144: Supporting Your Gifted Child

Jen Lumanlan 01:00

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  Today we’re going to talk about a topic that was actually requested by the members of my Supporting Your Child’s Learning Membership. They wanted to understand how to support gifted children and I have to say it initially made me feel uneasy, but I couldn’t quite figure out why. Perhaps it had something to do with the episode I did a year ago on White privilege in schools where I interviewed Dr. Allison Roda and we discussed how gifted and talented programs in New York City, where Dr. Roda works and studies, primarily benefit middle-class White students. But despite this, I went into the research with an open mind. What happens if giftedness really is a thing, and it’s just that programs, as they’re defined and used in schools, are broken?  And it turned out that that question really got to the heart of the two things I want to look at in this episode. Before we get into that, I just wanted to remind you of two things: firstly that the You Are Your Child’s Best Teacher workshop is getting started this Monday, September 13^th.  If you want to support your child’s intrinsic love of learning -whether you’re homeschooling or they’re in school – the workshop will help you to start using your child’s interests as a jumping-off point to deep, authentic, self-driven learning that will be so much more fun and memorable than curriculum-based learning that doesn’t interest them, and that they end up resisting. You’ll get one short email each day with an activity to do that doesn’t take a ton of time, and you’ll also join a private Facebook community where you can learn from and with all the other parents in the workshop too. You’ll come out of it with a sense of confidence that you really can do this – that you can get the skills and tools you need to support your child’s intrinsic love of learning, and it can actually be interesting and fun for both of you. You can sign up for the free workshop at yourparentingmojo.com/bestteacher.

Jen Lumanlan 02:38

And the second reminder is that the Supporting Your Child’s Learning membership is open for enrollment in just one week, on Saturday, September 18^th.  I’m doing two things for the first time with this membership: this is the first time that I’m offering sliding scale pricing on this membership. And secondly, I’m also offering the option to come into the membership for two weeks for FREE. You can come in and see the first two modules of content, and join our private community that isn’t on Facebook, and attend an orientation call to help you access all of the materials and see how it can work for you, and join a peer coaching group if you like, and even a group coaching call with me. At the end of the two weeks, if you decide that the membership just doesn’t fit your needs, you can cancel at no cost.  If you decide you love it, we’ll bill you for whichever of the sliding scale pricing options fits your budget at the end of the two weeks.  So, there’s literally no risk to join – you get to experience the entire membership which is completely designed to help you go beyond you are your child’s best teacher workshop and truly support your child’s intrinsic love of learning, and you get to make that decision based on actually experiencing it, not on what you can glean about it from an information page.  So, if you want to sign up, you can do it starting on Saturday, September 18^th, and our two weeks gets started after enrollment closes on Thursday, September 30^th.  If you have any questions about the membership, just reach out to support@yourparentingmojo.com and we’ll get right back to you.

Jen Lumanlan 03:56

OK, let’s talk about giftedness. Firstly, what is giftedness? How can we define it? And from there, how can we support gifted children effectively? Let’s start with the definition, and then we’ll move into support. Our view of what giftedness is has shifted quite a bit over time. Francis Galton was one of the first people to study the concept of genius in a book called Hereditary Genius published in 1869.  Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that he studied the family lineage of distinguished European men and concluded that genius must be genetically inherited. Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon developed a scale to identify students in need of alternative education in 1916, although many of the items they tested – things like eyesight, hearing, color sense, height, and weight seem more like they are testing for an optimal view of masculinity than anything related to intelligence.  Lewis Terman adapted Binet’s scale to create the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test, which viewed giftedness as a single entity, measured through this Intelligence Quo tient, or IQ test.  A score above 135 indicates someone is ‘moderately gifted,’ 150 indicates ‘exceptionally gifted,’ and above 180 indicates ‘severely and/or profoundly gifted.’  The problems with the IQ test and other standardized tests are well known.  Students who don’t identify as White may not be accustomed to answering questions simply for the purpose of sharing knowledge when there isn’t a real problem to solve may perform poorly on pencil-and-paper tasks conducted in settings that they may find intimidating, may miss cultural references in the test questions, have learning or cognitive styles that are different from White students, have low academic motivation or engagement when they are being assessed, and have test anxiety or suffer from stereotype threat.  Stereotype threat arises when you remind someone of a specific aspect of their identity that’s in conflict with the thing being tested, so if the test asks the student to check a box to indicate their race at the top of the form, and the student associated Whiteness with academic success and their own race with other attributes, they may perform less well on the test.  And while newer versions of the IQ test have been standardized on large, racially diverse samples, this certainly wasn’t the case historically, with Whiteness the norm both in the standardization process as well as in the test questions themselves.

Jen Lumanlan 06:09

In a second wave of research in the 1930s-1960s, Louis Thurstone identified seven primary mental abilities that he claimed were statistically independent of each other.  These were verbal comprehension or understanding, verbal fluency or the ability to quickly generate a large number of words with specific characteristics, rapid arithmetic computation, the ability to recognize symbols quickly, inductive reasoning, spatial visualization, and memory.  For those of you who have been listening for a while and remember back to our episodes on patriarchy, that list probably sounds to you like it does to me, which is a list of skills that are highly valued in our culture, and that are primarily the purview of men.  Notice the competitive element – doing things quickly, doing more of a thing than other people, being able to use language and numbers quickly and fluently, and using logic. There’s no indication that anything related to skills seen as more typically feminine are associated with intelligence – things like intuition or ability to navigate social situations or sensitivity.  Howard Gardner extended this work with his Multiple Intelligences model, which saw these intelligences each as an independent cognitive system, not static abilities nested under general intelligence.  The intelligences he proposed are:

1. Spatial, so visualizing the world in 3 dimensions
2. Naturalist – understanding living things and reading nature
3. Musical – discerning sounds, their pitch, tone, rhythm, and timbre
4. Body-kinesthetic – coordinating your body with your mind
5. Logical-mathematical – quantifying things, making hypotheses, and proving them
6. Linguistic – finding the right words to express what you mean
7. Intra-personal – understanding yourself, what you feel, and what you want
8. Interpersonal – sensing people’s feelings and motives

We’ll come back to critiques of this model later; for right now I just want to put it in historical context.

Jen Lumanlan 07:58

Two important theories came out of the Third Wave of research was Joseph Renzulli’s Three Ring Definition, which saw giftedness as the interaction of three characteristics: well-above-average ability, which he defines as the top 15-20% of any domain – much different than most models which consider the top 3-5% of individuals to be gifted, creativity, and task commitment.  Renzulli also proposed two types of giftedness – schoolhouse giftedness, which is related to test taking and lesson learning, where knowledge is consumed, and creative-productive giftedness, where knowledge is created and produced.  He reminds us that “History tells us it has been the creative and productive people of the world, the producers rather than consumers of knowledge, the reconstructionists of thought in all areas of human endeavor, who have become recognized as ‘truly gifted’ individuals. History does not remember persons who merely scored well on IQ tests.”  Critics of this approach argue that task commitment and creativity aren’t really part of giftedness, but are developed over the course of the person’s life, and that there may not be a link between the traits of children with various levels of IQ and their later life achievements.  The second important model is Sternberg’s WICS model, which sees giftedness as a synthesis of wisdom, intelligence, and creativity.  This is the first model that looks outside the individual, with wisdom being the use of knowledge and abilities to balance one’s own and others’ interests to achieve a common good, in both the long-and-short terms, through the use of ethical values.  Intelligence means following a life course that matches the person’s goals and capitalizes on strengths while compensating for or correcting for weaknesses, and creativity is the production of new, surprising, and compelling ideas or products.  Gifted people aren’t necessarily strong at all aspects, but they follow their strengths and compensate for or correct their weaknesses to adapt to, shape, and select experiences.

Jen Lumanlan 09:53

A fourth wave of research yielded an absolute slew of theories which overall widened the lens even more by placing talent within a developmental context that includes external variables like the person’s family, their education, social and cultural context, and historical events and trends – along with luck sometime.  Overall we’ve moved on from the idea that giftedness only consists of general intelligence and is completely determined by our genes.  Newer theories also focus on explaining the talent development process rather than listing traits that comprise giftedness.  The main differences between newer theories include disagreements about the role of abilities not linked to intellect, the role of creativity, and whether giftedness is a potential or an achievement that we can only see after a person has built up expertise in a particular domain.  Unfortunately, most schools still use IQ scores as the primary criteria to determine whether a child gets into a gifted and talented program, and several states require a minimum intelligence test score for a gifted program to be funded.  This creates a difficult situation where researchers now see giftedness as being much broader than IQ, but schools are still stuck firmly back in the first wave of tools – primarily because they’re cheap and easy to administer. So that’s overall what the research has said over the years about what giftedness is.  Here I want to introduce the idea that giftedness is a social construct, which means that it isn’t a ‘thing’ by itself.  It only exists because we say it exists.  So when we get into endless debates about whether a person should be at the 80^th percentile or the 97^th percentile to be called gifted, it’s arbitrary.  We can put the line wherever we want.  We have a hundred models of what giftedness is because it’s a social construct – it’s not that we are trying to understand what giftedness is and we can’t quite see it clearly; it’s that we can’t DECIDE what we think it is.  We’ll get into this more in a minute, but it does seem fairly clear that for a long time, definitions of giftedness in the mainstream research, which is what I’ve described to you so far, prioritize a White-centered view of giftedness, as well as how achievement that is associated with giftedness is defined.  Researchers are looking for gold medals in mathematics competitions, Nobel prize winners, champions in whatever field the individual chooses, and whether a country can lead its peers in league tables of standardized test scores, all of which promote without question the White centric, competitive, dominant view of success.

Jen Lumanlan 12:17

And when we play with the cutoff lines and talk about increasing the representation of students who don’t identify as White in gifted and talented programs, we’re then saying that some White students aren’t as gifted as we’d thought.  If one more Black person is called ‘gifted’ but threshold doesn’t change, then one White person who used to be gifted is no longer gifted.  Obviously, I’m not arguing against the identification of more people who aren’t White as gifted; I’m just calling out that the entire system of cutoffs is completely arbitrary.  Dr. James Borland, whom we’ll meet again at the end of the episode, facetiously describes “geographical giftedness,” which is the “not uncommon phenomenon whereby a gifted child, so labeled by his or her school district, finds himself or herself no longer gifted after moving to another school system.”  We can start to see that the concept of giftedness has a lot in common with the concept of race, which is to say it’s a construct that’s established by the dominant culture, using ‘scientific evidence’ as proof that it’s a thing, while we move the goalposts anytime we feel like it to best serve our needs. Normally this is the point in the episode where we lament the lack of cross-cultural research available on the topic that we’re studying, but we’re super lucky here! There’s actually a good deal of research on how people in different cultures see giftedness, and it turns out that they see it quite differently from the way mainstream White culture does.  So, let’s take a look at that how people from a number of different Indigenous tribes, as well as Mezistos (which is a term describing a person of mixed American Indian and European ancestry in Central and South America), and Black people here in the U.S.

Jen Lumanlan 13:52

One group that has been particularly active in this space are researchers at Charles Darwin University in Darwin, Australia, led by Dr. Michael Christie.  Yes, it is somewhat disappointing that the head of the Contemporary Indigenous Governance and Knowledge Systems research project at Charles Darwin appears to be White, but this does not appear to be the typical extractive model of research where a White professor visits a community, publishes peer-reviewed papers about what they learned, and remembers to thank the anonymous participants who were so generous with their time.  Dr. Christie works with the Yolngu [Yolnu] Aboriginal Consultants Initiative sees Yolngu elders as experts.  The website for this project has photos of the experts and the projects they’ve consulted on, and includes transcripts of the conversations, and shows the photos of each consultant alongside what they say. I’m afraid I won’t be able to do the pronunciation of their names justice, but I’ll include a link to the page where you can see them in the references.  There are three main ideas that came up again and again in this discussion of giftedness.  Firstly, that giftedness is associated with community leadership.  A person doesn’t have gifts by themselves or for themselves.  The gift isn’t there for the child; it belongs to everyone.  This is in huge contrast to how people in WEIRD cultures see giftedness, which is that it’s entirely embedded in themselves. Leadership means knowing who you’re related to, meaning your extended extended family, so being able to name all of your relationships with their second cousins, and know the connections between you, and also knowing the land – understanding what is here, what isn’t here that’s supposed to be here, how to hunt, and how to harvest. Another aspect of being a community leader is being patient, and a good listener, especially to elders.  When asked about how elders identify gifted and talented children, one consultant told a story: in the old days when boys were to go through their initiation ceremony, they would have ancestral designs painted on their chest telling the land where they belong to, or what creatures their totem is. After being painted, the boys would have to wait several days before their ceremony, sitting quietly and solemnly, listening to the ancestral singing and watching the preparations. Some boys would wriggle and play around and their paintwork would get messed up.  After a few days, it was pretty easy to see which boys were able to sit quietly and respectfully because they were the ones with paintings that hadn’t peeled off.

Jen Lumanlan 16:12

The second theme is that young people are born with their gifts and talents, which is an embodiment of their ancestral connections.  The word for this embodiment is gakal. When a person behaves properly, doing things like singing or dancing in a ceremonial context, they become one with their ancestors and their land.  There is no separation between man and country, or time and space.  This may mean that a person finds themselves in places that are mentioned in their ancestral songs, at the same tide, at the same time of day, seeing the same colors of sunset specified in their songs, collecting the food their ancestors collected in the same place, in the same way.  But gakal doesn’t have to be confined to traditional practices; it can come through a being in a rock’n’roll band or being a wise community leader who navigates conflict effectively and keeps everyone together in good faith.  And the third theme is that giftedness is neither a head thing or a guts thing, but an effect of the two coming together.  The Yolgnu believe that Western-style education focuses too heavily on the head, which causes the child to not be invested in feelings toward connections with others, which makes their spirit weak.  One of the Consultants, who was also an experienced teacher, said that you can identify a gifted child in a classroom because “they are the ones who help the other kid when the teacher isn’t watching.  They aren’t competitive.  They already know that they are people with destiny.  They know the authority of their elders (each in a specific and significant kin relationship with them).  They also know how to pay attention to significant people, and also places, things, and moments.  Their foundation stand strong in who they are, already gaining knowledge from over there, still learning both sides, balancing them, finding a path, like choosing, that’s how a true Yolŋu leader will emerge, from a child.’

Jen Lumanlan 17:55

We see this focus on community – both a person’s ancestral and direct family community and also their broader social community in other cultures as well, like the Maori in New Zealand.  The Maori also see giftedness as something that is owned by a group, and that is part of an individuals’ extended family and subtribe.  The gifted person doesn’t exist in isolation; others play a role in nurturing it and probably in making personal sacrifices for the relative’s giftedness to be developed.  The talent lies in the individual, but it’s a talent that belongs to the group, and so using the individual’s gifts and talents in service to others is a high priority.  There is a lot of importance placed on caring and sensitivity toward others, courage, hospitality, patience, honesty, integrity, and selflessness. This is obviously in stark contrast to the ‘self-made man’ narrative more predominant in Western culture, where stories of individual achievement are told, where giftedness in service to others is important only to the extent that it creates products and services that can be bought, which create material wealth for the gifted person. The Navajo tribe in the U.S. has a four-part framework of giftedness – firstly purity of thought, which is associated with spirituality, but also identifying interests having a good memory for information; cultural knowledge, and interpersonal skills, as well as abstract thought in areas like the arts, patterns, and math.  The second aspect is awareness and sensitivity of kinship, community, and nature, and showing respect and reverence for these.  The third is excellent problem solving skills using both convergent and divergent thinking, intrapersonal skills that enable the person to reflect spiritually, morally, and ethically; adapatability, and maturity.  Finally, leadership skills are associated with language use, verbal skills, the ability to listen with tolerance and patience, and being motivated to learn.

Jen Lumanlan 19:41

Latino scholars have noted that Latino children often need to engage in flexible and elaborate cognitive acts as cultural brokers when they help their parents during interactions with English-speaking U.S. society, as well as the difference between street smarts and book smarts. They may be the problem solver in their neighborhood who mediates conflict in their peer group, who persists in difficult tasks, who has unusual visual-spatial talent, or who is curious about things that aren’t on the school curriculum but may clam up in school settings.  They have to figure out how to ‘play the game’ enough to work and succeed within the mainstream system, but also not ‘sell out’ and use the cultural capital they develop on issues affecting their communities. Researchers commonly acknowledge just as we have done here that people in different cultures view giftedness differently, and yet the way giftedness is studied and supported in schools is very much grounded in the Western paradigm.  As a grad student, Dr. Juan Carrillo met and talked with Dr. Howard Gardiner who developed the Theory of Multiple Intelligences, which I’ll refer to as the TMI.  There have been a lot of critiques of the TMI over the years, including some that say it isn’t relevant to teaching and learning, or that it hasn’t been empirically tested. But even though researchers who work with indigenous peoples find space for indigenous ideas in the TMI because it includes ‘reading nature’ and a sense of spatial orientation that are missing from most theories of intelligence, if you look at the theory as a whole, it’s really no different from other theories that reproduce the thought and knowledge privileged by Western civilization (excluding the knowledge and values of women, anyone who isn’t White, Christian, local rather than decontextualized, and premodern ways of knowing the world).

Jen Lumanlan 21:17

It was essentially developed using European ideas about the development of intelligence by Piaget and Levi- Strauss, from the Western culture’s dominant view of needing to categorize knowledge, and from people defined as geniuses in their intelligence category who were almost all White – for example, dancer Martha Graham (body kinesthetic intelligence), Einstein (logical-mathematical intelligence), Picasso (spatial intelligence) and Ghandi (who wasn’t European but was educated in England, and is the model for interpersonal intelligence).  Where are the studies on the traditional ecological knowledge about the prevalence of species in specific places over periods of decades, or what you do with interpersonal knowledge once you have sensed people’s feelings and motivations and used your linguistic prowess to express what you mean – can you draw others to consensus?  Where are the studies of people who are regarded as leaders in Indigenous communities because their musical ability contributes to the continuation of their culture, rather than because they can create a lucrative solo career?  Where are the connections between understanding yourself, coordinating your body and mind, and understanding living things, and reading nature to see us as an integral part of nature, rather than nature being just something, we study?  Where is the role of knowledge gained through caring for others and grassroots organizing?  Where is the theory of knowledge on living a rich life of interesting relationships, meaningful work, intense interests, love, and contentment that women are more likely to do, rather than the masculine-focused, single-minded focus on one goal at the expense of everything else?  Where is the valuing of patience and quiet development of talent even when fitting this around childcare and supporting a spouse’s career, perhaps even while being denigrated by that spouse and denied educational and job opportunities?  And where are the studies of the work of developing a gifted person’s skills, which itself must be a form of giftedness – Sir Francis Galton, the very same one who first theorized intelligence, was tutored and cared for by his older sister Milicent Adele, and Thomas Edison’s mother spent almost two decades raising and homeschooling her brilliant, unusual son. When we promote the achievement of the gifted person and ignore the context, we very often devalue the contributions of women.

Jen Lumanlan 23:27

The TMI still privileges competition for control and mastery of the world, which entrenches patriarchal, capitalist systems rather than working to dismantle these.  It is silent on the issue of contextualized knowledge, so knowledge is something abstract that can be taught by any teacher to any student at any time in an assembly-line way.  Some teachers now organize their days according to multiple intelligences, with 9am being ‘social intelligence time, 10 am being logical-mathematical intelligence time, and so on.  Nothing has changed about the content, or the ways that it privileges White knowledge and ways of learning, or that the curriculum was set by administrators in a board room three years ago and it has no relevance to the students’ lives here, now, today, but at least it’s addressing their multiple intelligences.  Gardner himself claims that these specific intelligences are valued by society, but what is really valued is the perpetuation of capitalism.  To the extent that intelligences contribute to that, they are valued.  If they don’t, they aren’t.  Multiple intelligences are valued only as far as they improve a child’s scores on standardized tests since this is still the main way that knowledge is evaluated.  And the purpose of that testing is still to get a job, and be productive at work, achieve fame, become someone who is important – very masculine-oriented goals.  Bringing about social justice, liberation, democratic participation, and peace aren’t seen as important.  The MTI was welcomed because it accounts for more kinds of intelligence but doesn’t threaten the status quo too much. Dr. Carrillo has developed a preliminary Mestizo [muh STEE zow] Theory of Intelligence with seven components:

• navigating or contesting oppression using creative and empowered strategies, and by coping with feelings of hopelessness and despair when seeing one’s culture described as less-than-ideal.
• centering knowledge traditionally seen as less valuable than book knowledge, and supporting students in maintaining their dignity and a positive sense of self in the face of oppression
• centering hybrid identities derived from living in physical and mental contradiction and ambiguity
• straddling multiple forms of cultural capital across race, class, ethnicity, and gender
• decolonization – so, working toward a vision of life that isn’t structured by the forced imposition of one society over another, so young Latinos may covet self-authenticity while also striving for academic success deploy this form of intelligence to navigate the tension
• struggling for psychic, cultural, emotional, and spiritual wholeness, extending beyond traditional norms of education, challenging the Cartesian notions of body-mind separation
• remaining committed to social justice using the knowledge, resources, and cultural and social capital gained through higher education, which has links back to the community leadership found in Yolngu, Maori, and Navajo cultures.

Jen Lumanlan 26:18

Dr. Carrillo describes interviews with three Mexican-American men who had all navigated struggles in mainstream school and gone on to be professors at elite American universities.  I want to read you a paragraph of Mario’s own words, and then Dr. Carrillo’s commentary:

“Looking back, I should have just got a GED. My high school was a war zone. I wore two masks. One mask to pass the class and another to watch my back. Crazy fools were watching you. You had to kick it with them, those hanging outside. I had to be in switch mode, to survive. I learned that then, how to switch, and navigate all this information. You can identify the lie, the punk, the rawness of it all”

So Dr. Carillo goes on to say, Mario wore multiple masks as he engaged a border-crossing consciousness. His dedication to the “rawness” exemplified his commitment to an identity as a ghetto nerd who rejected linear assimilation and struggled through the ambivalence of being and becoming. In one of the interviews, Mario told me, “We come from a different experience from the middle class. You will never see me at a Starbucks playing Sudoku. I can’t get too comfortable, you know, I feel the pain and struggle every day.” He navigates the tensions of being forced to become a puppet all while working through the various cultural worlds in his school. Moreover, that role-playing and switching has become a permanent part of his scholarly ethos. He identifies with the graffiti-filled alleys of life, the underdog, the maladjusted, and the forbidden knowledge, all while attempting to make sense of the more sanitized spaces of higher education and challenges in K–12. …Feelings of “homelessness” are core feelings of the restless scholarship boy. In many ways, the road seems never to reach a place of tranquil sanctuary. In the colonial context under which Mario was schooled, there was always a confrontation with the various demands of domination. He embodied an existential, survival positionality. For Mario, resistance hurt, but obedience hurt more. Finding fluidity was challenged by chronic irresolution. Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences theory fails to capture this complex dimension, one that is salient to many oppressed groups. It involves much more than mainstream notions of bodily and cognitive mastery. More is on the line, such as struggling for and having the opportunity to live a life of dignity. In this intellectually and spiritually demanding space, aims for wholeness and decolonization stir active and ongoing sets of intelligences that aim to critically examine and understand discourses, expectations, and knowledge claims surrounding the brown body within schools.”

Jen Lumanlan 28:51

So these “invisible ones” whose knowledge is typically excluded from theories of intelligence also include second born children, rural children, children whose families live in poverty, second language learners, those who are not cisgendered, introverts, visual-spatial learners, and those who are both gifted in some areas and also have what are called ‘learning disabilities.’ Dr. Angela Novak of East Carolina University has developed a theory that for Black people, joy is a form of giftedness.  Dr. Bettina Love defines Black joy as “a celebration of taking back your identity as a person of color and signaling to the world that your darkness is what makes you strong and beautiful…[it] is finding your homeplace and creating homeplace for others,” and Dr. Novak adds the commentary that “the concept of homeplace, a safe haven for Black bodies and minds to escape the brutality of White supremacy, adds a richness to the context of Black joy.” Kleaver Cruz says that ‘ Black joy is an opportunity to use one of the most radical tools we have as Black people: our imagination.”  In expressing Black joy, “we are creating space to imagine how else we can exist.  We must imagine both the demise of a global system of oppression as well as what will exist in its stead.”  Expressions of Black giftedness include creative storytelling, especially verbal storytelling, an advanced sense of humor, and a penchant for direct and honest communication.  Additional cultural manifestations of giftedness in Black students may be movement – the act of expression, activity, dance, or constant motion through experiential learning, and not complying with arbitrary rules. Communalism is preferred over individualism; the opportunity to be social during work, and to collaborate rather than compete.  When we hear this list of characteristics – speaking up, being funny, communicating honestly instead of saying what the teacher wants to hear, moving your body in an environment where you’re supposed to sit still, and wanting to work together rather than demonstrating individual prowess, we see why Black giftedness isn’t just not recognized in schools, but the expression of Black giftedness is in direct contradiction to what is considered to be acceptable behavior in schools.

Jen Lumanlan 31:05

A 2012 dataset observed that African American students represent 17.3% of the Kindergarten-Grade 12 population, and 10% of the gifted education population, and 25% of the special education population.  So Black students are more likely to receive their education in more restrictive settings that lack rigorous courses, so they are less prepared and lack the minimum requirements for advanced and accelerated learning opportunities.  Students who are referred for special education are often given standardized tests, and there’s a massive amount of literature on this topic alone that I may cover in an episode one day.  In short, there’s evidence that standardized tests are more likely to identify students who don’t identify as White for special education services, and even where this may not be the case, sometimes education departments use short versions of the test that aren’t as reliable as the full versions and again over-select Black students for special education services in the state of Mississippi.  It’s also possible that some tests actually over-predict the achievement of Latinos who are English Language Learners, meaning they don’t get access to services that might help them.  The tests focus on things that are easy to measure, like verbal and quantitative reasoning, and ignores topics like spatial reasoning, the ability to form complex written arguments, and evidence-based decision-making – and these are just the missing topics cited in a paper geared toward a mainstream academic audience, and ignore all of the other qualities that people in other cultures perceive to be components of giftedness that perhaps we should consider as well.

Jen Lumanlan 32:34

In a fascinating chapter in the Handbook of Giftedness in Children, assessor Linda Kreger Silverman describes some of the challenges of conducting these assessments.  Some children shut down when they miss an item.  Some get upset when the tester asks them to say more, so the assessor switches to a task they’re more comfortable doing and then comes back to the test.  Some are adept at reading facial expressions and look for clues to the right answer in the examiner’s facial expression.  And test scores are almost never useful by themselves.  Ms. Kreger describes a case study of a 16-year-old who wanted to go to college early, and who had an IQ of 128 (So not dramatically high). A testing report from the previous year said she had done well on a couple of tests, and that she had read Dante’s Inferno at age 8, but now she was struggling with heavy reading demands and timed tests. No learning disabilities were indicated in the previous round; the test results were exceptional in some areas and average in others and didn’t warrant a diagnosis of learning disability.  Ms Kreger’s tests identified that the student was highly gifted and motivated and was working overtime to get stellar grades with a reading disorder that was masked by her abstract reasoning abilities. The developmental history of knowing the child had read Dante’s Inferno provided context for interpreting the test scores which the previous assessor hadn’t done. Of course, Ms. Kreger runs a private testing center in suburban Denver whose prices aren’t listed on its website. Children who are stuck in a room and told to fill out the bubbles on a test before they’re immediately directed into a program are never going to have this complexity in their lives recognized. And once they’re in special education, African American students tend to face difficult personal and social issues in school. They have to not just understand what their own disability means but confront the stigma associated with having a disability, which in this case conforms with teachers’ and the broader cultural stereotypes of their low academic achievement and likelihood of school dropout. This becomes relevant to our topic of giftedness when we look at the intersection of Blackness, giftedness, and disability.  Teachers who are confused about the characteristics the child is displaying in the classroom are more likely to refer the child for remedial education rather than gifted education. These students may set high goals from themselves but struggle to meet them because of their disability.  The intersection of their race and disability means they are even more likely to be overlooked by teachers when making nominations for gifted education and even if they are identified, they are likely to be one of the few students of color in their gifted classes which can cause behaviors that are seen as problematic in school, as well as poor self-esteem and underachievement.

Jen Lumanlan 35:06

Alright, let’s shift to looking at how to support gifted children.  I’m on board with the researchers who argue that we are wasting our time by focusing all of our efforts on identifying what giftedness means and whether the threshold should be set at the 80^th percentile or the 97^th percentile, or the 98^th percentile if you’re a student in New York City unless you have a sibling who already tested as gifted in which case the 90^th percentile is good enough for you.  We SHOULD be looking at how to effectively support gifted children.  There’s a reasonable amount of evidence to help us here, in a helpful review by Dr. Jonathan Plucker and Dr. Carolyn Callahan in a special episode of the journal Phi Delta Kappan published in November 2020. Drs. Plucker and Callahan tell us that one of the most studied intervention strategies for advanced learners is acceleration, which means using practices like entering kindergarten early, skipping grades, and compressing content into a shorter timeframe, dual enrollment, and early college programs.  Evidence is lacking related to diverse populations, and most of it isn’t experimental, but it has positive effects on student achievement. The evidence supporting ability grouping isn’t quite as clear cut, but there is convincing evidence that flexible ability grouping (which means the groups change as student abilities and needs change), benefits both the most and least advanced students. This is different from tracking, which involves placing students in rigid groups from which they rarely move, which isn’t supported by the evidence. Research suggests that advanced learners benefit from what are called “pre-differentiated curricula” with clearly stated learning outcomes, formative assessment procedures plus direction on how to use the assessment results to modify the instruction and so on.  Formative assessments are assessments that are done during the learning process so the information gained in the assessment can be used to shift how the instruction is carried out.  So if the learner is struggling with one particular concept, more time is spent on that concept. This is different from summative assessment, which is done at the end of a learning period, and whose sole purpose is to generate a score or a grade.

Jen Lumanlan 37:04

There are a few strategies that have some supporting evidence that need additional research. These include enrichment programs which focus on the development of skills like creativity and higher-level thinking, although experimental evidence is lacking. Research on Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate has lots of strong data from teacher and student surveys about how much they like the programs, but have mixed results regarding student outcomes – not all students who do well in Advanced Placement courses go on to do well in college. There is mixed evidence for the practice of having public high schools selecting high-performing students based on entrance exam scores mostly because it’s difficult to establish whether these students would also have done just as well if they attended a non-selective school. There are a couple of practices that have little evidence of effectiveness; these include psychosocial interventions like those targeting growth mindset, grit, and learning styles – and if you want a deep dive into the evidence on growth mindset and grit, I’ve done episodes specifically on each of those topics.  These qualities might be useful but by themselves, they don’t support advanced students in making more progress toward reaching their potential.  And finally, there’s the idea of heterogeneously grouped differentiation, where students spend most of their time in mixed-ability classrooms, perhaps with an hour a week in pull-out classes. This approach relies on teachers’ willingness, skill, and time to differentiate curriculum and instruction for the wide variety of students in the classroom, and many teachers find it difficult to provide this kind of instruction effectively.

Jen Lumanlan 38:29

So that’s what the evidence says. But as we usually try to do on the show, we’re also going to step outside what the evidence says and look at the context that the evidence sits within.  So, when we look at programs that separate advanced learners from other learners and put them in special programs, probably in smaller class sizes with teachers who have received more training, and we give them instruction that doesn’t require them to do the same thing over and over and over again but rather to move on when they’re ready, is it any wonder that they make more progress than they would in regular classrooms?  When we teach these students using curriculum that’s differentiated for them and assess them using methods that allow them to then focus on the areas where they’re struggling rather than just giving them a grade at the end, is it surprising that they do well?  What we would actually have to do to really test the efficacy of these programs is to put some so-called ‘not gifted’ children in smaller class sizes with teachers who have received more training and give them instruction that doesn’t require them to do the same thing over and over and over again but rather to move on when they’re ready, and see if the gifted students still massively out-perform not gifted children. Because it turns out that when we look at the effectiveness of programs to support gifted children, what we’re actually looking at is the effectiveness of school.  And on that point we do start to get ourselves into a difficult spot.  When we’re looking at whether gifted programs prepare students for success, the way that success is measured is their success on future standardized tests, their college graduation rates, and sometimes their success at earning money.  The measures of success are intimately intertwined with White views of success, which doesn’t reflect what success looks like in all cultures and I would argue isn’t actually working that well for White people either.  As we talked about in the Mother’s Day Momifesto episode, many of us just put one foot in front in front of the other because we’re SUPPOSED to do well in school and go to a good college and get a well-paying job and get married and have children and it’s a mark of privilege if we get all that done by middle-age and have energy left to look around and realize that actually, this isn’t working for us that well after all.

Jen Lumanlan 40:33

So when we tie success in gifted programs to grades and scores on standardized tests, we’re perpetuating this cycle from the beginning.  We’re separating some children out and telling them they’re better than others, and we’re disproportionately doing this for White children.  Very often these gifted and talented programs are set up to keep White parents invested in urban schools, even though the programs produce de facto segregation inside the schools. The peer-reviewed research doesn’t look at this, but what if the better outcomes that children in these programs demonstrate come partly because the children who stay behind in the regular programs are effectively told they’re not as good, which decreases THEIR scores on the tests, making the ‘gifted’ children look better by comparison. So what ARE we supposed to do about this? Well by this point in the research I had some ideas of my own, and then in an edited book called Conceptions of Giftedness I found an essay at the front by a researcher who seemed almost surprised to have been asked to contribute. And in that chapter, Dr. James Borland of Teacher’s College at Columbia University argues that we should actually be working toward what he calls “gifted education without gifted children.”  Apparently, all of the contributors to the book were asked to address five questions, the first of which was “what is giftedness,” and I was amused that his answer was “my short answer to this question is that giftedness, in the context of the schools, is a chimera.  But, because I am an academic, there is a predictably longer answer.”  Dr. Borland recounts many of the arguments we’ve discussed – that the notion of gifted children was constructed because of historical necessity because it serves the interests of the dominant culture.

Jen Lumanlan 42:07

Dr. Borland notes that children do develop at different rates. That is not in question. But instead of singling children out as ‘gifted’ ‘learning disabled,’ or twice exceptional – meaning both gifted AND learning disabled – or just ‘normal,’ that instead, we see that having this idea of the ‘average’ child actually doesn’t really help anyone.  There is no average child.  No child performs at exactly average level on every task.  If it sounds ridiculous to say that we should do away with these kinds of labels, try putting them on yourself instead of a child.  Chances are you do some things better than average, right?  I process words very quickly, and I write fairly persuasively.  I’m really good at decoding an exam question to understand what the instructor wants to see, and I’m good enough at following instructions and routine procedures that I can get a good grade in math just by seeing that a problem looks like one I’ve done before and repeating the required steps, even if I don’t really understand why I’m doing them.  Because I have these skills, I did well in school. I’m really terrible at design – I know good design when I see it, but I can’t do it myself. Social situations are not my strong suit, and neither is any kind of fast, explosive physical movement – although I do have good endurance. I wouldn’t say I’m a natural consensus-builder – I find it too hard to read the sub-text of what people aren’t saying. When I worked in the corporate world it would drive me nuts when people would sit in a meeting and agree with everything you were saying and then the criticism would flow through back channels afterward. I’m not ‘average’ any more than your average.  I’m just lucky that my skillset lines up well enough with what the dominant White culture says intelligence is that I’m considered intelligent. My deficits aren’t relevant in this context. But what if instead of privileging the kind of intelligence I had, we could actually see all kinds of intelligence as valid and support people in developing these?

Jen Lumanlan 43:54

Granted, this does require a profound shift in thinking. Our cultural tendency is toward reductionism.  We want there to be separate boxes for people to fit in that describe them, and to have tests we can use to find people who fit in those boxes and then develop separate educational provisions to meet their needs.  Once the box has been defined, we then try to pretend that the substance that makes it up is real and objectively identifiable and scientifically verifiable. As Dr. Borland says, “The category was created in advance of the identification of its members, and the identification of the members of the category both is predicated on the belief that the category exists and serves, tautologically, to confirm the category’s existence.”  So, in other words, we create the gifted category, then we select gifted people, and because there are gifted people, we’ve confirmed that the idea of giftedness is ‘real.’  Then we can say that a child either has or doesn’t have it, as if it has an existence of its own, which it wouldn’t if we hadn’t made it up. As a culture, we aren’t good at dealing with complexity. It’s much easier to deal with the boxes of ‘gifted,’ ‘learning disabled,’ and ‘normal’ people. But dealing with complexity is what TRULY supporting children’s learning requires that we do. Dr. Borland suggests, and I concur, that we dispense with the concept of giftedness, and the definitions, identification procedures, fast-tracking, and other programs.  He says we should instead “focus on the goal of differentiating curricula and instruction for all of the diverse students in our schools,” I would go further and argue that curriculum itself is not serving students.  The reason ‘gifted’ students want to move ahead faster, and ‘learning disabled’ students fall behind, and even the students whom we now know are not average at all get bored is because this average curriculum, which is taught in all schools in a standardized way doesn’t work for anyone except policymakers who are interested in our performance on standardized tests.  It doesn’t work for teachers, who are essentially deprofessionalized as they are told what to teach and how to teach it and then held accountable for the results of something they have no control over. And the only students for whom it works are the ones who are willing to say “OK, I get that I have no control here and the ‘best thing’ for me to do is to shut up and just do what I’m told.” We say we value critical thinking but if any of our children actually think critically enough to call the entire education system into question – which they do with their bad behavior and bad attitudes and lack of motivation, then we tell them the problem is with them because most certainly the problem cannot be in the system. So, at this point, you may be wondering: well, what do we do with children then, if teaching them a standard curriculum isn’t the right path forward?  It seems like an almost impossible task in school, especially if we’re continuing to measure learning through standardized tests, and we don’t provide any training to teachers, and we don’t fund schools enough that we can actually reduce class sizes to the extent that teachers can realistically differentiate instruction in a classroom.  It’s entirely possible that it IS impossible to do it under these circumstances.  The closest we get is instituting a tiny portion of self-led learning, called “20% time,” after Google’s program where employees get 20% of their time to innovate on something besides their current project. Teachers who institute this approach say that “I’ve never received a better response from my students than when we did 20% time.  Our class came together and learned everyone’s true interests and passions. We got over the fear of failing together. We cheered for each other during presentations, and picked each other up when things didn’t go as planned. We had conversations about standards, skills, and learning goals. Using 20% time allowed me to “teach above the test,” and my students finally understood that learning doesn’t start or end with schooling.”  Students who like fashion magazines start making their own clothes.  Students learn sign language to communicate with a deaf younger cousin, or make their own movies, or try to clone a carnivorous plant.  The author’s Principal said these were the best presentations she ever saw – not because of the content, but because of the conviction students’ had through their work.  ?

Jen Lumanlan 48:02

The good news for the parents who are in my Supporting Your Child’s Learning membership is that they are actually already doing this.  In the membership, we learn how to follow a child’s interests so it’s like doing 20% time all the time.  Parents’ first concern about this approach is that children won’t learn everything they need to learn, which makes sense when you see that only things taught in school count as learning. But when you realize that nobody can ever learn everything there is to know, and that children are actually going really deep on topics they’re interested in rather than getting a quarter inch of peanut butter spread across many subject areas, going deep suddenly looks really valuable.  Instead of being dragged through a standard curriculum kicking and screaming, children pick their own interests and learn through that.  The student interested in fashion is suddenly learning how much fabric costs, and how to calculate how many yards you need when your skirt takes 3/8 of a yard and your shirt takes 2/5 of a yard.  The student learns how to follow directions in written format and find videos to show it when the written instructions aren’t enough, and what decisions you need to make to depart from the directions to make your own creation and ways to reduce the risk associated with doing that (like making one out of cheap fabric before using expensive fabric).  They’re learning about garment construction and why you can’t use cotton thread on polycotton fabric, and maybe how to make historically accurate costumes for a theater performance.  They might look at the history of fashion to get ideas for the clothes they’re designing, and what other people wear in different places around the world, and try to figure out what makes something ‘fashionable’ in the first place – perhaps by looking at the Smithsonian Museum’s Clothing and Social Change in America online exhibit.  They come to understand how fashion is connected to the people who wear it and the places they live in, which contextualizes history and geography in a way that rarely happens in school.  They might look at the effect of the fashion industry on body image, cultural expectations of women, and the connection between attractiveness, fashion sense, and success.

Jen Lumanlan 50:00

They learn how to sketch ideas quickly and draw details. They start developing a sense for how fabric will respond when they do certain things to it, and make choices based on gut feelings that are grounded in their experience, and how to persevere when things don’t go the way they had hoped.  They find mentors at the fabric store and in sewing clubs and in online communities.  They might even end up creating a business to sell their creations when they start to learn about cost of goods and cost of labor and profit margins and product photography and marketing and persuasive writing and supply and demand and 100 other things as well, and maybe they’ll learn how not everyone has access to enough clothes, and end up designing coats that can also be used as sleeping bags for people who don’t have access to a warm place to sleep at night. This way of learning tends to come easily to children because they build new knowledge on top of a framework that they built themselves, based on their own interests.  It’s knowledge that’s rooted in a sense of community and of place, so it can’t be contained in a curriculum and exported to someone else somewhere else.  It’s deeply right for THIS student, in THIS place at THIS time.  A student who ‘doesn’t like’ reading may be more willing to persevere with it when they are deeply vested in understanding the content.  A student who struggles with fractions is motivated to figure it out when they WANT to buy the fabric they need.

Jen Lumanlan 51:16

In school, with a regular curriculum, it can be incredibly difficult to separate a child’s lack of motivation to learn from true struggles with learning. When you remove the motivation issue by following the child’s interests, we can see with clarity that remaining struggles are most likely due to challenges with learning that the child needs more help to address.  This is not to say that we need to be the one who is the expert on everything related to education – just that we can see the struggles as they arise, and connect the child to resources just like we connect them to sewing patterns and fabric stores and mentors.  Dr. Silverman, who wrote the book chapter on assessment says that instead of asking how a child’s test scores compare with the norms for average children, a better diagnostic question for children is “to what extent does the discrepancy between the child’s strengths and weaknesses cause frustration and interfere with the full development of the child’s abilities?”  This is also a big difference from how weaknesses are seen in schools, where any performance less than average must be corrected.  Out in the real world, underachievement is only an issue when it limits what a person wants to do.  And we don’t have to feel that we must correct for every potential limitation right now.  When a person is motivated, it’s absolutely possible to cover several years’ worth of math content in a few weeks. Some researchers report that there are five Cs that contribute to gifted students’ satisfaction with their learning environment: Control, Choice, Challenge, Complexity, and Caring.  Control gives them choice over what and how they learn, and then they find intellectual stimulation through content that is that is challenging and complex.  A caring teacher who is interested in them and their learning gets them through hard times.  It is sometimes possible to find the five Cs in school.  Challenge and Complexity are the most likely if the child’s talents are recognized.  Control and choice are very rare because a child cannot have real choice in a curriculum-driven environment.  Caring teachers are unfortunately more likely to be found by some students than others.  It’s unfortunately not uncommon that gifted students experience a mismatch with their learning environment.  Instead of creating a love of learning, this results in boredom, inattentiveness, academic underachievement, and even conduct problems in the classroom.

Jen Lumanlan 53:24

Interest-led learning is most often recommended for gifted students, because it allows for a learner’s freedom of expression and creativity.  The problem I see here is that we only find see interest-led learning as suitable for some students.  Regular students, and especially students who aren’t performing at grade level couldn’t possibly be trusted to do this.  Dr. Jennifer Adair has produced compelling evidence on this topic – she created short videos of children in two first grade classrooms serving mostly children of Latino immigrants.  The children in these classrooms were agentic – they influenced and made decisions about how and what they learned both in individual and collective ways.  The video showed the children initiating projects, asking questions without raising their hands, moving around the classroom, solving problems, discussing a range of topics, giving feedback to each other, and making decisions about where and with whom to work. They pursued ideas as a collective group even when these ideas weren’t part of the teacher’s lesson plan.  Dr. Adair’s team showed the video to first-grade students who were not in the filmed classes, and these students were shocked. The children watching the films explained that the children in the film couldn’t possibly be learning, and one boy spontaneously yelled: “Keep your mouth zipped, eyes watching and…and…and ears listening!” as he made a gesture like he was zipping his mouth and cupping his ears. All of the children were alarmed that the children in the film weren’t raising their hands and were collaborating and making plans without adult assistance, and said their teachers would get mad if they talked without raising their hands first.

Jen Lumanlan 54:54

When teachers who weren’t associated with the filmed classroom watched the video, some of them said that good learning was happening – but all of them agreed that the children in their schools couldn’t possibly be so agentic in their own learning because they didn’t have enough vocabulary.  Vocabulary in English was seen as a gateway to being able to handle – or perhaps deserve – more sophisticated learning experiences, despite the fact that the students in the video were in exactly the same place with learning English as their own students.  Other researchers have shown that when teachers work with students who are fluent in Spanish but still learning English in a mixture of languages, they able to produce sophisticated work.  When they read a text appropriate to their grade in English but then discussed it in both English and Spanish, they very successfully engaged in the task of comprehending the English text.  A requirement to discuss the text in English made it seem like the children were poor learners when actually this was not the case.  So, when we reduce choice, and we put constraints on learning that are based on our ability to only speak one language, and we see a child’s inability to comply with exactly our narrow view of learning, then pretty often what we find are deficits.  And if we create opportunities for children to succeed, we find that they do.  When we only ask questions like “what is the best way for THIS child to learn” about children who are perceived to be gifted, then we’re missing an enormous opportunity to help ALL students to develop their own gifts.  When we put all the ‘gifted’ children together in a room and then teach them critical thinking skills (which is what most gifted programs do) rather than actually putting them in a room with people who think differently from themselves and supporting them in having real conversations, we’re depriving both the ‘gifted’ and the ‘non-gifted children. When we see that ‘gifted’ students who are taught in a way that fits how they think do better in school but that children who have creative and practical abilities are almost never taught or assessed in a way that matches their pattern of abilities and we don’t do something about that, we’re creating a system where a good chunk of the children in any class mostly learn that they aren’t good enough.

Jen Lumanlan 57:02

Parents who want to support ‘gifted’ children are told by researchers that “gifted children’s thoughts and emotions differ from those of other children, and as a result, they perceive and react to their world differently.”  Parents are told that a gifted child’s intellectual development occurs more quickly than his or their social, emotional, and physical development, and that more than half of gifted adolescents report that they don’t feel they can be themselves in school and that they feel different from their peers.  Parents are told that self-beliefs about academics are related to the gifted child’s achievement and that we need to allow gifted children control over their learning to support their achievement. But I argue that actually ALL children need this support.  It’s not that gifted children’s thoughts and emotions are different from everyone else’s, but that all children perceive the world differently.  We only see it as important that some children develop “intellectually” faster than others because we don’t value social and emotional and physical development.  I’d be surprised if fewer than half of adolescents that haven’t been identified as gifted say they feel they can be themselves in school.  And as we’ve seen, if self-beliefs about academics are important to achievement, why aren’t we allowing all children to direct their own learning?  We’ve seen that first-grade English language learners can do this effectively, so why don’t we consider it for all children?  It’s possibly because it might lead children to think for themselves, which could cause them to question the systems we impose on them, which wouldn’t be at all convenient for us adults.  Far better to just keep them in line.

Jen Lumanlan 58:31

Parents whose children are in the school system have their hands tied to some extent.  There’s likely not a lot you can do to shift your child’s school away from using curriculum.  But even if your child is in school, you can still support them in doing interest-led learning outside of school.  You can even use these practices to extend the aspects of classroom-based learning that most interest them.  And if your child isn’t in school?  Well then, the world is your child’s oyster. So if you want to learn how to support exactly this kind of interest-based, intrinsically-driven learning, then I’d love to work with you in the free You Are Your Child’s Best Teacher workshop that’s coming up this week, starting Monday September 13^th.  This isn’t a plan that will tell you exactly what to do and exactly when to do it.  It’ll help you to support your child’s intrinsic love of learning whether they’re gifted or not, homeschooling or not, and whether you’re employed outside the home or not.  You can sign up for the free workshop at yourparentingmojo.com/bestteacher.  If you miss the workshop and you want to dive right into the Supporting Your Child’s Learning membership, where we take all the ideas from the workshop and dive deeper, you can do that at yourparentingmojo.com/learningmembership, and you can find information on both of these, plus the references from today’s episode at yourparentingmojo.com/giftedness.

Jen Lumanlan 59:47

Thanks for joining us for this episode of Your Parenting Mojo. Don’t forget to subscribe to the show your parentingmojo.com to receive new episode notifications and the free guide to 13 reasons your child isn’t listening to you and what to do about each one. And also joined the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. For more respectful research-based ideas to help kids thrive and make parenting easier for you. I’ll see you next time on Your Parenting Mojo.

 

 

References

Adair, J.K., Colegrove, K. S-S., & McManus, M.E. (2017). How the word gap argument negatively impacts young children of Latinx immigrants’ conceptualizations of learning. Harvard Educational Review 87(3), 309-334.

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