How to Organize Education for Highly Gifted Children?
“We cannot solve our most important problems within the framework in which we created them” — Albert Einstein
This article is the second of two articles aiming to provide information, inspiration, and building blocks towards developing an integrated approach for offering highly gifted children exactly what they need within (primary) education.
In the first article “Highly gifted children in (primary) education, the focus was on providing information about what being highly gifted is, how to recognize it and about underachievers.
In this article the focus is on providing information about the four strategies that can be used to organize education for highly gifted children, social emotional issues, the use of a week task and guidance of highly gifted children and the role of testing.
Opportunity and time
Don’t forcefully treat every child the same. As a teacher, emphasize the fantastic existence of differences between children, between people. It is an absolute fact and at the same time an existential necessity for our species to progress. We need people that are different, think differently, look, and design differently to make things better, to discover new things, and to find new solutions.
Gifted children are an exception. Everyone knows it, including their class. Including the child itself. That is why it is impossible to make an exception of a gifted child, they already are. This gives a teacher the freedom to organize children’s learning in such a way that it empowers every individual child.
As a teacher, you can use the characteristics of a gifted child. These are often children who can learn quickly, think quickly, enjoy doing new things, and often have a fairly large degree of autonomy and self-responsibility.
It does require certain specific skills of a teacher. A teacher needs to be willing to give away control. Needs to trust the highly gifted child. Needs to empower, to be more of a coach and a guide of the learning process than to be focussed on transferring knowledge. Needs to get out of the stigma that as a teacher you have to know it all.
A teacher can help a highly gifted child with formulating goals, stimulate and motivate it to take the next step, or comfort it when it has failed a task miserably. A teacher can help to find solutions and check together with the child if set goals are reached.
And, maybe the most important two things of all: Give a highly gifted child opportunity and time. Not just one day, or a couple of hours each week. They’re highly gifted every day of the week, not just at certain moments.
Four strategies
Four different strategies can be used at school to design education for (highly) gifted children. It’s possible to combine them in any way it suits a child, underneath the terminology:
Compacting:
- The deletion in the regular subject matter, so that it becomes suitable for (highly) gifted children, where the core objectives of primary education are leading
- Skipping unnecessary repetition and exercise material
- Adjusting the curriculum to the learning characteristics of the (highly) gifted child
- If used, it must also be used for debriefing assignments or instruction.
Compensating:
- Spend extra time and practice on subjects where the child fails or where there are gaps
Enriching:
- Expansion of the basic program with additional program components to make it more responsive to the needs and abilities of the individual child
- Pursuit of additional goals
Accelerating:
- Accelerate through the basic program with the possible result of skip to the next academic year or a group
“You don’t have to think for yourself at school, you have to do copy-paste and answer what they want to hear.” — Sara (6)
Compacting
Compacting can be designed in various ways, but one of the ways this can be done is utilizing preliminary testing. This means that children are tested before the start of a new chapter. The teacher then analyzes which goals the child has mastered based on at least an 80%-standard. The child may exclude the exercises and assignments that belong to the already mastered learning objectives. He then makes the lessons with learning objectives that are not yet mastered and does attend the instruction part of these lessons. Compacting cannot be done by itself, it is always in combination with compensating or enriching.
Compensating
Compensating is suitable for children with a disharmonious developmental pattern. These children score very high on certain subjects and lower on others. In such a case, a child can compact the subject matter of the subject in which he is strong. The time available can be used for repetition and to eliminate gaps in the subject with which the child has difficulty.
Enriching
By compacting the regular subject matter, time is freed up for gifted children. This time is filled with enrichment activities. It is important that the enrichment material does not pre-empt the regular curriculum, but that it is deepening or broadening. It helps when schools have a wide range of enrichment materials available.
The teacher, in consultation with the child, draws up an enrichment program for about 8 weeks, so that the child has enough time to broaden or deepen in a particular subject. When drawing up the periodic enrichment program, the following can be taken into account:
- Time spent per week,
- Topics in the method or projects,
- Learning goals (make those SMART),
- Interest of the child,
- Variation in the program
- Cooperation possibilities with other gifted children.
- A (digital) portfolio (e.g. Schoolfolio) can be used for this purpose.
Suitable enrichment work meets one or more of the following characteristics:
- Contains open questions
- Has a high complexity
- Contains assignments with a problem-oriented character
- Enables multiple solution strategies
- Appeal to creativity
- Exceeds the didactic level of the child
- Fits the interest of the child
It is of great importance to set learning goals with the child, the enrichment work is not without obligation. Precisely these children need to be challenged intellectually, have to learn how to learn, learn to deal with difficulties, and learn to ask questions.
Anne (11) decided to spend the two hours a week she had available for not having to join all five mathematics lessons, on learning French. Together with her teacher, she looked for suitable materials and found these in an app and a booklet with audio samples, filled with exercises. She agreed to complete two lessons each week, and start with vocabulary and pronunciation in the app. Manon started frantically, loving to work on a subject she had chosen. Every year they went on holiday to France and next year she might be able to speak with her French friends she met there! Her teacher asked her every hour she worked on French if she had any questions or needed help of some kind. But Manon didn’t need any, she never did with the other subjects and felt like she could do this as well. After five lessons, the book offered a test. A week later, Manon took it. Her teacher went to sit next to her and took his red pen. He didn’t say a word and started correcting: 43 errors in 60 questions. When he looked to his right, he saw the big tears rolling over Manon’s cheeks. The teacher put the test to the side and had a life-changing talk with Manon, addressing learning to learn, how to organize home-work, how to practice spelling, and preparing for a test. The best topic of all: It’s necessary to make mistakes, to improve and learn.
Accelerating
When a child has a didactic advantage of 1 year or more in several areas, it should be carefully considered whether the child is eligible to accelerate. As a school, it might be a suggestion to create a list of criteria. Having a solid set of criteria helps to make a sound decision on whether to enrich and/or accelerate the education of the child, based on the best fit to the needs of the child. In this way, thresholds to speed up are thus lowered and decisions are made in a well-founded matter. It is recommended that the decision is always made in consultation with the class teacher, internal supervisor, management, child, and parent(s). The final decision should lie with the school.
In general, early acceleration (ages 4–8) is preferred over late acceleration (9 and up), because a child:
- Shows less absconding behavior to show his capacities
- Develops a more positive self-image, because the child’s educational needs have been met sooner
- Arrives earlier in his new group, wherein the course of time people ‘forget’ that the child has accelerated
Social-emotional issue
Numerous arguments serve as a pitfall for not letting children accelerate. Those involved must be aware of this when considering whether or not to let a child accelerate. Most common is the fear of possible social-emotional problems. Too often, it is stated that the child is socio-emotional, not ready to accelerate because of unadjusted behavior. It is overlooked that this behavior may be the result of the gap between the educational program and social environment on the one hand and the capabilities of the child on the other hand. Behavioral problems may even disappear when adjustments take place!
The same goes for motivational problems. Teachers often reason that child with a lack of commitment will get stuck if they are challenged even more. This reasoning lacks a good analysis of the motivational problems. Another fear of not accelerating is that this decision negatively affects a child’s future. Finally, too little knowledge about these problems among teachers and the pressure on the school organization are pitfalls not to accelerate.
The above arguments are unjustified fears according to research. Numerous studies show that children who have accelerated in elementary school, on average, perform better and are not more or less happy than their peers. Acceleration prevents the development of mental laziness and after acceleration improved self-confidence, motivation, and learning performance (Verlinden, 2014).
Week task
An organizational form that works well is drawing up a physical or digital weekly task. This can be the weekly subtraction of the earlier mentioned enrichment program for about 8 weeks. In the weekly task the tasks that the child makes, based on the agreements with the teacher, are outside the regular offer. When a gifted child has finished a task, he can tick it off. This makes it easier to keep an overview for both child and teacher.
The weekly task can be completed once at the beginning of the eight weeks. After that, the child can fill in the week task himself. The teacher can use the weekly task as a checklist to see if the child has done the work agreed upon.
Emma (10) is an excellent and gifted student with language. She makes the tests of language in advance. Then she studies what content she didn’t master yet. The lessons that offer this content, are the lessons she participates in. She gets an overview of these lessons from the teacher so that she knows when to attend and when not. From these lessons, she makes only the extra challenges exercises.
She also reads the stories of the vocabulary lessons in advance. She studies the words and autonomously learns the words she does not know. From these lessons, she always makes the most difficult task only. The time she saves is spent on the extra challenging work out of her weekly task, in her case the world orientation program “Top Entrepreneurs”. But, (part of) this time could also be spent on assignments from the book with extra challenging exercises for language.
Guidance of highly gifted children
Prerequisites for good guidance of (highly) gifted children are:
- A positive attitude and sufficient knowledge of the teacher regarding (highly) gifted children
- Extra attention to the learning process and less emphasis on learning outcomes
- Time in the curriculum to coach these children and to plan, reflect and evaluate with them
- A serious attitude towards enrichment work. This means that it has no non-committal character, it is evaluated with the child, and feedback is given verbally and in writing
The role of testing
In education, most of the tests are still taken as a measuring instrument to check if the content offered in the weeks before has persisted in the brain of the children. However, this has a limitation. By testing in this way, a teacher does not know which parts of the content his pupils already knew before it was offered. And, perhaps even more important in the context of giftedness, neither do the children.
It is therefore advisable to test more frequently in advance. By testing in advance, insight is gained into which part of the content is and is not mastered. This enables the teacher to make specific choices in what he or she will teach, to perhaps omit certain things or to emphasize them. For more gifted children this provides insight into which lessons they will join and during which lessons they can use their time differently.
Also, the use of large scale assessments before learning can be of great use to design challenging learning environments for every learner, including highly gifted children. The reason for this is that with these kinds of assessments, every child can be successful. These assessments show you what the level of a child is with a certain subject, in such a way that a teacher can connect his instruction to the needs of the individual child.
Another advantage is that it enables the focus to be shifted towards maximizing learning gain instead of reaching a too difficult, too easy, or a just-right fixed end level.
That is why it is important as a teacher to give highly gifted children autonomy to foster self-efficacy. Do not worry if they will or will not meet the requirements of a standard test that will come up. If they fail that test, it is highly unlikely they will let that happen a second time!
“In the end, what we want as educators is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, not the knowledge in pursuit of the child.” — G.B. Shaw
Note: Co-written by Marina van Meel, highly gifted specialist at OPO Hof van Twente, the Netherlands.
