word “gifted”, the first thing they think is that this person is smart. Typically this means that things come easily to them, and/or they’re particularly skilled in an academic subject area such as math or ELA. The problem with this characterization is that it often overlooks the fact that giftedness can also apply to creativity. These are students who may display a gift for thinking outside the box.

Here is what this creative thinking might look like. The teacher asks the class which of the following three shapes has no sides:

• Triangle

• Circle

• Square

Twenty-nine hands go up in the classroom with the same answer: the circle. Yet one student defiantly raises her hand and says, “They all have sides.”

The teacher does a double-take, looking at the shapes again and then at the student. “But dear, a circle doesn’t have any sides.”

“Sure it does,” the girl says, sticking to her guns. “There is an in-side and an out-side.”

It is this creative thinking that does not get much attention in the 21st-century classroom, with its focus on content standards that aim for skill mastery rather than levels of creativity.

This is why we, as educators of gifted students, need to make sure we are challenging our students not only academically, but creatively as well. You might be wondering what this looks like. Here are three things you can do to allow gifted students to use their creativity in the classroom:

1. Allow a choice of performance assessments – often when we’re assessing our students’ mastery of a topic, we use the very traditional method of pencil-to-paper responses. What if, instead, we let students choose the method they use to demonstrate their mastery, providing them with choices such as:

• Oral presentations

• Technology such as coding or creating a website

• Drawings/paintings/posters

• Demonstrations

• Real-world products such as podcasts, newscasts, or vlogs

2. Design work that has no known answer or no ceiling

“When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all.”

• Paul Simon (Kodachrome)

My family and I sat down to play a trivia game we had newly gotten from the holidays based on the television show Friends. I was excited to test my love of the show for I had watched every of one its 236 episodes and who knows how many reruns. It was my favorite show on television during its time and there are many episodes my family and I quote to one another all the time. I felt I had a true understanding of the sitcom, and this trivia game would test that, or so I thought.

The first question I was asked was “What is the name of the guy who works at the copy place with Chloe?” I thought back in my memory of the show and was able to recall that Chloe had been the girl Ross had been with the same night Rachel had broken up with him. Chloe was a character who was in a single episode and did not garner much screen time. Her only purpose was to create further conflict. I had not remembered her name and barely recalled her working at a copy place. These facts were less important than the actual impact it had on the Ross and Rachel relationship for this would drive a lot of the storyline as we would have to wait 7 more seasons to see them get back together. So given the fact that her name wasn’t important, why was remembering the name of the guy who worked with her who had even less screen time and really served no purpose in the grand scheme of that particular show essential?

Thinking this was a fluke, I listened as the next question was asked. From season 7, “what did the duck eat causing it to get sick?” I remembered there was a duck as well as a chicken I believe. But I was having trouble remembering that it had eaten anything to upset its stomach much less what it was that was eaten. And so this continued on throughout the night, listening to question after question that was asking for inconsequential information. My conclusion was that this was more frustrating than fun. Having to pay attention to such non-essential details or remembering things that had nothing to do with the enjoyment of the overall episode do not inspire me want to want watch a Friends episode like I thought playing the game would.

This reminded me of a time I was helping my high school daughter study for a social studies test. And guess what? All of the things she was being required to know for the test were just like the questions in the Friends trivia game. They were useless facts that had nothing to do with the overall impact of the event. They were questions making students focus on stuff that doesn’t really matter and overlooking the stuff that does.