What Does it Mean to be Gifted Now?

For the sec­ond in our sum­mer series, Tony Bal­dasaro (@baldy7 on Twit­ter) brings us this reflec­tion on his views about gifted edu­ca­tion. Tony is the Chief Human Resources Offi­cer and the Per­son­al­ized Path­ways Admin­is­tra­tor for the Vir­tual Learn­ing Acad­emy Char­ter School. This arti­cle was also cross-​​posted at Tony’s blog, TransLead­er­ship.

What excites me about the shift in edu­ca­tion away from the classroom-​​centric model we have all been a part of over the last cen­tury, is the fact that stu­dents are less depen­dent upon the teacher and/​or the sys­tem for all knowl­edge.  Stu­dents no longer have to attend school to attain their knowl­edge, they are as Nagel describes, “free agent learn­ers”.

Because of that, stu­dents have the oppor­tu­nity to break from the long-​​standing cat­e­gories we so often use in edu­ca­tion.  Terms such as “slow learner”, “hands on learner”, “trou­bled stu­dent”, “active stu­dent”, “solid stu­dent”, “middle-​​of-​​the-​​road stu­dent”, “tal­ented stu­dent”, “straight A stu­dent” and yes “gifted stu­dent” are sim­ply con­structs of our edu­ca­tional sys­tem and they most often only pro­vide clues as to how the stu­dent learns within the nar­row con­fines of that sys­tem. The “straight A” stu­dent may be intel­li­gent, but I’ll bet they are also also very com­pli­ant and dili­gent in get­ting their home­work done and being atten­tive in class.  They are very good at play­ing the part of the indus­trial model school stu­dent that the “con­spir­acy” of school was intended to cre­ate but are they good at solv­ing prob­lems, being cre­ative, unlearn­ing that which they have pre­vi­ously learned so they can be rel­e­vant?  Do we really chal­lenge these stu­dents to use their gifts to their fullest poten­tial or do we sim­ply moved them along the con­veyor belt, send­ing them off to col­lege with the tools to con­tinue to be “good” students?

The “active” stu­dent is one that doesn’t fit our sys­tem well, yet fits in the world’s chaotic and unpre­dictable sys­tem very nicely.   To make that stu­dent fit within our edu­ca­tional model, we drug, pun­ish, and belit­tle the stu­dent until they either com­ply to a degree in which they can be tol­er­ated, or are pushed out of our sys­tem all together.  The real shame here is that many times there is an assump­tion that these stu­dents are not gifted, when in fact they are, they sim­ply don’t play the game by the indus­trial model rules that were estab­lished a cen­tury ago.  Our choice has been to change the stu­dent to fit the model instead of chang­ing the model to fit the stu­dent and by doing so, we have missed an oppor­tu­nity with a whole bunch of gifted students.

How often do we work to con­trol our stu­dents?  Think of that stu­dent who chal­lenges our sys­tems.  Think about your reac­tion to that stu­dent.  Now think about your reac­tion to that stu­dent when you know they are right and our sys­tem in wrong.  Unfor­tu­nately, most of us squelch that stu­dent and often with­out a true expla­na­tion as to why.  We say that it is, “com­pli­cated” or “for their own good” or “they will under­stand when they are older”, instead of embrac­ing those stu­dents, their ideas and their input.  Instead of acknowl­edg­ing that they are right­fully chal­leng­ing the way we edu­cat­ing them because our sys­tem is not work­ing for them and they want it to.  Their “chal­lenges” are pleas for help, not the acts of betrayal we so often por­tray them to be.

My point here is that we have so nar­rowly defined what it means to be “gifted” in our sys­tem of edu­ca­tion, that we fail to either see the gifts within each stu­dent, or we fail to push stu­dents beyond the model we have been a part of for so long.  I fear that as long as we define “school” and “learn­ing” so nar­rowly, we will con­tinue to miss the the oppor­tu­nity to cul­ti­vate the gifted stu­dent found in all stu­dents.  As long as we con­tinue to define what it means to be “gifted” by the sys­tem which so nar­rowly defines how we learn, we will not truly find each of our stu­dents’ gifts.  It is why this shift toward free agent learn­ing, with the cat­e­gor­i­cal free­doms and the power to self-​​define our gifts, is so intriguing.