I watch this and realize that I should be enthusiastic, energized, motivated, and excited about the potential and opportunities for an explosion of new learning that could take place.
So why instead do I feel depressed, defeated, and hopeless? I am at a place where the cynic in me is winning the battle and crushing the idealist. I want to innovate, but my own weaknesses and lack of knowledge coupled with what seem to be endless barriers in the system convince me daily that it will never happen.
I can address my own flaws, and I am. I can chip away at the barriers, and I am. But are there enough people doing the same? Can we overcome the enormous inertia that continues to drive the system on in the same direction? I hope so, with the little bit of hope I have left.
I’ve been pondering a post about all the reasons we tend to resist meeting the real needs of the exceptional students in our classrooms. Yesterday, Tamara Fisher said it better than I. This should challenge every one of us, regardless of how much we think we’re doing for our gifted students, to reflect on our practice and our assumptions.
As much as I love to read and write, my least favorite class in high school was English. I’m not entirely sure why, other than the fact that some of the teachers seemed far more interested in telling me what I was supposed to think about a novel than in finding out what my ideas and insights were. The focus of the classes was mainly on pure literary analysis, and there was rarely any relevance to the real world.
It appears there is some connection to life. Guy Kawasaki, a venture capitalist, speaker, and business guru, talks about how literature is being used in medical schools and residency programs. He proposes that the effects they see—notably a better ability to see things from other points of view and greater compassion for their patients—could apply as well to business.
Perhaps this could inform the way we teach gifted children about literature, too. There are certainly going to be some for whom the traditional literary analysis will be fascinating and enjoyable. I suspect, though, that there will be far greater numbers who will benefit more from looking at literature in the context of life. Gifted students often struggle with their identity and social relationships. Just as it is doing for medical students, literature can help lift the students’ eyes and give them new ways to see the world and their place in it.
One technique for more easily addressing the varied needs of a large group of students is to create smaller focus groups. Groups can be formed based on skill needs, topic interests, or product. Here are a few tips for making the most of your small focus groups:
Form groups based on pre-assessment results
Re-form groups frequently as needs change
Meet with each group at least once per week
Set goals for each group and share them with students
Don’t be afraid to go different directions with different groups
Plan tiered or differentiated assignments and centers for independent work times
Use repeatable assignment templates to minimize preparation time
Muchhasbeenwrittenabout the changing needs of students in the 21st century and the transformation that must take place in our schools to make it happen. Several things are clear to me as I read them. First, it is going to take a visionary administration to remake the environment in which our schools operate in order for those changes to be possible. Second, like a mile-long freight train being switched onto another track, it will take a very long time for the needed changes to work their way down to the local level.
It took several years for No Child Left Behind to shift the focus of our schools from students to test scores, but that shift happened. In the meantime, the world shifted, too. What we really need now is No School Left Behind. Schools need to become more agile, more proactive, more willing to look ten or twenty years into the future instead of one or two.
In his blog, Scott McLeod recently reported on a keynote address by Alan November. Here are a few highlights that are relevant to how we educate gifted students in the 21st century:
There is a gap between what we teach children and what is needed in the global workplace, and the gap is growing.
Students need to be able to do three key things:
Have the capacity to do good research on the Web
Have good global communication skills
Be self-directed
One of the goals of gifted education is to help students with great potential fulfill it. I believe it would be irresponsible not to consider the impact that these children can have on our society and our world as adults, and to prepare them to be global citizens.
Scott also notes later in his post that in order to have global communication skills, students need a big voice. How do we give them that voice? Move beyond paper. “Paper gives you a little voice—paper stays in the classroom,” he says. Teach students how to develop their voice online. Create blogs, web sites, wikis, and shared documents.
A telling point was made by Alan November in his keynote: “Too many ‘technology-enabled’ assignments involve using the computer as a $1,000 pencil.” Are we simply moving our paper to a file on the local hard drive or school network? We need to teach our students to use the real life technology tools they will need in the workplace. We need to leverage the tools they are going to use anyway in their free time (Facebook and YouTube) for academic goals. How much more powerful will an assignment be when the world is the audience instead of just the teacher?
A student’s portfolio should not be a folder in a file cabinet somewhere that will never be seen again after June. What if a student’s portfolio began with the list generated when her name is typed into Google? Will Richardson calls this her digital footprint.
Here’s the thing: Our students are going to have these digital footprints whether we embrace the idea or not. As an educator, I’d rather be helping them choose the path those footprints are going to follow, and to guide them away from the potholes and dead ends that lie ahead.
One of the requests I often get from classroom teachers is for project ideas suitable for gifted students. This is the first in what I hope will be an ongoing series of posts with simple ideas for going beyond the usual to tap into the needs and interests of your students looking for more challenge. Here are some ideas for how to spice up your reading projects.
Author Study
Read several books by one author and look for common ideas, themes, and patterns. Does the author’s writing style change from book to book? Or read a biography of an author and one of his or her books. Do you see any connections or parallels?
Topic Study
Read several fiction books about one topic or historical period. Compare with factual books about the topic and see how the authors incorporated fact into fiction.
Award study
Read many books that won a particular award (such as the Newbery or Caldecott Awards) and see if you notice features that they have in common. What did the reviewers look for in choosing a book to receive the award?
Genre study
Read several books in a genre and figure out what makes a book fit that category. Are there books that could fit in more than one genre? Are there books that don’t seem to fit any genre?
Create an Anthology
An anthology is a collection of writing by many different authors. Usually there is a theme that connects all the pieces. Read a large number of pieces about a particular theme or idea and select ones to put into an anthology you are creating. List each title and explain why it belongs in your book.
What ever happened to striving for excellence? In schools today, it is now about striving for proficiency. Students are expected to perform at a proficient level on state assessments. Schools that aren’t meeting goals for proficiency are censured. There is no incentive whatsoever for schools to encourage students to perform at the advanced level. A student who scores perfectly on the state assessment counts exactly the same as one who barely crosses the proficiency threshold. But to many people, this is now what it means to strive for excellence
Robert Sternberg, in a recent issue of Educational Leadership, asks what it means for a school to be excellent. Too often, a school’s own definition of excellence is defined by the performance of a subgroup of students. The school looks solely at the improvement in performance of the bottom students, or the very top, or perhaps that group just on the cusp of proficiency. He argues that instead, schools ought to focus on excellence for all students, and that the numbers will fall into place as a result of that changed focus.
According to Sternberg (2008), in addition to the traditional 3 R’s, we also need to be teaching students Reasoning, Resilience, and Responsibility. I believe this is particularly important for gifted students, who can often learn the basics of academic content quickly but have more difficulty with these “Other Three R’s”. What if when we compact the curriculum for these children we were to focus our enrichment work on teaching these new skills?
Unfortunately, they can’t develop in a vacuum. All three skills (and, I would argue, all of the traditional three as well, past a certain level) require students to interact with others on a deep level. But how can we do that when we may only have one student in a classroom (or perhaps even in an entire school) who can move quickly into this area of learning? Certainly we want to provide these opportunities for all students on a regular basis. But Reasoning, Resilience, and Responsibility can be more of a centerpiece for gifted students who are capable of engaging them at a depth that other students may not attain until much later.
One solution to this is to provide more opportunities for gifted students to interact with their intellectual peers. Creating situations where this is possible can be a challenge, however. If there are only a few gifted students in a school, even when they are all together, the level of interaction is not high.
Online tools can provide a way to expand the connections for our gifted children. Andrew Torris recently wrote about how social networks and online collaboration can help educators to be more engaged with each other in their own professional development. Many of the same arguments he gives, and indeed, many of the same scenarios he describes, apply as well to gifted children in our classrooms.
I have recently experimented with using a wiki to allow students from multiple schools to work together and interact on a common project. There have been some successes and some challenges, and the level of interaction so far is not high. But even at this very basic level, my students have gotten a glimpse of the power of networking, and as my own professional network grows, I hope to find ways to add to my students’ network of colleagues.
Torris ended his article with a powerful video. I’m including it here also because it emphasizes the importance of sharing, collaboration, and learning to network. Watch it twice—once from the perspective of your students, and once with your own professional growth in mind. Then think: How can we begin to move back towards excellence, first in our own lives, then in our instruction, so that all students can gain meaningfully from their time in our classrooms?
References
Sternberg, R. (2008). Excellence for all. Educational Leadership, 66(2), 14–19.
Think about the worst inservice workshop you ever attended. When you filled out the workshop evaluation at the end, chances are you wrote (or at least thought) something along the lines of one of these:
This was a waste of my time.
It was irrelevant.
I had better things I needed to do today.
I didn’t see the point of what I was asked to do today.
I already knew this and probably could have taught the workshop myself.
This is the situation in which bright and gifted students often find themselves. When the classroom teacher is forced to slow the pace for students who can’t keep up and to reteach some concepts several times until the majority of the class understands, the faster students are constantly feeling like they could be using their time for something better.
Differentiated work you give to students, especially highly able ones, should always be worthwhile and meaningful. Instructional time in school is limited enough without asking some students to wait for their peers to catch up to where they are. Consider some of these options when you are planning activities for these children:
The fact that students differ may be inconvenient, but it is inescapable. Adapting to that diversity is the inevitable price of productivity, high standards, and fairness to kids.
– Theodore Sizer
All students have needs, and it is misleading to think of struggling or below-level students as being the “neediest.” While their needs may require more intensive attention, it is unfair to leave gifted and advanced students to fend for themselves. The goal of differentiation is to identify the specific needs of different students in order to design appropriate types of instruction for each of them.
Differentiation is…
Differentiation is not…
Different work
More work
Deeper or broader assignments
Longer assignments
Tiered assignments
Extra assignments
High expectations for all students
Individualization
Structured choices for students
Always teacher-assigned
Rote tasks and memorization
High-level thinking
Instruction in needed skills
Self-help or peer tutoring
Appropriately challenging
Pushing to the limits
Respectful, meaningful work
Keeping students occupied
Flexible grouping based on pretesting
Static ability groups
Demonstrating mastery
Assuming understanding
Moving at their own pace
Waiting until the group is ready to move on
Varied strategies, approaches, and adaptations
The same differentiation strategy all the time
