Tuesday 25 June 2019

Busting Myths of Gifted Education: Gifted Awareness Week 2019

Here goes my yearly contribution to this blog! Every year I hope that I will find the time to regularly post here, but every year the Gifted Awareness Week blog tour comes around and I find that I haven't managed to blog during the year. The life of a teacher!

This year's theme is Myths of Gifted Education and I've chosen my favourite:
Gifted learners don't need extra help, they'll be fine on their own.

I've chosen this one because, as a teacher in mainstream education, this is often a line I hear and I completely understand where it comes from. There are so many competing pressures on our time and to a teacher without a fundamental understanding of theories of giftedness, it would appear that generally gifted students seem to do ok. 



For me though, this raises the question of the purpose of schooling and education. Is the aim for every child to do 'ok'? Or is the aim for every child to be challenged, extended, and able to develop at the pace and level they are ready for?

I think a lot of the issue here stems from the label 'gifted'. I recently read a much better definition that I think would help dispel a lot of the myths surrounding gifted learners and gifted education in general. The article asserted that giftedness could be labelled asynchronous development instead and that students need to be met where they are in the different domains. The very definition of differentiation!

The other side of this argument, and one I have made before, is what are we missing out on if we don't extend, challenge, support these students to achieve to the levels they are capable of?

So how do we do that? 

There are a few key things that I recommend teachers can do to extend, challenge and support their gifted students.
  • Find out what your learners know and can do, take a strengths-based approach. Gifted students aren't usually gifted in all domains, sometimes teachers think they need to focus on the areas they aren't gifted in and ignore the area of giftedness as they're already doing ok in that area. I find this is often detrimental to the student's well being and they make much more progress in all areas when a strengths based approach is taken. 
  • Talk with and listen to the students' whānau - gifted students' parents may be able to shed light on what works for their child. They are a valuable resource to work with.
  • Differentiate, provide choices - using the principles of differentiation is a great way to cater to gifted students needs. But this doesn't mean leaving them on their own to complete their own work, they still need support to be able to continue to learn and develop. Remember every child should be making one years progress in a year.
  • Engage with out-of-school opportunities - don't try and be everything to everyone, there are specialist teachers out there who have experience with supporting gifted students. Use their expertise to support you and your learners.
The re-developed Gifted Learners TKI site has a wealth of information and support on it if you want to increase your understanding and dispel more myths about gifted learners. 

Check out the other great blogs in the blog tour as well!




Sunday 28 April 2019

The new Digital Technologies Curriculum: A Catalyst of Success?

I'm excited to be joining in on the New Zealand Gifted Awareness Blog Tour again this year. This year the theme is 'Celebrate Gifted: Catalysts of Success'. 

While I was thinking about what to write for this blog, I re-read the blogs I have written during GAW in the past. My 2016 blog, Getting education right for gifted and talented students - Imperative for the survival of humanity sparked an idea because thankfully, due to a change in government in New Zealand, some of the suggestions I made in that blog have come to fruition since then! 

In that blog, I bemoaned the negative influence National Standards and GERM theory was having on gifted students' ability to succeed but now, in 2018, the New Zealand education system is moving out from under their shadow and forging a new future with the scrapping of National Standards and an Education Conversation initiated by the government, as they review and rejuvenate our education system so it meets the needs of our students now and in the future.

To me, the new Digital Technologies curriculum, released at the beginning of this year indicates the direction that education is going. Not just because digital technologies are an integral part of our students' lives, but the way it is designed and the assumptions it makes about learning. One of the strands of the curriculum centers around a way of thinking. This takes the emphasis away from learning content related to a subject and supports students in developing a way of thinking that increases their understanding about the "principles that underlie all digital technologies, and learning how to develop instructions, such as programming, to control these technologies.” (TKI)

I have been using this new curriculum with my students from Years 7 - 11 and it has definitely proved to be a catalyst of success for several of my gifted students. Two students in particular who, through this curriculum have been successful in ways they may not have experienced otherwise.