Gifted and Talented Education

Kiless

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Hello. Yes, the newbie again.

I thought I'd write because of this thread - the amazing brucetta:
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=59914
and some points raised within it.

And after a quick search, found the following threads -
http://www.internationalskeptics.co...736&highlight=gifted+education#post1870466736 ('I deserve x because I'm poor' but the issue is raised and some people give examples of gifted education schooling at the end)
and
http://www.internationalskeptics.co...000&highlight=gifted+education#post1870725000 (on 'social promotion' although the topic is touched upon).

Any comments? Perhaps people might like to raise an issue involved with gifted and talented education first?

I don't have much time right at the moment but I have several resources I can cite later today on some of the issues. :)
 
Advocatus Diaboli....

Definition.

The original definition of being 'gifted' meant that you scored over 130 on the Terman test (IQ).

Therefore, being in the top 2% of the population in terms of intelligence, should be the best determiner of what is truly 'gifted'. Everything else just shows 'bright kid - not necessarily gifted'.

All this nonsense about children saying that they were hanging out in their classes being bored, not feeling challenged by their teachers, weren't recognised by the school and that there weren't facilities to suit them - well, perhaps they were intelligent, sure, but just not intelligent enough. Otherwise, they would have been identified by the state and catered for.

There's plenty of intelligent kids out there, stuck in schools that for socio-economic reasons and political reasons, even, can't provide for them. But it doesn't necessarily mean that just because they demonstrate intelligence beyond that of their peers that they DESERVE to have more time, resources and support.

That's just unfair to every other kid in the class who, with support, could just as easily perform just as well or better than the 'intelligent' kid. :)

It's just prejudice otherwise.

Is that good enough for a conversation starter?
 
The primary school I attended (age 4-11) had a policy of "jumping a year". If a child was considered advanced enough they would jump a full year and no other special provisions were provided for “gifted” children (additional resources were required to provide an additional “final year” for the pupils who had jumped a year).

There were a few kids at the school who ended up being jumped two whole years and they were allowed to enter secondary school a year earlier then normal (e.g. in their 11th year not 12th year). I went to the same secondary school as some of these and they did not perform particularly better then any other pupil. A very interesting fact is that two of them had teachers for parents and I often wondered if they had been considered “in advance” of others not because they were “gifted” but because they’d received “more education”.
 
When I was at primary school the system was that if you skipped one year, you still went on to secondary school a year early. I don't know how much difference it made to anyone. I was the youngest in my year by quite a bit (born only 10 days before the cutoff for school entry) and I found people often assumed I had jumped a class even though I hadn't.

I remember a university classmate of mine was only 16 when we went up to university, not turning 17 until the following April, because of all the class-skipping she'd done. She performed average at university and nobody really seemed to remember that she was about 18 months younger than the rest of us. (She just squeaked through graduation, being 21 years and 3 months on graduation day - apparently for our degree the regs said you couldn't graduate before your 21st birthday.)

I was in the category Auden mentioned as ought to be "catered for", but no catering occurred. At my school they wouldn't have let the person who was already the baby of the class go up a year. I did have some very weird problems at primary school, which looking back were probably related to the IQ thing. Nowadays they would probably have got an educational psychologist on my case. But would it have made any difference? In a class of about 15, I was one of two who eventually gained PhDs.

The "weird problems" went away when I went to secondary school, to be replaced by the normal sort of problems. The fact that I was shunted through to a secondary school specialising in the academically bright probably had a lot to do with it. This was done at the instigation of my primary teacher, who maybe had caught on to more than it seemed she had at the time.

I don't know what I'm rambling on about here. It's just that I often wonder what might have been different if I'd been selected out for special treatment. Maybe nothing. Or maybe things wouldn't have gone as well as they did. I suspect there's a place in the system for everyone if the system itself is flexible enough, and I'm a bit dubious about singling out "special" children for "special" treatment.

Rolfe.
 
Re: Advocatus Diaboli....

Auden said:
Definition.

The original definition of being 'gifted' meant that you scored over 130 on the Terman test (IQ).

Therefore, being in the top 2% of the population in terms of intelligence, should be the best determiner of what is truly 'gifted'. Everything else just shows 'bright kid - not necessarily gifted'.

All this nonsense about children saying that they were hanging out in their classes being bored, not feeling challenged by their teachers, weren't recognised by the school and that there weren't facilities to suit them - well, perhaps they were intelligent, sure, but just not intelligent enough. Otherwise, they would have been identified by the state and catered for.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure I understand where you're going with this. Are you suggesting that a student with an IQ of 131 might get bored in a class that doesn't offer them sufficient challenges, but one with an IQ of 129 wouldn't? Or are you saying that teachers should only be concerned about students being bored if their IQs are above a certain level? Either way, I'm not sure I agree.

Similarly, I'm not entirely sure what you are asking us to discuss in the original post. Schools -- and this applies to both private and public -- are generally not very good at dealing with students who place unusual demands on the system, either at the high or the low end. This is a simple function of resources and economics; when you have twenty-five third-graders in the class, the bulk of the material, resources, and class time will be devoted to the "average" performers. Much of the "additional" resources will typically be devoted to the low-end performers, who, frankly, need it more as a matter of public policy. As a parent, however, you are in an idea position to essentially create your own GATE enrichment environment at home, and that's typically a lot more successful than district-run enrichment programs. You know your child, you know her interested, and -- hey, how much trouble can you get in by taking her to the museum on weekends?

Districts vary in regards to their policies on students skipping years. In my school district it simply didn't happen, and Einstein himself would have been required to sit the full course. A friend of mine at college graduated high school at 15, having skipped three years over the course of primary and secondary school. There are advantages and disadvantages to both courses; I was bored silly for much of secondary school, but kept myself amused at the local library -- being "of the correct age" also allowed me to participate in sports, something that I rather enjoyed (but you can imagine how frustrating it is for a 12 year old to be competing against 14 year olds). I was offered a chance to attend college a year early, but opted against it since I wanted to party with my friends my last year. I've never regretted that decision.

On the other hand, Anne seemed happy at college despite the fact that she was three and four years everyone's junior, but I wonder how it affected her social life. (I can imaging it scaring
some potential boyfriends, for example. -- and of course, she couldn't even enter a pub, even with a fake ID.)

I guess my real question is -- what sort of special treatment do you want your child to receive?
 
Ah, what's wrong with just starting debate for debate's sake?

new drkitten said:
Similarly, I'm not entirely sure what you are asking us to discuss in the original post.
Click to expand...

I linked to the original post that inspired me to start this one.... where Bruce started to inspire stories of 'I'm a gifted kid, blah blah, these things concerned me...' then linked to two others that also raised issues involved with gifted education.... eh, join the dots. :)
 
I chose not to put my youngest son in the GATE program even though he qualified with flying colors. My son is rather shy, and he would've had to change schools, leaving behind his best friend. Plus, the homework in the GATE program (at least in our school district) is heavy. 5-7 hours of homework per night. That leaves the kid with no play time, no sports or music lesson time, no chillin' time. And after this last year of school, I am really glad I didn't put him in GATE. He is such a perfectionist, he worked himself into a case of GERD (GORD in the UK) over schoolwork. I can't imagine how bad it would have been if he'd been in GATE.

I did get lots of criticism for my decision from the other mommies. But, dammit, I know my kid best. He would have hated it.
 
I think Dr Kitten nailed the core problem. Schools aren't designed to handle unusual inmates, and when the occasional child comes along with a one-in-a-thousand or one-in-ten-thousand kind of talent the flexibility to cope with them doesn't exist.

Of course teachers would never arbitrarily decide to teach their Grade Seven class Grade Three material for a year instead of the assigned curriculum, for all sorts of obvious reasons. The children would learn little or nothing, they would mostly be bored and unhappy, and it would be a criminal waste of six hours per day of those children's lives. This is what gifted children live with for years at a time, of course, it's just that doing anything different is seen as too hard.

The question that has arisen that I think is incredibly interesting is that of how much you should challenge gifted children. Suppose we have a gifted child in Grade X. We somehow know that the child could absolutely ace Grade X+1 material, do very well at Grade X+2 material, do reasonably well at X+3 and scrape a pass at X+4. Where "should" they be?

The school and academic system is geared to reward people at the top of their year group, so in terms of awards, scholarships and so forth the child would be best rewarded at X or X+1, whichever held their interest. But this is an entirely artificial system not meant to handle people who jump ahead.
 
What do you do with the child who is gifted in some areas and not others? Maybe their social skills are 'normal' but they are very good at maths. I do not see any 'easy' solution.
 
rjh01 said:
What do you do with the child who is gifted in some areas and not others? Maybe their social skills are 'normal' but they are very good at maths. I do not see any 'easy' solution.
Click to expand...

You are right to say there is no easy solution. I seriously doubt there is one solution, but how many of them can we practically afford to apply?

But changing the way we (meaning educators and parents) look at education might help:

1. Get rid of IQ.

2. Take a closer look at Gardiner's Multiple Intelligences, and also at learning styles, i.e. visual, audial, tactile, and combined styles. These will tell you more about the student than IQ can ever do, although this information likely will not tell you how to teach the student. But more direct data is a good thing, generally.

3. Reduce classroom sizes to 10 students or fewer. A teacher with 30 students is forced to teach to the middle abilities and styles by the simple law of averages.

4. Require all students of education to take at least an intro to logic, an intro to philosophy, and an intro to skeptical thinking. Teachers can't teach critical thinking if they've never been exposed to it themselves in a deliberate manner.

5. Understand that because all students learn differently, all students need differing forms of education in order to develop their individual potentials. At this time (and probably all times) most societies cannot afford to provide such diverse educations, and it isn't likely to ever happen.

If "giftedness" had been something popular when I was a child, I'd have been so labelled. But I don't feel I deserved more resources, or more anything by virtue of that fact. What I wish is that I'd been introduced to critical thinking before I was 40, say 5 or 6, or even sooner, and encouraged in it all along the way.

Just the one thing would have done so much for me, and will do so much for any student with the mental capacity to comprehend it, which I believe would be the vast majority of them.

In my vision of Utopia, everyone can think for him- or herself, and a lot of the crap we deal with today doesn't exist.

But not being a good prognosticator, I can't imagine what would take the place of the crap. Which, for all I know, might be even more worrisome.

edited because "al ot" is just wrong
 
Re: Advocatus Diaboli....

I should dig out my references too. You'd be surprised at the political machinations and opinions that have resulted in gifted kids getting the raw end of the deal.

Slingblade - there's degrees you can do in critical thinking in education and I must admit, as a high school teacher I think I'm not really the best person to be doing it - not because of who I am, but because I think PRIMARY school teachers should be the one seeking out that sort of qualification. This isn't the realm of the upper-school teachers alone. Get them early. The earlier the better. It's also the thinking behind the 'Philosophy in Schools' program.
 
Re: Re: Advocatus Diaboli....

Originally posted by Kiless
I should dig out my references too. You'd be surprised at the political machinations and opinions that have resulted in gifted kids getting the raw end of the deal.

"Oh, you're so smart, you don't need any help." Sigh. No, I don't think I'd be very surprised.

Slingblade - there's degrees you can do in critical thinking in education and I must admit, as a high school teacher I think I'm not really the best person to be doing it - not because of who I am, but because I think PRIMARY school teachers should be the one seeking out that sort of qualification. This isn't the realm of the upper-school teachers alone. Get them early. The earlier the better. It's also the thinking behind the 'Philosophy in Schools' program.

I agree to a large extent with your point about Elem. teachers, as the earlier we catch students, the better. But too many of my classmates at the moment haven't a clue. It's not just so that they can teach critical thinking that these courses are needed: it's so they can actually do it, themselves. I just think even an intro into logic would be soooo helpful, for all involved, at all levels, never mind a major, minor, or concentration in crit thought.

You don't even want to hear about the English majors I know who can't spell, on a basic level mind you, and yet somehow expect to teach it. And they see no compelling logic in being skilled at their craft. "I've got spell check; why do I need to know how to spell?"

Again, sigh.
 
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