The intersection between challenge and wellbeing at school
“I thought the work would get harder when I started high school. That’s what I’ve been waiting for, for years. But it’s just the same stuff all over again.”
“I’ve been in Kindy for ages, when will I learn how to write?”
“The girls in my class are friendly, but I can’t talk about quarks and antiquarks with them because I want to fit in, and they just want to talk about boys and singers. I haven’t found anyone yet who I think will want to talk to me about quarks, maybe I never will.”
“I’m in the top group for spelling, but I’m not very good at it. I got two words wrong on my last test but I only started crying when I got home and sat on the trampoline. The trampoline is where I sit when I’m sad because I didn’t get 100%.”
“I didn’t learn anything at high school and the teachers all hated me because I disrupted all the classes, but still averaged 95% on all my tests. I would just read the textbook at the beginning of the unit and then I’d learned it all, so I didn’t need the teachers. I’m a cardiologist now, but still get angry when I think about my high school experience. It was all such a waste of time.”
These are actual quotes from gifted adults, children and adolescents, and all of them point to the connection between being challenged at school and wellbeing. There is a vast amount of literature related to gifted and talented students and their education. Decades of research has culminated in clear and consistent information about identification, characteristics, underachievement, strategies in the classroom, accelerative options, social/emotional needs, and how to plan appropriately challenging learning programs. Despite this, gifted and talented students remain widely under-served, under-stimulated and demonstrate limited academic growth on school-based, standardised and national testing. This means that all too often, gifted students are unhappy and experience school as place where:
nothing new is learned,
they are asked to revise and practice knowledge and skills they have long mastered,
they have no intellectual peers,
no-one is interested in their area of passion, or
where failure is terrifying because they have never been challenged and so never experienced it
These are the students at risk of questioning their own identity, underachieving, and seeing school as a place of boredom, frustration and a sense that they are nothing more than a number in a relentless system.
Schools and teachers are trained to focus on the content that needs to be covered for a particular year group, and being a conscientious bunch, they tend to worry first about covering core content, and that they will not get through it all. This doesn’t leave much room for finding out which students already know parts or all of the core content, let alone what to teach these students when they have covered it and are ready for something new! Despite decades of consistent research findings about the importance and effectiveness of key strategies to extend and accelerate gifted students, a large proportion of schools and teachers continue to be suspicious about the benefits making above-year level concepts and skills available to students. A colleague in an Australian capital city is a counselor specialising in working with children and adolescents who are gifted and have significant mental health concerns, including anxiety, perfectionism, and trauma linked to negative school experiences. Sadly, her business is booming and she tells anyone who will listen that all the kids want is to learn something at school and to find friends they can be themselves with.
In order to maintain engagement and see the value in their education, it is important that gifted and talented students are actually learning when they come to school each day, and see school as a place where their prior learning is recognised and new learning occurs. To ensure this happens on a daily basis, we must:
Pre and formatively assess students to determine prior knowledge and avoid students practicing and repeating skills, knowledge and understandings they have already mastered. Gifted students often experience school as a place where week after week, topic after topic, and year after year, they are asked to unnecessarily practice and repeat skills.
Make sure students are not asked to complete ‘core’ work before they can access the work that is genuinely at their level and will offer challenge. Gifted students often experience years of being ‘rewarded’ for completing their work by being given more, and over time they become demoralised or learn to avoid the extra work by finding ways to waste time.
Asking the strongest students to mentor, coach or teach other students. Teachers often do this with the rationale that this helps both students. In reality, neither the weak nor the strong student benefits from this arrangement. It is important to remember that our brightest students deserve to be learning new material rather than being a substitute teacher, just as other students expect to do every day. Gifted students enjoy and should be able to work with intellectual peers on a daily basis, in order to feel accepted, express their ideas without fear of criticism and to be appropriately challenged.
Asking students to catch-up on missed work if they are out of the classroom to access extension work. This is especially true if the missed work includes unnecessary practice and repetition!
Design learning tasks that have genuine challenge based on what is known about a student’s prior knowledge. Challenge can come from posing abstract and complex questions rather than low-order repetition or retell. Challenge can also come by giving students the work they are ready for including accelerative options. VanTassel-Baska and Stambaugh (2006) argue that accelerating content must be considered as a priority by teachers when planning learning experiences for gifted and talented students.
“All students deserve to learn something new every day.”
Implementing these strategies in no way implies that gifted and talented students deserve more than any other student. Rather, we are endeavouring to level the playing field for these students, to provide the same degree of challenge that other students experience each day at school, to foster the same ability to persevere with tasks that are difficult, to see themselves as learners, and to experience school as a positive place where learning occurs on a daily basis.
Of course it is true that there are many teachers and schools who are doing a wonderful job of ensuring their gifted students are challenged, including those who may be underachieving or twice-exceptional. Nevertheless, we need to improve our consistent practice across Australian schools and sectors to ensure that our brightest minds see the value of school, that their time spent at school genuinely does have value for them, and that as a result of their school experience they are confident, self-aware, resilient learners and problem-solvers. As a nation we must strive for a consistent understanding of gifted students, so that parents and children do not have to choose between a school where they might learn something sometimes, and a school where they learn every day.
There are lots of resources available to learn more about the needs of gifted students, and how to support them at school:
https://education.arts.unsw.edu.au/about-us/gerric/resources/
http://www.mermaidsandmermen.com.au/
References:
Rimm, S (Sep, 2012). Sylvia Rimm on Perfectionism in the Gifted. Supporting Emotional Needs of the Gifted: 30 Essays on Giftedness, 30 Years of SENG. 47-50.
Rogers, K.B. (Fall, 2007). Lessons Learned About Educating the Gifted and Talented: A Synthesis of the Research on Educational Practice. Gifted Child Quarterly, 51(4), 382-396.
VanTassel-Baska, J., and Stambaugh, T. (2006) Comprehensive Curriculum for Gifted and Talented Learners, 3rd Edition. College of William and Mary: Pearson.
NOTE: This post is a reproduction of the article written by K.Bice that originally appeared in the Jan 2019 edition of the Australian Youthwise Magazine.