19 ms·

What it means to teach gifted learners well

177 points by rahimnathwani 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kleer001 5y ago
Ok, that's in the States. Can anyone share their educational experience in Canada?
- wheelinsupial 5y ago
  I am not gifted and have never been in any gifted programs. When I was at UBC I came across a program called the University Transition Program (UTP) that was located on the UBC campus and run by the Vancouver School Board. The program is for 13-15 year olds to complete high school in 2 years. [1] has more details about the program, comments from students, and a newsletter produced by the program. [2] has some recent discussion on some limitations and issues with the program. [1] https://universitytransition.ca/ https://universitytransition.ca/ [2] https://www.ubyssey.ca/news/university-transition-program-call-for-change/ https://www.ubyssey.ca/news/university-transition-program-ca...
  - kleer001 5y ago
    That's COOL! Thank you very much. Hopefully it'll be around if and or when my little progeny wants/needs it.
Ivanjefferey 5y ago
themodelplumber 5y ago
Hmm, that's a lot, and it's even deeper than it looks! It's interesting stuff, but I wonder if the author was annoyed at being told to sum it up. Maybe meta: It's kinda too bad, in a lot of ways, that there's still this gifted/not dichotomy, this cultural meme we've labored under for multiple centuries now. A few years back, for a while, I made hard-but-good money coaching parents in understanding the gifts of their children. Every single child has a set of gifts that are really valuable. One approach I used was designing a more theoretical gifted context around the child, tracking and tailoring it while observing them, and then relating those idea-space concepts back to the here and now. The approach I preferred is way different from the traditional "gifted child" definition-based approach, by which data and professional levels of subjectivity are used for ranking. I still have a couple of friends from this world who are in their '40s and fighting over who has the higher IQ. Which is not to say it's all like that, but I do think the weaknesses of holding this weirdly polarizing view can and should be put behind us, even at this late point. Even though my approach was different, I never realized until I started how hard parents will try to 1) discern just how _you_ view intellect and gifts, and 2) attempt from day zero to shoehorn their child into the extreme higher ends of that model. I had to develop a separate model for working with parents who had extreme views about gifted children. If you've ever worked in earnest to develop a very thoughtful model meant to help create the best outcomes possible, only to watch people try to game it over and over, you know what I mean. One of the most important issues for most of the kids (IMO) was so much different though--it was definitely not this gifts/no gifts issue. It was closer to the perception of troubling relationship differentials among the people in their various life contexts. Kids and parents. The family at home. The kids and the teachers they don't like. And it's funny, it's not even a perception of hatred, anger, or abuse. It's more like the full spectrum. The person who can make you laugh and act in the now can be just as dangerous to your well-being as the person who pisses you off. This stuff was causing so many of the kids pain, robbing them of sleep, and throwing them into a strangely irresistible open rebellion against family members, friends, and other people and school systems that were trying to help them. It could get so bad that there wasn't any room for learning anymore. So in my view one of the easiest blockers that can prevent the "gifted effect" at all is really obvious--it's this troubling relationship differential issue. It will get in the way of everything, it will block powerful learning-stimulation signals and it will make psychological damage almost certain once it starts disturbing sleep. Conversely when most of the contextual relations are at least pretty calming, or ideally even mutually-encouraging and open, _everybody_ starts looking gifted. Plus there's less of a reason to say, "I'm _more_ gifted," as a means of self-protection. This was always my favorite thing to see.
- jkhdigital 5y ago
  This “relationship differential” idea is intriguing but you described it in such vaguely general terms that I’m not sure I understand what you mean. Could you maybe give a concrete example?
  - themodelplumber 5y ago
    Thanks & sure, and there are different ways you can describe those different effects of relating. Let's take the current context. Here's a differential effect where you have politely asked me to clarify for you. We can ask--"is that close to what we want? How does it benefit the parties involved? And if we call this information transfer with minimal emotional content, what if one expressed more emotional contents? Same effect or different somehow?" So we start to use some basic transactional analysis to get at a higher level idea of the system of outcomes from the relationship. We can also name the relationship by the type of effect. Over time the same groups of natural patterns will emerge in other relationships, so we can use the label as: A filter, a leverage point for teaching, etc. That's what I'm referring to, the system of thinking about differentials in this way. It will naturally overlap somewhat with the existing concepts like "friendship" and "working relationship," etc. In fact, some people will cling to those terms because it's what they know--"well isn't this just a friendship?" But by expressing the specifically new and unexplored contextual facets, we can bridge gaps in previous modes of thought about relating and solve problems that couldn't otherwise be solved under those more traditional concepts. So no, it's not just a friendship, any more than a computer running Photoshop is not just an adding machine; there are clear advantages for using additional terms as descriptors. Also I should add that it's a high level system of perceptions, so I leave out lots of concrete details with intent. This is to help to fully claim the broader concept space as a "construction zone," because it's been my experience that getting into details too soon is a common mistake, and may even block in- and outflows- from areas of strategic leverage. For example I try to claim and use lots of metaphor. It's weird but it works. In general, people are too concerned about detail at a cultural level and you can see this kind of "detail panic" (not referring to your comment, just in general) even at policymaking levels, which is the last place it should be a relevant concern. So culturally we clearly need more people who can sit in strategy, show how it can be interpreted as-is, and demonstrate how it naturally informs details over time. (Digression because of the details/example nature of your inquiry--anyway it's really fun stuff, thanks for asking)
antishatter 5y ago
I’m no potato covered in gravy, bro.
zitterbewegung 5y ago
In grade school I was in a gifted program. I think either my good memory or IQ allowed me to pass certain tests with multiple choices or logical decisions . In the long run regardless of your talents you eventually reach a peak where your talents don’t work anymore. It started for me in Junior high and in Community college and University. I eventually graduated by the grit that made my degree take longer than most and I really wish I had been given more challenges like that. My parents did the best they could. But the thing that really helped me was the constant flood of computers that were hand me downs from my uncle . I initially made twice what my mom made, tried to do a startup that failed after burn out , worked at three other jobs and some freelancing for distributed ledger technology and now I make four times my mom makes and I quadrupled my net worth in 3 years by living with my parents . At college I did have a capstone project where I investigated lambda calculus with a self distributed operation and discovered a few cellular automata that had interesting features . So life has treated me well with grit I suppose. I gave a talk at a hacking Confrence and pyOhio and to be honest last year was one of the best years of my life and I can’t wait to figure out what’s next.
- strikelaserclaw 5y ago
  IQ and conscientiousness are different dimensions, successful people usually have both but one can have a lot of one without much of the other. I personally know people who've gotten perfect scores on standardized testing but haven't really succeeded much in life because they lacked conscientiousness.
gnicholas 5y ago
Getting any sort of advanced instruction for our daughter has been like pulling teeth. I assumed it would be readily available, given that we live in the heart of Silicon Valley and our child attends a very well-funded public school. The school started off saying they don't offer advanced instruction, then grudgingly agreed to assess our child to see if she even would require it. But all of their "assessments" are closed-ended, which means she cannot actually demonstrate her proficiency level. Even when faced with her clearly advanced abilities (3.5 grades ahead in math, according to the diagnostic from the online math platform they use), they are still doing their best to hold her back. Their rallying cry? "Even Steph Curry practices dribbling". After hearing this for the third time, I finally pointed out that Steph Curry wouldn't have become who he is if he were never allowed to practice anything but dribbling. The school has continued dragging their feet. The unsurprising result is that advanced students leave for private schools. We never would have bought a home in an expensive district had we anticipated departing for a private. I would recommend that parents interested in good schooling in this area look into Redwood City over Menlo Park or Palo Alto, since it has a magnet program for 3-8 and is considerably less expensive. This whole process has been very disappointing (and surprising) for me, since I had a very different experience growing up. I went to public schools in Sacramento, where magnet programs were freely available and students could open enroll from anywhere in the region. We had classmates who lived halfway to Tahoe. It was great. I understand their programs are still up and running, and it's shocking that the well-heeled districts around here are so hostile to advanced instruction. Happy to connect with other nearby parents of young kids. Contact info is in profile.
- dv_dt 5y ago
  California used to have a better funded GATE (gifted and talented education) program - like maybe in the 70’s - but like much infrastructural social investment in America - it has undergone long term atrophy of decades.
  - gnicholas 5y ago
    I don't think it's decades of atrophy. In 2014 the state simply got rid of the GATE requirement. Districts abandoned their programs in droves after that. It was much more binary than a decades-long decay.
armchairhacker 5y ago
I'm pretty sure most if not all gifted learners really like to learn - that's what makes them gifted. Really the most important thing is to give gifted learners opportunity and make sure they know what's available. I think a good way to provide "gifted" education is through optional extra-curriculars like math clubs which teach higher-level concepts and function as ways to place-out of lower-level classes. Most students who aren't that smart won't even want to go to these clubs, and the ones that do shouldn't cause any issues, and the gifted students will want to go at minimum it's less work for them to place out of the "boring" classes. If a particular student or small group is much more gifted than their peers, they should have access to a regional or state or even national club or classes. That way they don't feel like an outcast, in this day and age their are plenty of very talented people in all fields.
- hiptobecubic 5y ago
  Agree fully. I was in G&T in elementary and middle school and the primary benefit imo was that I went into highschool with a circle of friends that were mostly high-achievers. Unless you plan on being a horrible overbearing helicopter parent, peer pressure is going to determine a lot more than you're expecting about what your kids like, do, strive for, etc. Despite being at a school that sent zero students to Stanford or Harvard or Cambridge, we had a pretty high upper bound on what you _could_ do if you were motivated. Competitive academic teams were the norm in many subjects (math, languages, history, civics...) Some of my middleschool friends split off to go to local magnet schools instead and looking at the spread, they didn't actually fair any better than the rest of us. Meanwhile, they mostly describe highschool as a miserable experience that made them vomit with stress instead of the excellent time that I had in public school with access to all the "public school stuff" like marching band, large theatre program involvement from the local community, etc. Maybe some of those things have since died, but I'd be surprised if the difference was enough to justify it.
fersho311 5y ago
everything said in this article applies to non gifted learners as well!
- jkhdigital 5y ago
  …no? The first point, of course, but the author explicitly stated that. A fundamental (and non-controversial) aspect of “giftedness” is that the child learns at a much more rapid pace than peers. This almost automatically requires adjustments to curriculum that would not apply to a non-gifted child.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    People do not learn at a constant speed throughout their education. Almost everyone has at least a few runs of "giftedness", at least in some subjects, where they could benefit from acceleration; and conversely, even gifted students might need some "remedial" effort from time to time.
    - jkhdigital 5y ago
      A person with an IQ of 140 will learn pretty much every academic subject faster than someone with an IQ of 100. It’s kind of baked into the metric. Now, of course this doesn’t mean that they will have any advantage in learning, say, how to ride a bike or dribble a basketball, but the discussion here is clearly directed at “book learning” which comprises the majority of school curriculum.
- hatware 5y ago
  I think the obsession with gifted learners being "different" from the "normal" is... weird. I look at the phenomenon as more of a "Here's how we cater to what we perceive as our best and brightest" ... when the reality is that everyone has the capacity to be bright, environment and competition just play a huge role.
  - amatecha 5y ago
    I mean, my lifetime experience is one of "being different". I was fundamentally different from my classmates since day 1. Teachers picked up on it immediately and were concerned that, while I breezed through everything and seemed to be very "sharp" (or whatever funny word they would use), I was totally disinterested and seemed bored and unhappy. I was. I learned nearly everything I was shown instantly, and usually understood it effortlessly. In grade 3 I excelled so strongly at spelling that the teacher had me make the weekly spelling tests. In grade 5 I was the only kid who actually copied down and memorized "pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis" and "phthatlylsulfithiazole" when the teacher wrote them on the board to be funny (though he spelled them wrong at the time, I later learned). FWIW I just typed those from memory without checking their spelling. Environment surely does play some part. I grew up in a home that fostered intellect, learning, growth etc. I'm sure there are countless studies on "nature vs. nurture" and my subjective view is both are relevant, perhaps even fairly 50/50. But my life growing up I was the exception to the norm in all environments. I have some really stark examples that could really hit this home but I'm not going to post them on here, but... there's a lot of truth to the "differentness of giftedness".
actfrench 5y ago
It's absurd in this day and age that point 1 and point 2 are deemed only important for gifted learners. Our education system has such a low level of differentiation and is geared so much towards achieving a base line of mediocrity for the highest number of students that we serve almost no one well. Point one: "Good curriculum and instruction for gifted learners begins with good curriculum and instruction" Doesn't every child deserve good curriculum and instruction and can't good curriculum and instruction help elevate every child from whatever situation they are beginning with? Yes, the author acknowledges good curriculum is important. But why should students considered gifted be more entitled to this than others. And wouldn't good instruction help highlight hidden giftedness in those that are less advantaged. Point Two: "Good teaching for gifted learners is paced in response to the student's individual needs." It's widely known in the education community that mastery learning (1-1 instruction and independent study where students learn at their own pace using curriculum that builds upon concepts) results in 2 sigma better achievement than learning that happens in a classroom setting where every child learns at the same rate. Children speed up sometimes, they slow down sometimes. Shouldn't every child have the possibility to learn at their own pace, go fast when they're learning quickly and slow when they are struggling more, much as when someone visiting a foreign country sometimes learns language at a fast clip and is other times processing, and then may have a big burst forward? Why is this better or important for just "gifted children?" Point 3 makes sense "Good teaching for gifted learners happens at a higher "degree of difficulty". Even so, a good teacher understands that learning must be differentiated. It's great for students to be challenged, but students also need to be having fun while they're challenged. Way too often, students who are gifted, or who society deems are gifted are put under tremendous, horrible pressure to succeed. As a tutor, I've seen kids throw up from the stress and strain of homework and getting into Ivy League Schools. All this is so unnecessary. A good teacher helps children develop grit, by gently encouraging to push past obstacles, but ultimately challenges should be fun and engaging. And like points 2 and 3, EVERY student should be encouraged to do things that are a little difficult for them. Again, that is why mastery learning, which is completely accessible now with adaptive learning apps, books, khan academy and the plethora of free tutoring programs emerging, is a better way. Don't just put gifted kids in a more challenging class. In my opinion point 4 is verging on sheer idiocy. "Good teaching for gifted learners requires an understanding of "supported risk." More often than not gifted learners have an imposter syndrome because they are so smart that they may do poorly on standardized tests or have a sense that they are not actually smart, but just faking it. If we really want to support gifted children, we'll praise their hard work and efforts, not they're results. That's what they have control over and where they can most excel. All and all, the biggest takeaway from all this is that what gifted children and all children need to excel is mastery learning. And if parents want to encourage their gifted children to reach their full potential, they can cultivate a growth mindset by praising their hard work and curiosity.
jpgvm 5y ago
So this is a decent article overall but it's missing a key part of the discussion which is "why?". Gifted children don't just benefit from instruction catered to them, they often need it and the absence of it can be actively damaging. Such children experience the world differently from normal people just by simple function of being less normal. I attended an academically selective high school, yet I was the "nerd" at the nerd school, I went on to do a CS degree and again, I was the nerd in what could be considered the nerd course at arguably the nerdiest university. Both institutions are probably considered best of breed in my country. So I would say I'm probably pretty qualified to speak on what it's like being "gifted". The sad reality is that gifted often isn't accompanied by success, at-least not in the outright sense that many think about it and that is because said gifts many times come with costs. Not always, some have social skills, athleticism and are highly functioning. However in most cases extreme intellect also comes with being a social outcast and not sharing in the same hobbies or worse yet not even relating on the same level with similarly aged peers. Turns out increased intellect also generally comes with accelerated maturity and differing interests to those less mature, who would have known! So how does this factor into schooling? (prepare for gross generalisations). Well first of all a school is generally one of the worst places on the planet for a gifted child, especially for their favourite hobby - learning. It's full of kids that don't give a rats ass about learning anything, adults that are tasked with trying to make these other children do something they don't want to do/play babysitter and a ton of arbitrary rules. Teachers don't have time for gifted children, they are struggling to manage a classroom of clowns and/or try keep the laggards up to a passable standard. Which is another problem, as a society we seem to care much much more about ensuring special needs children aren't left behind than we are that our best and brightest are able to achieve their potential. Maybe we just think "hey they are smart, they will work it out" (oftentimes we do) but I really don't think people are seeing how "gifted" kids struggle. I tend to quote "gifted" for this very reason. Everyone I know that falls into the category has emotional scars for one reason or another, most of which borne early in life during school and endure their entire life. So yeah, we are smart but we are also likely on the spectrum, even when social difficulties are mild our interests shoehorn us into isolation that further increases social development problems because of how cruel children are. The best thing my parents/educators did for me was to realize the system isn't built for people like us and accelerate me 2 grades (at 2 different times, not a single massive jump) so I could at least get out of it as soon as possible. I didn't do as well in school as I should have, I was branded a trouble maker, suspended constantly and even expelled twice (well asked to leave). I didn't even do anything that bad - I just wasn't wanted there. University was better but I was woefully in-equipped to actually do well. Not for intellectual reasons, just beaten down self-esteem, clinical depression, etc. I made life long friends however so it really doesn't matter in the end. If anything finally making it to university saved my life because there was finally a high enough concentration of people like me to make real friends. These days I'm "very successful" by societies metrics. Well traveled, wealthy, own my own place, have a great relationship, healthy, all of that. So I guess there is some truth to the fact that "we will work it out". But the experience has made it really hard to stomach the idea of having my own children. What if they turn out like me? What if they have to endure the depression and pain I did? (and still battle with) I don't know if I could do that. I'm not strong like my parents are, it would break me to see my child go through that knowing that the system is stacked against them. So while everything in this article sounds helpful I think the most helpful thing would be to try address the actual dynamic of schools from a social and emotional perspective for gifted children. That alone would make the biggest difference in their outcomes.
twodave 5y ago
I tested into the gifted program in elementary school, and honestly it was refreshing in that it gave me something else to do. I didn’t have great instruction or curriculum. But I was given freedom. I’m sure lots of kids need these rich curated experiences to thrive, but lots of kids also just need room to develop and follow their own academic interests. In 6th grade my English teacher took me and another boy aside. She said based on our initial evals she didn’t have anything to teach us for at least 9 weeks and we were free to choose a research topic and present it to her at the end of the quarter. She checked in with us once a week or so. We spent class time in the library otherwise. It was one of the more memorable positive experiences I had in school.
wanderingmind 5y ago
Who better to talk about gifted education than Terrence Tao https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/advice-on-gifted-education/ https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/advice-on-gifte...
Gatsky 5y ago
I’m not gifted at all (well around here at least). When I was a kid my parents found a retired Russian maths professor to tutor me. In reality he was more like a mentor, he was the first ‘intellectual’ I had ever met. He spent time building telescopes, translating Pushkin into English and producing educational maths videos (this was long before youtube or MOOCs). He introduced me to astronomy and computers among other things (we didn’t have one in the house until he told my folks they must buy a Macintosh Classic). He really had a big influence on me. I still remember with great fondness eating Russian dumplings at his kitchen table with his asthmatic dog Boris at our feet. He was one of the few adults in my life to whom I wasn’t related that I spent time with. I realise this is quite rare actually - families seem to have become more insular in the last 25 years, a lot of kids don’t have any relationships with other adults who aren’t family. Anyway, I think that many, perhaps most kids need mentors/coaches. Parents can only do so much, and teenagers don’t want to listen to their parents anyway. Gifted learners surely aren’t any different. The ‘content’ problem seems solved - there is just so much interesting stuff out there, and so many great resources. The guidance and encouragement and diversity of influences is what is missing. This seems very hard or impossible to scale up.
- ckemere 5y ago
  I really appreciate prefacing the comment, "I'm not gifted".
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  "Anyway, I think that many, perhaps most kids need mentors/coaches. Parents can only do so much, and teenagers don’t want to listen to their parents anyway" There is an old saying: it takes a village to raise a child. So I am looking forward for the villages to revitalize with smart people ..
- amatecha 5y ago
  As I've gotten older I look back and wish I had any sort of mentor in my life for certain areas I struggled to learn in myself -- programming especially. I REALLY wanted to learn languages like C when I was a kid but it was just NOT happening. I was starting from nothing, borrowing library books I couldn't even remotely make sense of. I know for sure I could have learned, but it just wasn't going to happen by reading a textbook (especially when they all assumed I was running DOS, Windows or UNIX and I only had a Mac -- so the compiler disk they included was always completely useless to me). If I had a mentor in my life, even a junior/intermediate one, it would have been completely different. For this reason, I work especially hard to mentor people when I can, and open doors for them to show what's possible.
pottertheotter 5y ago
I was in the Gifted and Talented Education program in California in elementary school. All I remember about it is that we would occasionally get pulled out of our class to go to the GATE room and work on something else. Once we came back a few minutes early to find our classroom was locked. Turned out the rest of the class was out on the playground having fun while we were doing busy work about some artist.
chx 5y ago
Not sure why this one page was picked from this website but to say the very least: this is the "bright side" and gets talked about quite often, many resources are available one way or another. But the "dark side" is https://www.nagc.org/resources-publications/resources-parents/social-emotional-issues/asynchronous-development https://www.nagc.org/resources-publications/resources-parent... and notice how shorter it is but I would argue it is just as important to get help on the "left behind" areas than it is to get help on the areas which are "ahead". Wish I had. Check https://www.hellomotherhood.com/the-effects-of-isolation-on-a-childs-social-development-9744732.html https://www.hellomotherhood.com/the-effects-of-isolation-on-... as well.
cm2012 5y ago
Most studies on going to specialized schools full of gifted people show it doesn't have positive impact on future outcomes compared to going to regular school. Dobbie and Fryer (2013) look at New York City, comparing kids whose test scores are just-above versus just-below the cut points, and find that “exposure to these higher-achieving and more homogeneous peers has little impact on college enrollment, college graduation, or college quality.” Abdulkadriglu, Angrist, and Pathak (2014) look at Boston and find that “the marked changes in peer characteristics at exam school admissions cutoffs have little causal effect on test scores or college quality.” Barrow, Sartain, and de la Torre (2020) look at an effort in Chicago to give a boost to lower-scoring kids who came from high-poverty neighborhoods and find that “for students from low-SES neighborhoods, we estimate negative effects on grades and the probability of attending a selective college.”
- gnicholas 5y ago
  I can imagine that would be true for kids just at the cutoff. They are either toward the bottom of an advanced school or at the very top of a typical school. There are tradeoffs involved. I wonder if the same is true for kids who are well above the cutoff, for whom there is not the same tradeoff. For example, either the kid is at the top of an advanced school or the top of a typical school. I can't imagine that doesn't affect college admissions.
- Strilanc 5y ago
  I think I went to the wrong "Donnie and Fryer 2013" because it had an abstract that made the schools sound pretty good? [1] > youth offered admission to the Promise Academy middle school score 0.283 standard deviations higher on a nationally-normed math achievement test and are 14.1 percentage points more likely to enroll in college. Admitted females are 12.1 percentage points less likely to be pregnant in their teens, and males are 4.3 percentage points less likely to be incarcerated [1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w19581 https://www.nber.org/papers/w19581
  - cm2012 5y ago
    "The Impact of Attending a School With High Achieving Peers" is the one, which focused on tested into honors high school. Seems like some lottery charter schools do work though!
Perenti 5y ago
I am gifted, and one of my degrees is in teaching, and I've taught in a school for gifted children. Having the advanced students be "junior teachers" to the struggling students benefits both groups. It stimulates deep understanding for the gifted student, which is not catered for in the "recipe" provided. Fact is that students will respect information provided by their peers above that provided by teachers. This is well known. See Vygotsky for example.
wolfymaster 5y ago
I found this article extremely accurate. I was part of the gifted program in my district and we constantly had to educate folks on what gifted education is and push back against the district when they tried to shut down the program. Mostly on a basis that it 'wasn't fair' to other students that the gifted students (GIEP) had special accommodations. Though no one ever argued against the IEP students and their accommodations.
- slothtrop 5y ago
  Then we wonder why companies feel the need to import talent from anywhere other than North America.
  - rizzaxc 5y ago
    it's hilarious to me as a foreigner to read this topic. my (gifted) school taught (American) university Math in 8th grade and it was fine. it's a public school with little funding and no endowment - the teachers just teach different stuff and noone really bullies you if you falls behind (most likely because they have their weak stuff too)
infologics 5y ago
[dead]
sandgiant 5y ago
I lost all interest in the school system when experiencing all the "Inappropriate Instruction(s) for Gifted Learners" from that article. Started playing computer games instead and smoked weed every day for several years. University was the first place I really felt challenged. Ended up doing a PhD in physics. I sometimes wonder how much more (if anything) I could have achieved with the right instruction early on. Sometimes I wonder if I should try teaching.
ajuc 5y ago
> Good teaching for gifted learners requires an understanding of "supported risk." Highly able learners often make very good grades with relative ease for a long time in school. They see themselves (and often rightly so) as expected to make "As," get right answers, and lead the way. In other words, they succeed without "normal" encounters with failure. Then, when a teacher presents a high-challenge task, the student feels threatened. Not only has he or she likely not learned to study hard, take risks and strive, but the student's image is threatened as well. This is the key. Everybody constantly says you're great cause you are so smart. Your value and identity is build on that for half your life at that point. If you suddenly can't deal with something - it means you're a fraud. Better to fail because you haven't tried ("you're so smart but so lazy") than to fail after a solid try ("you are not special after all, you're just a regular kid"). And for a while it works - you put less effort not to risk being "found out", you get same effects (or even better effects because if you haven't tried and still got A it means you're that much smarter). Then it stops working and you're absolutely miserable never having learned to put in the work. I don't know how to "fix" this problem, I think the first step is to stop showering gifted kids with praise.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- amatecha 5y ago
  Seriously. The constant praise and expectation that I'm "soooo smart" was terrible ego-bolstering and false-confidence-building I didn't need or want. I have a lifelong problem with taking on challenges that I might not succeed at or easily crush, even as I near the age of 40. I've had to work REALLY hard to suppress my instinct to avoid failure and just face challenges head-on. It's seriously a constant battle. That said, nothing could have changed the fact that during my entire childhood, I saw everyone around me struggling with (or not breezing through) things I found super easy, and I got very used to finding everything easy. I had extremely few opportunities to fail, relative to anyone else around me. If something was hard, I basically just wouldn't do it. That's nothing to do with praise, and unfortunately a much harder issue to even spot, let alone mitigate. After thinking about what I've just written here, I feel like the praise issue is like the surface-level problem but the "only knows how to succeed" is a deeper and probably more-important issue to look out for.
Proven 5y ago
physicsguy 5y ago
When I was about 10, my primary school teacher asked my Mum if I'd be interested to going to our local University on Saturday mornings for additional Maths lessons. It was all funded by the local government at the time, and they had some teachers who basically ran through parts of higher level mathematics in a 'fun' way - did things like work through International Maths Olympiad problems, things that were tangential to the syllabus a few years ahead of where we were but would reach. I went to this til I was 16. For me, who came from a background where I knew nobody who went to University, it was a really enriching experience. It lead to me becoming a physicist. I met other people who were similarly good at Maths where there just weren't those people at my school. It kept me interested in the subject when I found it very dull at school, because it was so easy. Unfortunately the programme got cut. They tried running it as a private tutoring type service but that made a focus on sticking to the syllabus, and eventually it closed. Was a real shame. There were probably a couple of hundred students across a city with a population of ~700k in the urban area.
thibran 5y ago
Reads like a nightmare waiting to unfold. They should first understand what 'teaching well' means, before tackling 'teaching gifted learners'. I'm always shocked to see how much the education system ignores cognitive science.
dav_Oz 5y ago
This dichotomy of gifted/not gifted learners is heavily biased on what you see is all that is and ignores the cognitive medium, the water we all swim in and through we all interact. Yes, as s private tutor (mostly for maths) I witnessed young people (1 of 10) who are not only exceptionally fast at grasping abstract concepts but in the same breath can actually use them to infer/deduce correctly (at times in new ways). In that case I have to switch gears to keep them excited but at the same time rebuild their formal foundation which is weathered through the school system (strechted in time beyond recognition and disintegrated in small "digestible" pieces i.e. uncomplete or no proofs at all) without hampering their great intuitions, a very difficult task. That being said from a purely cognitive/neurological perspective the possibilities in "wiring the brain" are for all intents and purposes the same between healthy newborns. Our culture tends to overemphasize the little differences which has its upside in empowering the individual (very important!) but its downside in the indifference of the overwhelming similarities. Once I positively acknowledged the (nearly identical) neurophysiological start parameters in every human especially during the critical period from birth to adulthood, it changed my whole attitude. It is like realizing we all share the same very recent - in evolutionary terms - African origin, it puts relatedness into perspective. From that vantage point I feel much better equipped to appreciate the wonderful individual differences and discover the light and shadows of giftedness in every learner without the need for them in participating or winning math olympiads, international music competitions, chess tournaments, gymnastics championships ... Being familiar with the empirical example (admittedly small in sample size but nevertheless what are the odds?) of Judith Polgár [0] the impressivness all nearly lies in the determination of her father's experiment without having to resort to some dubious concept of "giftedness". This of course does not imply we should all teach everyone the same, but - quite the opposite- to the needs of the young (hearing them out), that's were I agree in conclusion but without the needless distinction between some upper limit of gifted and not gifted. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r
JackMorgan 5y ago
For anyone considering teaching a gifted and talented student, as a former TX state G&T teacher I'd currently recommend either homeschooling or a Sudbury Valley school [0]. The outcomes for the "no tests, no lectures" format of Sudbury Valley schools produces better results vs traditional programs[1]. This fact is known by many educators who follow up with the question "but I wouldn't have a job at a Sudbury Valley school since teaching is no longer needed..." I myself have worked at both trad and Sudbury, and could not in good conscience continue in trad education. Everything I leaned about pedagogy told me the trad format caused the worst outcomes, yet the school boards prevented me and other teachers from making any changes. It's sad to realize how ineffective the trad methods are, and that many teachers know it yet follow along because they need the paycheck. If I have children they will only attend Sudbury valley schools or be homeschooled in a similar format. It actually prepares children to be self reliant, self teaching adults, vs the trad model that prepares for totalitarianism and simple memorization [2]. I know it's hard for many adults who went to a trad school model to accept that it's one of the worst formats possible when measured against other formats, but is it really so hard to believe? Consider everything you know about humans, and how we often fall into bad patterns even when when we know better. It's not so hard to realize how a bad model has been doubled down on for over a century, and the people in control of it have no interest in admitting they've been propagating a bad system this whole time. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school [1] https://circleschool.org/wp-content/uploads/Circle-School-Grads-in-2015-July-30-2015.pdf https://circleschool.org/wp-content/uploads/Circle-School-Gr... [2] https://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html https://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html
- strikelaserclaw 5y ago
  We all know that humans naturally gravitate towards the path of least resistance, especially children because they have not built up the wisdom to recognize such patterns in themselves, how can such a school system prevent unmotivated children from essentially playing video games all day on their phone?
  - JackMorgan 5y ago
    Those schools have existed for 80+ years, and have better long term outcomes in education level, income, and satisfaction. They do not in any way force children to do any learning, which allows children to have the space to learn to love learning on their own. Every single child you know who sits and plays games is a product of a system that they hate, where even going to the bathroom is not guaranteed. Children (and adults) who sit mindlessly on games and TV are the product of a system built around oppression and total lack of autonomy. American adults often only have a few minutes a day of personal freedom, so why bother doing anything but sit and wait for the next command from the system. However, yes, there are some people that when given the freedom to do whatever they want with literally unlimited time will only play video games. And the uncomfortable truth is they probably wouldn't get much out of a traditional school either. After all, something like 30% of American adults read at the 5th grade level. So why torture them in a traditional school? If you see the research from the Sudbury schools, you'll see a good third just go on to manual, service, manufacturing, and labor jobs. Considering that was basically all humanity did up until a hundred years ago, I'm surprised it's so low. We need to stop acting like those are lessor jobs. It's noble to work with one's hands, and I think forcing every child into a college degree path is cruel. However for the majority of Sudbury graduates that go on to higher education, they do so despite never having taken a single test, single lecture, single math class, single spelling quiz. They are allowed to play unlimited video games at school, but choose not to, because video games are not as fun as learning and developing mastery. Having grown up this way, I can attest, there's just so much more interesting things to do than play video games. Sure I'd play a few hours a day, but then it gets old and I'd build a trebuchet, get my student pilots licence, learn to program to make my own games, write a novel with my friends, write plays, join an acting troupe, become a lifeguard, learn to oil paint, learn classical guitar, play countless hours of futbol, get into computer networking to setup LAN parties, take gymnastics, read stacks of books every week, get a job at a rock climbing camp, start a coffeeshop at 16, discover history (starting with medieval combat tactics and siege warfare of course!). The list goes on and on. The joys of self learning barely got me through college, which I hated, with all the tests and stupid deadlines and arbitrary requirements. Now as an adult I've been able to keep up that love and learn so much more on my own terms. I understand maybe it's not for everyone, but the research seems clear it's better for the majority, so it really should be the default system. What sort of a population do we want, one of cowed automatons, or one of independent self learners who love developing mastery for it's own sake? Creative thinkers who know their own minds, or people who will turn in the report by Friday? Which set of skills do you think makes a better citizen who can navigate our complex world, and bring us into a better future? This doesn't even talk about how Sudbury schools are significantly cheaper than trad schools. Often only three adults can run a school of 80+ kids. And they still get better outcomes than trad schools at less than a 1/3rd the price. And right there we see why educators (especially school administrators) keep it under wraps.

177 points by rahimnathwani 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

kleer001 5y ago

Ok, that's in the States. Can anyone share their educational experience in Canada?

wheelinsupial 5y ago
I am not gifted and have never been in any gifted programs. When I was at UBC I came across a program called the University Transition Program (UTP) that was located on the UBC campus and run by the Vancouver School Board. The program is for 13-15 year olds to complete high school in 2 years. [1] has more details about the program, comments from students, and a newsletter produced by the program. [2] has some recent discussion on some limitations and issues with the program. [1] https://universitytransition.ca/ https://universitytransition.ca/ [2] https://www.ubyssey.ca/news/university-transition-program-call-for-change/ https://www.ubyssey.ca/news/university-transition-program-ca...
- kleer001 5y ago
  That's COOL! Thank you very much. Hopefully it'll be around if and or when my little progeny wants/needs it.

Ivanjefferey 5y ago

themodelplumber 5y ago

Hmm, that's a lot, and it's even deeper than it looks! It's interesting stuff, but I wonder if the author was annoyed at being told to sum it up. Maybe meta: It's kinda too bad, in a lot of ways, that there's still this gifted/not dichotomy, this cultural meme we've labored under for multiple centuries now. A few years back, for a while, I made hard-but-good money coaching parents in understanding the gifts of their children. Every single child has a set of gifts that are really valuable. One approach I used was designing a more theoretical gifted context around the child, tracking and tailoring it while observing them, and then relating those idea-space concepts back to the here and now. The approach I preferred is way different from the traditional "gifted child" definition-based approach, by which data and professional levels of subjectivity are used for ranking. I still have a couple of friends from this world who are in their '40s and fighting over who has the higher IQ. Which is not to say it's all like that, but I do think the weaknesses of holding this weirdly polarizing view can and should be put behind us, even at this late point. Even though my approach was different, I never realized until I started how hard parents will try to 1) discern just how _you_ view intellect and gifts, and 2) attempt from day zero to shoehorn their child into the extreme higher ends of that model. I had to develop a separate model for working with parents who had extreme views about gifted children. If you've ever worked in earnest to develop a very thoughtful model meant to help create the best outcomes possible, only to watch people try to game it over and over, you know what I mean. One of the most important issues for most of the kids (IMO) was so much different though--it was definitely not this gifts/no gifts issue. It was closer to the perception of troubling relationship differentials among the people in their various life contexts. Kids and parents. The family at home. The kids and the teachers they don't like. And it's funny, it's not even a perception of hatred, anger, or abuse. It's more like the full spectrum. The person who can make you laugh and act in the now can be just as dangerous to your well-being as the person who pisses you off. This stuff was causing so many of the kids pain, robbing them of sleep, and throwing them into a strangely irresistible open rebellion against family members, friends, and other people and school systems that were trying to help them. It could get so bad that there wasn't any room for learning anymore. So in my view one of the easiest blockers that can prevent the "gifted effect" at all is really obvious--it's this troubling relationship differential issue. It will get in the way of everything, it will block powerful learning-stimulation signals and it will make psychological damage almost certain once it starts disturbing sleep. Conversely when most of the contextual relations are at least pretty calming, or ideally even mutually-encouraging and open, _everybody_ starts looking gifted. Plus there's less of a reason to say, "I'm _more_ gifted," as a means of self-protection. This was always my favorite thing to see.

jkhdigital 5y ago
This “relationship differential” idea is intriguing but you described it in such vaguely general terms that I’m not sure I understand what you mean. Could you maybe give a concrete example?
- themodelplumber 5y ago
  Thanks & sure, and there are different ways you can describe those different effects of relating. Let's take the current context. Here's a differential effect where you have politely asked me to clarify for you. We can ask--"is that close to what we want? How does it benefit the parties involved? And if we call this information transfer with minimal emotional content, what if one expressed more emotional contents? Same effect or different somehow?" So we start to use some basic transactional analysis to get at a higher level idea of the system of outcomes from the relationship. We can also name the relationship by the type of effect. Over time the same groups of natural patterns will emerge in other relationships, so we can use the label as: A filter, a leverage point for teaching, etc. That's what I'm referring to, the system of thinking about differentials in this way. It will naturally overlap somewhat with the existing concepts like "friendship" and "working relationship," etc. In fact, some people will cling to those terms because it's what they know--"well isn't this just a friendship?" But by expressing the specifically new and unexplored contextual facets, we can bridge gaps in previous modes of thought about relating and solve problems that couldn't otherwise be solved under those more traditional concepts. So no, it's not just a friendship, any more than a computer running Photoshop is not just an adding machine; there are clear advantages for using additional terms as descriptors. Also I should add that it's a high level system of perceptions, so I leave out lots of concrete details with intent. This is to help to fully claim the broader concept space as a "construction zone," because it's been my experience that getting into details too soon is a common mistake, and may even block in- and outflows- from areas of strategic leverage. For example I try to claim and use lots of metaphor. It's weird but it works. In general, people are too concerned about detail at a cultural level and you can see this kind of "detail panic" (not referring to your comment, just in general) even at policymaking levels, which is the last place it should be a relevant concern. So culturally we clearly need more people who can sit in strategy, show how it can be interpreted as-is, and demonstrate how it naturally informs details over time. (Digression because of the details/example nature of your inquiry--anyway it's really fun stuff, thanks for asking)

antishatter 5y ago

I’m no potato covered in gravy, bro.

zitterbewegung 5y ago

In grade school I was in a gifted program. I think either my good memory or IQ allowed me to pass certain tests with multiple choices or logical decisions . In the long run regardless of your talents you eventually reach a peak where your talents don’t work anymore. It started for me in Junior high and in Community college and University. I eventually graduated by the grit that made my degree take longer than most and I really wish I had been given more challenges like that. My parents did the best they could. But the thing that really helped me was the constant flood of computers that were hand me downs from my uncle . I initially made twice what my mom made, tried to do a startup that failed after burn out , worked at three other jobs and some freelancing for distributed ledger technology and now I make four times my mom makes and I quadrupled my net worth in 3 years by living with my parents . At college I did have a capstone project where I investigated lambda calculus with a self distributed operation and discovered a few cellular automata that had interesting features . So life has treated me well with grit I suppose. I gave a talk at a hacking Confrence and pyOhio and to be honest last year was one of the best years of my life and I can’t wait to figure out what’s next.

strikelaserclaw 5y ago
IQ and conscientiousness are different dimensions, successful people usually have both but one can have a lot of one without much of the other. I personally know people who've gotten perfect scores on standardized testing but haven't really succeeded much in life because they lacked conscientiousness.

gnicholas 5y ago

Getting any sort of advanced instruction for our daughter has been like pulling teeth. I assumed it would be readily available, given that we live in the heart of Silicon Valley and our child attends a very well-funded public school. The school started off saying they don't offer advanced instruction, then grudgingly agreed to assess our child to see if she even would require it. But all of their "assessments" are closed-ended, which means she cannot actually demonstrate her proficiency level. Even when faced with her clearly advanced abilities (3.5 grades ahead in math, according to the diagnostic from the online math platform they use), they are still doing their best to hold her back. Their rallying cry? "Even Steph Curry practices dribbling". After hearing this for the third time, I finally pointed out that Steph Curry wouldn't have become who he is if he were never allowed to practice anything but dribbling. The school has continued dragging their feet. The unsurprising result is that advanced students leave for private schools. We never would have bought a home in an expensive district had we anticipated departing for a private. I would recommend that parents interested in good schooling in this area look into Redwood City over Menlo Park or Palo Alto, since it has a magnet program for 3-8 and is considerably less expensive. This whole process has been very disappointing (and surprising) for me, since I had a very different experience growing up. I went to public schools in Sacramento, where magnet programs were freely available and students could open enroll from anywhere in the region. We had classmates who lived halfway to Tahoe. It was great. I understand their programs are still up and running, and it's shocking that the well-heeled districts around here are so hostile to advanced instruction. Happy to connect with other nearby parents of young kids. Contact info is in profile.

dv_dt 5y ago
California used to have a better funded GATE (gifted and talented education) program - like maybe in the 70’s - but like much infrastructural social investment in America - it has undergone long term atrophy of decades.
- gnicholas 5y ago
  I don't think it's decades of atrophy. In 2014 the state simply got rid of the GATE requirement. Districts abandoned their programs in droves after that. It was much more binary than a decades-long decay.

armchairhacker 5y ago

I'm pretty sure most if not all gifted learners really like to learn - that's what makes them gifted. Really the most important thing is to give gifted learners opportunity and make sure they know what's available. I think a good way to provide "gifted" education is through optional extra-curriculars like math clubs which teach higher-level concepts and function as ways to place-out of lower-level classes. Most students who aren't that smart won't even want to go to these clubs, and the ones that do shouldn't cause any issues, and the gifted students will want to go at minimum it's less work for them to place out of the "boring" classes. If a particular student or small group is much more gifted than their peers, they should have access to a regional or state or even national club or classes. That way they don't feel like an outcast, in this day and age their are plenty of very talented people in all fields.

hiptobecubic 5y ago
Agree fully. I was in G&T in elementary and middle school and the primary benefit imo was that I went into highschool with a circle of friends that were mostly high-achievers. Unless you plan on being a horrible overbearing helicopter parent, peer pressure is going to determine a lot more than you're expecting about what your kids like, do, strive for, etc. Despite being at a school that sent zero students to Stanford or Harvard or Cambridge, we had a pretty high upper bound on what you _could_ do if you were motivated. Competitive academic teams were the norm in many subjects (math, languages, history, civics...) Some of my middleschool friends split off to go to local magnet schools instead and looking at the spread, they didn't actually fair any better than the rest of us. Meanwhile, they mostly describe highschool as a miserable experience that made them vomit with stress instead of the excellent time that I had in public school with access to all the "public school stuff" like marching band, large theatre program involvement from the local community, etc. Maybe some of those things have since died, but I'd be surprised if the difference was enough to justify it.

fersho311 5y ago

everything said in this article applies to non gifted learners as well!

jkhdigital 5y ago
…no? The first point, of course, but the author explicitly stated that. A fundamental (and non-controversial) aspect of “giftedness” is that the child learns at a much more rapid pace than peers. This almost automatically requires adjustments to curriculum that would not apply to a non-gifted child.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  People do not learn at a constant speed throughout their education. Almost everyone has at least a few runs of "giftedness", at least in some subjects, where they could benefit from acceleration; and conversely, even gifted students might need some "remedial" effort from time to time.
  - jkhdigital 5y ago
    A person with an IQ of 140 will learn pretty much every academic subject faster than someone with an IQ of 100. It’s kind of baked into the metric. Now, of course this doesn’t mean that they will have any advantage in learning, say, how to ride a bike or dribble a basketball, but the discussion here is clearly directed at “book learning” which comprises the majority of school curriculum.
hatware 5y ago
I think the obsession with gifted learners being "different" from the "normal" is... weird. I look at the phenomenon as more of a "Here's how we cater to what we perceive as our best and brightest" ... when the reality is that everyone has the capacity to be bright, environment and competition just play a huge role.
- amatecha 5y ago
  I mean, my lifetime experience is one of "being different". I was fundamentally different from my classmates since day 1. Teachers picked up on it immediately and were concerned that, while I breezed through everything and seemed to be very "sharp" (or whatever funny word they would use), I was totally disinterested and seemed bored and unhappy. I was. I learned nearly everything I was shown instantly, and usually understood it effortlessly. In grade 3 I excelled so strongly at spelling that the teacher had me make the weekly spelling tests. In grade 5 I was the only kid who actually copied down and memorized "pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis" and "phthatlylsulfithiazole" when the teacher wrote them on the board to be funny (though he spelled them wrong at the time, I later learned). FWIW I just typed those from memory without checking their spelling. Environment surely does play some part. I grew up in a home that fostered intellect, learning, growth etc. I'm sure there are countless studies on "nature vs. nurture" and my subjective view is both are relevant, perhaps even fairly 50/50. But my life growing up I was the exception to the norm in all environments. I have some really stark examples that could really hit this home but I'm not going to post them on here, but... there's a lot of truth to the "differentness of giftedness".

actfrench 5y ago

It's absurd in this day and age that point 1 and point 2 are deemed only important for gifted learners. Our education system has such a low level of differentiation and is geared so much towards achieving a base line of mediocrity for the highest number of students that we serve almost no one well. Point one: "Good curriculum and instruction for gifted learners begins with good curriculum and instruction" Doesn't every child deserve good curriculum and instruction and can't good curriculum and instruction help elevate every child from whatever situation they are beginning with? Yes, the author acknowledges good curriculum is important. But why should students considered gifted be more entitled to this than others. And wouldn't good instruction help highlight hidden giftedness in those that are less advantaged. Point Two: "Good teaching for gifted learners is paced in response to the student's individual needs." It's widely known in the education community that mastery learning (1-1 instruction and independent study where students learn at their own pace using curriculum that builds upon concepts) results in 2 sigma better achievement than learning that happens in a classroom setting where every child learns at the same rate. Children speed up sometimes, they slow down sometimes. Shouldn't every child have the possibility to learn at their own pace, go fast when they're learning quickly and slow when they are struggling more, much as when someone visiting a foreign country sometimes learns language at a fast clip and is other times processing, and then may have a big burst forward? Why is this better or important for just "gifted children?" Point 3 makes sense "Good teaching for gifted learners happens at a higher "degree of difficulty". Even so, a good teacher understands that learning must be differentiated. It's great for students to be challenged, but students also need to be having fun while they're challenged. Way too often, students who are gifted, or who society deems are gifted are put under tremendous, horrible pressure to succeed. As a tutor, I've seen kids throw up from the stress and strain of homework and getting into Ivy League Schools. All this is so unnecessary. A good teacher helps children develop grit, by gently encouraging to push past obstacles, but ultimately challenges should be fun and engaging. And like points 2 and 3, EVERY student should be encouraged to do things that are a little difficult for them. Again, that is why mastery learning, which is completely accessible now with adaptive learning apps, books, khan academy and the plethora of free tutoring programs emerging, is a better way. Don't just put gifted kids in a more challenging class. In my opinion point 4 is verging on sheer idiocy. "Good teaching for gifted learners requires an understanding of "supported risk." More often than not gifted learners have an imposter syndrome because they are so smart that they may do poorly on standardized tests or have a sense that they are not actually smart, but just faking it. If we really want to support gifted children, we'll praise their hard work and efforts, not they're results. That's what they have control over and where they can most excel. All and all, the biggest takeaway from all this is that what gifted children and all children need to excel is mastery learning. And if parents want to encourage their gifted children to reach their full potential, they can cultivate a growth mindset by praising their hard work and curiosity.

jpgvm 5y ago

So this is a decent article overall but it's missing a key part of the discussion which is "why?". Gifted children don't just benefit from instruction catered to them, they often need it and the absence of it can be actively damaging. Such children experience the world differently from normal people just by simple function of being less normal. I attended an academically selective high school, yet I was the "nerd" at the nerd school, I went on to do a CS degree and again, I was the nerd in what could be considered the nerd course at arguably the nerdiest university. Both institutions are probably considered best of breed in my country. So I would say I'm probably pretty qualified to speak on what it's like being "gifted". The sad reality is that gifted often isn't accompanied by success, at-least not in the outright sense that many think about it and that is because said gifts many times come with costs. Not always, some have social skills, athleticism and are highly functioning. However in most cases extreme intellect also comes with being a social outcast and not sharing in the same hobbies or worse yet not even relating on the same level with similarly aged peers. Turns out increased intellect also generally comes with accelerated maturity and differing interests to those less mature, who would have known! So how does this factor into schooling? (prepare for gross generalisations). Well first of all a school is generally one of the worst places on the planet for a gifted child, especially for their favourite hobby - learning. It's full of kids that don't give a rats ass about learning anything, adults that are tasked with trying to make these other children do something they don't want to do/play babysitter and a ton of arbitrary rules. Teachers don't have time for gifted children, they are struggling to manage a classroom of clowns and/or try keep the laggards up to a passable standard. Which is another problem, as a society we seem to care much much more about ensuring special needs children aren't left behind than we are that our best and brightest are able to achieve their potential. Maybe we just think "hey they are smart, they will work it out" (oftentimes we do) but I really don't think people are seeing how "gifted" kids struggle. I tend to quote "gifted" for this very reason. Everyone I know that falls into the category has emotional scars for one reason or another, most of which borne early in life during school and endure their entire life. So yeah, we are smart but we are also likely on the spectrum, even when social difficulties are mild our interests shoehorn us into isolation that further increases social development problems because of how cruel children are. The best thing my parents/educators did for me was to realize the system isn't built for people like us and accelerate me 2 grades (at 2 different times, not a single massive jump) so I could at least get out of it as soon as possible. I didn't do as well in school as I should have, I was branded a trouble maker, suspended constantly and even expelled twice (well asked to leave). I didn't even do anything that bad - I just wasn't wanted there. University was better but I was woefully in-equipped to actually do well. Not for intellectual reasons, just beaten down self-esteem, clinical depression, etc. I made life long friends however so it really doesn't matter in the end. If anything finally making it to university saved my life because there was finally a high enough concentration of people like me to make real friends. These days I'm "very successful" by societies metrics. Well traveled, wealthy, own my own place, have a great relationship, healthy, all of that. So I guess there is some truth to the fact that "we will work it out". But the experience has made it really hard to stomach the idea of having my own children. What if they turn out like me? What if they have to endure the depression and pain I did? (and still battle with) I don't know if I could do that. I'm not strong like my parents are, it would break me to see my child go through that knowing that the system is stacked against them. So while everything in this article sounds helpful I think the most helpful thing would be to try address the actual dynamic of schools from a social and emotional perspective for gifted children. That alone would make the biggest difference in their outcomes.

twodave 5y ago

I tested into the gifted program in elementary school, and honestly it was refreshing in that it gave me something else to do. I didn’t have great instruction or curriculum. But I was given freedom. I’m sure lots of kids need these rich curated experiences to thrive, but lots of kids also just need room to develop and follow their own academic interests. In 6th grade my English teacher took me and another boy aside. She said based on our initial evals she didn’t have anything to teach us for at least 9 weeks and we were free to choose a research topic and present it to her at the end of the quarter. She checked in with us once a week or so. We spent class time in the library otherwise. It was one of the more memorable positive experiences I had in school.

wanderingmind 5y ago

Who better to talk about gifted education than Terrence Tao https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/advice-on-gifted-education/ https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/advice-on-gifte...

Gatsky 5y ago

I’m not gifted at all (well around here at least). When I was a kid my parents found a retired Russian maths professor to tutor me. In reality he was more like a mentor, he was the first ‘intellectual’ I had ever met. He spent time building telescopes, translating Pushkin into English and producing educational maths videos (this was long before youtube or MOOCs). He introduced me to astronomy and computers among other things (we didn’t have one in the house until he told my folks they must buy a Macintosh Classic). He really had a big influence on me. I still remember with great fondness eating Russian dumplings at his kitchen table with his asthmatic dog Boris at our feet. He was one of the few adults in my life to whom I wasn’t related that I spent time with. I realise this is quite rare actually - families seem to have become more insular in the last 25 years, a lot of kids don’t have any relationships with other adults who aren’t family. Anyway, I think that many, perhaps most kids need mentors/coaches. Parents can only do so much, and teenagers don’t want to listen to their parents anyway. Gifted learners surely aren’t any different. The ‘content’ problem seems solved - there is just so much interesting stuff out there, and so many great resources. The guidance and encouragement and diversity of influences is what is missing. This seems very hard or impossible to scale up.

ckemere 5y ago
I really appreciate prefacing the comment, "I'm not gifted".
hutzlibu 5y ago
"Anyway, I think that many, perhaps most kids need mentors/coaches. Parents can only do so much, and teenagers don’t want to listen to their parents anyway" There is an old saying: it takes a village to raise a child. So I am looking forward for the villages to revitalize with smart people ..
amatecha 5y ago
As I've gotten older I look back and wish I had any sort of mentor in my life for certain areas I struggled to learn in myself -- programming especially. I REALLY wanted to learn languages like C when I was a kid but it was just NOT happening. I was starting from nothing, borrowing library books I couldn't even remotely make sense of. I know for sure I could have learned, but it just wasn't going to happen by reading a textbook (especially when they all assumed I was running DOS, Windows or UNIX and I only had a Mac -- so the compiler disk they included was always completely useless to me). If I had a mentor in my life, even a junior/intermediate one, it would have been completely different. For this reason, I work especially hard to mentor people when I can, and open doors for them to show what's possible.

pottertheotter 5y ago

I was in the Gifted and Talented Education program in California in elementary school. All I remember about it is that we would occasionally get pulled out of our class to go to the GATE room and work on something else. Once we came back a few minutes early to find our classroom was locked. Turned out the rest of the class was out on the playground having fun while we were doing busy work about some artist.

chx 5y ago

Not sure why this one page was picked from this website but to say the very least: this is the "bright side" and gets talked about quite often, many resources are available one way or another. But the "dark side" is https://www.nagc.org/resources-publications/resources-parents/social-emotional-issues/asynchronous-development https://www.nagc.org/resources-publications/resources-parent... and notice how shorter it is but I would argue it is just as important to get help on the "left behind" areas than it is to get help on the areas which are "ahead". Wish I had. Check https://www.hellomotherhood.com/the-effects-of-isolation-on-a-childs-social-development-9744732.html https://www.hellomotherhood.com/the-effects-of-isolation-on-... as well.

cm2012 5y ago

Most studies on going to specialized schools full of gifted people show it doesn't have positive impact on future outcomes compared to going to regular school. Dobbie and Fryer (2013) look at New York City, comparing kids whose test scores are just-above versus just-below the cut points, and find that “exposure to these higher-achieving and more homogeneous peers has little impact on college enrollment, college graduation, or college quality.” Abdulkadriglu, Angrist, and Pathak (2014) look at Boston and find that “the marked changes in peer characteristics at exam school admissions cutoffs have little causal effect on test scores or college quality.” Barrow, Sartain, and de la Torre (2020) look at an effort in Chicago to give a boost to lower-scoring kids who came from high-poverty neighborhoods and find that “for students from low-SES neighborhoods, we estimate negative effects on grades and the probability of attending a selective college.”

gnicholas 5y ago
I can imagine that would be true for kids just at the cutoff. They are either toward the bottom of an advanced school or at the very top of a typical school. There are tradeoffs involved. I wonder if the same is true for kids who are well above the cutoff, for whom there is not the same tradeoff. For example, either the kid is at the top of an advanced school or the top of a typical school. I can't imagine that doesn't affect college admissions.
Strilanc 5y ago
I think I went to the wrong "Donnie and Fryer 2013" because it had an abstract that made the schools sound pretty good? [1] > youth offered admission to the Promise Academy middle school score 0.283 standard deviations higher on a nationally-normed math achievement test and are 14.1 percentage points more likely to enroll in college. Admitted females are 12.1 percentage points less likely to be pregnant in their teens, and males are 4.3 percentage points less likely to be incarcerated [1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w19581 https://www.nber.org/papers/w19581
- cm2012 5y ago
  "The Impact of Attending a School With High Achieving Peers" is the one, which focused on tested into honors high school. Seems like some lottery charter schools do work though!

Perenti 5y ago

I am gifted, and one of my degrees is in teaching, and I've taught in a school for gifted children. Having the advanced students be "junior teachers" to the struggling students benefits both groups. It stimulates deep understanding for the gifted student, which is not catered for in the "recipe" provided. Fact is that students will respect information provided by their peers above that provided by teachers. This is well known. See Vygotsky for example.

wolfymaster 5y ago

I found this article extremely accurate. I was part of the gifted program in my district and we constantly had to educate folks on what gifted education is and push back against the district when they tried to shut down the program. Mostly on a basis that it 'wasn't fair' to other students that the gifted students (GIEP) had special accommodations. Though no one ever argued against the IEP students and their accommodations.

slothtrop 5y ago
Then we wonder why companies feel the need to import talent from anywhere other than North America.
- rizzaxc 5y ago
  it's hilarious to me as a foreigner to read this topic. my (gifted) school taught (American) university Math in 8th grade and it was fine. it's a public school with little funding and no endowment - the teachers just teach different stuff and noone really bullies you if you falls behind (most likely because they have their weak stuff too)

infologics 5y ago

[dead]

sandgiant 5y ago

I lost all interest in the school system when experiencing all the "Inappropriate Instruction(s) for Gifted Learners" from that article. Started playing computer games instead and smoked weed every day for several years. University was the first place I really felt challenged. Ended up doing a PhD in physics. I sometimes wonder how much more (if anything) I could have achieved with the right instruction early on. Sometimes I wonder if I should try teaching.

ajuc 5y ago

> Good teaching for gifted learners requires an understanding of "supported risk." Highly able learners often make very good grades with relative ease for a long time in school. They see themselves (and often rightly so) as expected to make "As," get right answers, and lead the way. In other words, they succeed without "normal" encounters with failure. Then, when a teacher presents a high-challenge task, the student feels threatened. Not only has he or she likely not learned to study hard, take risks and strive, but the student's image is threatened as well. This is the key. Everybody constantly says you're great cause you are so smart. Your value and identity is build on that for half your life at that point. If you suddenly can't deal with something - it means you're a fraud. Better to fail because you haven't tried ("you're so smart but so lazy") than to fail after a solid try ("you are not special after all, you're just a regular kid"). And for a while it works - you put less effort not to risk being "found out", you get same effects (or even better effects because if you haven't tried and still got A it means you're that much smarter). Then it stops working and you're absolutely miserable never having learned to put in the work. I don't know how to "fix" this problem, I think the first step is to stop showering gifted kids with praise.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
amatecha 5y ago
Seriously. The constant praise and expectation that I'm "soooo smart" was terrible ego-bolstering and false-confidence-building I didn't need or want. I have a lifelong problem with taking on challenges that I might not succeed at or easily crush, even as I near the age of 40. I've had to work REALLY hard to suppress my instinct to avoid failure and just face challenges head-on. It's seriously a constant battle. That said, nothing could have changed the fact that during my entire childhood, I saw everyone around me struggling with (or not breezing through) things I found super easy, and I got very used to finding everything easy. I had extremely few opportunities to fail, relative to anyone else around me. If something was hard, I basically just wouldn't do it. That's nothing to do with praise, and unfortunately a much harder issue to even spot, let alone mitigate. After thinking about what I've just written here, I feel like the praise issue is like the surface-level problem but the "only knows how to succeed" is a deeper and probably more-important issue to look out for.

Proven 5y ago

physicsguy 5y ago

When I was about 10, my primary school teacher asked my Mum if I'd be interested to going to our local University on Saturday mornings for additional Maths lessons. It was all funded by the local government at the time, and they had some teachers who basically ran through parts of higher level mathematics in a 'fun' way - did things like work through International Maths Olympiad problems, things that were tangential to the syllabus a few years ahead of where we were but would reach. I went to this til I was 16. For me, who came from a background where I knew nobody who went to University, it was a really enriching experience. It lead to me becoming a physicist. I met other people who were similarly good at Maths where there just weren't those people at my school. It kept me interested in the subject when I found it very dull at school, because it was so easy. Unfortunately the programme got cut. They tried running it as a private tutoring type service but that made a focus on sticking to the syllabus, and eventually it closed. Was a real shame. There were probably a couple of hundred students across a city with a population of ~700k in the urban area.

thibran 5y ago

Reads like a nightmare waiting to unfold. They should first understand what 'teaching well' means, before tackling 'teaching gifted learners'. I'm always shocked to see how much the education system ignores cognitive science.

dav_Oz 5y ago

This dichotomy of gifted/not gifted learners is heavily biased on what you see is all that is and ignores the cognitive medium, the water we all swim in and through we all interact. Yes, as s private tutor (mostly for maths) I witnessed young people (1 of 10) who are not only exceptionally fast at grasping abstract concepts but in the same breath can actually use them to infer/deduce correctly (at times in new ways). In that case I have to switch gears to keep them excited but at the same time rebuild their formal foundation which is weathered through the school system (strechted in time beyond recognition and disintegrated in small "digestible" pieces i.e. uncomplete or no proofs at all) without hampering their great intuitions, a very difficult task. That being said from a purely cognitive/neurological perspective the possibilities in "wiring the brain" are for all intents and purposes the same between healthy newborns. Our culture tends to overemphasize the little differences which has its upside in empowering the individual (very important!) but its downside in the indifference of the overwhelming similarities. Once I positively acknowledged the (nearly identical) neurophysiological start parameters in every human especially during the critical period from birth to adulthood, it changed my whole attitude. It is like realizing we all share the same very recent - in evolutionary terms - African origin, it puts relatedness into perspective. From that vantage point I feel much better equipped to appreciate the wonderful individual differences and discover the light and shadows of giftedness in every learner without the need for them in participating or winning math olympiads, international music competitions, chess tournaments, gymnastics championships ... Being familiar with the empirical example (admittedly small in sample size but nevertheless what are the odds?) of Judith Polgár [0] the impressivness all nearly lies in the determination of her father's experiment without having to resort to some dubious concept of "giftedness". This of course does not imply we should all teach everyone the same, but - quite the opposite- to the needs of the young (hearing them out), that's were I agree in conclusion but without the needless distinction between some upper limit of gifted and not gifted. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r

JackMorgan 5y ago

For anyone considering teaching a gifted and talented student, as a former TX state G&T teacher I'd currently recommend either homeschooling or a Sudbury Valley school [0]. The outcomes for the "no tests, no lectures" format of Sudbury Valley schools produces better results vs traditional programs[1]. This fact is known by many educators who follow up with the question "but I wouldn't have a job at a Sudbury Valley school since teaching is no longer needed..." I myself have worked at both trad and Sudbury, and could not in good conscience continue in trad education. Everything I leaned about pedagogy told me the trad format caused the worst outcomes, yet the school boards prevented me and other teachers from making any changes. It's sad to realize how ineffective the trad methods are, and that many teachers know it yet follow along because they need the paycheck. If I have children they will only attend Sudbury valley schools or be homeschooled in a similar format. It actually prepares children to be self reliant, self teaching adults, vs the trad model that prepares for totalitarianism and simple memorization [2]. I know it's hard for many adults who went to a trad school model to accept that it's one of the worst formats possible when measured against other formats, but is it really so hard to believe? Consider everything you know about humans, and how we often fall into bad patterns even when when we know better. It's not so hard to realize how a bad model has been doubled down on for over a century, and the people in control of it have no interest in admitting they've been propagating a bad system this whole time. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school [1] https://circleschool.org/wp-content/uploads/Circle-School-Grads-in-2015-July-30-2015.pdf https://circleschool.org/wp-content/uploads/Circle-School-Gr... [2] https://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html https://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html

strikelaserclaw 5y ago
We all know that humans naturally gravitate towards the path of least resistance, especially children because they have not built up the wisdom to recognize such patterns in themselves, how can such a school system prevent unmotivated children from essentially playing video games all day on their phone?
- JackMorgan 5y ago
  Those schools have existed for 80+ years, and have better long term outcomes in education level, income, and satisfaction. They do not in any way force children to do any learning, which allows children to have the space to learn to love learning on their own. Every single child you know who sits and plays games is a product of a system that they hate, where even going to the bathroom is not guaranteed. Children (and adults) who sit mindlessly on games and TV are the product of a system built around oppression and total lack of autonomy. American adults often only have a few minutes a day of personal freedom, so why bother doing anything but sit and wait for the next command from the system. However, yes, there are some people that when given the freedom to do whatever they want with literally unlimited time will only play video games. And the uncomfortable truth is they probably wouldn't get much out of a traditional school either. After all, something like 30% of American adults read at the 5th grade level. So why torture them in a traditional school? If you see the research from the Sudbury schools, you'll see a good third just go on to manual, service, manufacturing, and labor jobs. Considering that was basically all humanity did up until a hundred years ago, I'm surprised it's so low. We need to stop acting like those are lessor jobs. It's noble to work with one's hands, and I think forcing every child into a college degree path is cruel. However for the majority of Sudbury graduates that go on to higher education, they do so despite never having taken a single test, single lecture, single math class, single spelling quiz. They are allowed to play unlimited video games at school, but choose not to, because video games are not as fun as learning and developing mastery. Having grown up this way, I can attest, there's just so much more interesting things to do than play video games. Sure I'd play a few hours a day, but then it gets old and I'd build a trebuchet, get my student pilots licence, learn to program to make my own games, write a novel with my friends, write plays, join an acting troupe, become a lifeguard, learn to oil paint, learn classical guitar, play countless hours of futbol, get into computer networking to setup LAN parties, take gymnastics, read stacks of books every week, get a job at a rock climbing camp, start a coffeeshop at 16, discover history (starting with medieval combat tactics and siege warfare of course!). The list goes on and on. The joys of self learning barely got me through college, which I hated, with all the tests and stupid deadlines and arbitrary requirements. Now as an adult I've been able to keep up that love and learn so much more on my own terms. I understand maybe it's not for everyone, but the research seems clear it's better for the majority, so it really should be the default system. What sort of a population do we want, one of cowed automatons, or one of independent self learners who love developing mastery for it's own sake? Creative thinkers who know their own minds, or people who will turn in the report by Friday? Which set of skills do you think makes a better citizen who can navigate our complex world, and bring us into a better future? This doesn't even talk about how Sudbury schools are significantly cheaper than trad schools. Often only three adults can run a school of 80+ kids. And they still get better outcomes than trad schools at less than a 1/3rd the price. And right there we see why educators (especially school administrators) keep it under wraps.