Working with Gifted Students

Readings: 

Margrain, V., Murphy, C., and Dean, J. (2015) Giftedness in the Early Years: Informing Learning & Teaching. NZ: NZCER Press

Cathcart, Rosemary (2020) They're Not Bringing My Brain Out : Understanding and Working with Gifted Learners. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. 4th Edition. Note: The author of this book is the founder of NZ's National Gifted Education Centre and One Day School.

Key Learnings: 

* Gifted students need opportunities to work with "like minds" who can think, talk, co-create, play, pretend, read or work at a similar level to themselves. They may often prefer working with adults than children because of this need. 

* Giftedness may encompass a striking ability in these 3 areas: above average ability (e.g. in maths, thinking, language use) + highly focused task commitment + creativity (Renzulli & Reis, 1986 in Margrain, Murphy & Dean (2015, p.6)

* Giftedness can be understood as possessing both extreme intensity / focus on specific areas of learning coupled with advanced cognitive ability (Cathcart, 2020). 

* Gifted children often also show intensity or have excitabilities (in Piechowski, 2014 in Margain et al, 2015, pp129, 232). These excitabilities fall into 5 areas: psychomotor intensity, senual intensity, intellectual intensity, imaginational intensity or emotional intensity. 

For Psychomotor Intensity (SJ): give children something to hold (blue tack, stress ball etc), limit sitting/stillness, give time outside. 

For Imaginative Intensity (SJ): encourage story creation through drawing/writing, talk through stories with children and annotate if needed, open-ended problem solving tasks, encourage imaginative play with peers, provide interest specific resources.   

* Play is a vehicle for all children to develop at their own rate (sometimes scaffolding is needed to support this development). It offers opportunities to interact socially, develop abstract and creative thought, use language and build follow personal interests (Margrain et al, 2015). It can be an ideal environment for gifted children to flourish within. 

* Gifted children are more at risk of under-achievement in school, despite their giftedness (Cathcart, p.3) and more likely to find school boring (Cathcart, p.54). This boredom can led to disengagement in learning.

* Leaving them to "get on with it" (learning) independently, frequently leaves gifted children frustrated, very bored and more disengaged in school, and in learning itself. Educators can support students to build independent skills and capacities ("tools of thought") to avoid this happening. This involves planning specific tasks and providing teacher/adult/peer scaffolding, prompting, feedback and questioning (Cathcart, 2020, chapter 7-). These tools of thought are described below.

* A child may be gifted but also have special learning needs, i.e. gifted children can also have dyspraxia, dyslexia etc

How Educators and Schools Might Assist Gifted Learners

* Consider all of the following when viewing the gifted learner and planning for them: intensity (and interests) > traits and abilities > behaviour and needs > asynchronous development (Cathcart, 2020). 
* Support students to develop "tools of thought" or competencies for independent and further learning, namely:

• Skills for self-reflection and evaluation of learning
• Emotional, social & ethical skills
• Interest and passion for learning (e.g. based on existing interests or trialing stimulus)
• Creative & intellectual capacity
• Thinking tools, including:
1. observation & perception skills (e.g. give children 3 mins to write or talk about their room in detail, the remembering tray game, scientific drawing, see/hear/smell table)
2. study & research skills, e.g. brainstorming, planning a research topic / field, comparison skills (Venn diagram etc), mind mapping, question writing/asking, presenting their work 
3.  communication skills, e.g. facilitated small group discussion, pair challenges / drawing, gap pictures, model giving reasons, board games and role plays, open ended questioning. For advanced vocabularies, try dictionary making, crosswords/wordfinds, joke book making, dialogue talking /writing, poetry, list making (creative, e.g. all the things that you can think of with handles, which could be used to make music etc), acrostics, mime
4. thinking skills, e.g., compare/contrast, philosophical questions for children, real world problem solving, hypothesising & experimenting with a practical task, expose child to graphs, maps, charts & different ways of representing information, mazes,
5. organisational skills, including time management, planning, recording methods, working methodically

Further ideas for learning (and developing tools of thought) (Cathcart, 2020): 

• Challenging concepts, related to child's existing knowledge: examples include open ended or creative questions, e.g. what would happen if..., draw all the things that could unmix themselves, describe / draw / plan a story about a character who owns this shoe/jacket/hat/other prop, Escher  and hidden picture drawings, debating with peers / teachers 
• Use the arts: appreciation as well as own creation (pictures, poetry etc). Related activities could be picture sorting, using random pictures to create a story (SJ writing time!), word blasting on a theme or topic, if I were a....poetry/writing, write/describe what happened before a story started, making models or diagrams in response to poems or stories, map reading, map creation, scene / character drawing and describing/acting etc