I’ve just got back from a select committee up in Marton. Apologies for not having yet read posts from this morning’s blog. Instead I have started going through Heather Roy’s ‘Step Change’ report in a bit of depth.
There are quite a few points to be made, but I’ll make them in separate blogs for risk of overkill in one post.
The report is a bit misleading around the identification of the top 5% of kids who the report says are gifted and talented.
The top 5% of kids are not necessarily gifted and talented – they may just be very bright.
I had a bit to do with setting up a school for gifted and talented kids in Kaitaia in 2000 when I worked for the Ministry of Education.
The children accepted into this school were assessed in areas that schools simply did not assess. Asttle certainly doesn’t assess for G&T, nor does NCEA.
It cost about $400 (at the time) to get them assessed by a specialist group in Auckland.
Gifted and talented kids did not usually fall into the top 5%, instead they normally fell in with bunch.
I remember some G&T kids not being able to write more than a couple of sentences in script that was barely decipherable, but their ability to concentrate on a single task like building the Eiffel Tower (for example) out of matchsticks was amazing.
They may have the ability to fixate on single complex tasks for hours on end, often at the expense of eating, sleeping and interacting with others, then once having completed the task losing complete interest in it.
Ask a bright kid what they would do if they were President of the World for a day and they may say they’d choose to go to Disneyland with twenty friends and eat ice cream. Ask the same question of a G&T kid and they’d probably say they’d like to settle the Palestinian/ Israeli conflict, design earthquake proof homes to rebuild Haiti, and negotiate a peaceful withdrawal of American and allied troops from Iraq.
G&T kids may get in trouble in class because they understand concepts immediately but get bored because they have to wait while lessons are repeated over for others.
Often they don’t do work, get caught staring out the window or antagonising other kids who they know they can manipulate. Chances are teachers think they are trouble makers or lazy or both.
Not all G&T kids behave like this, but it is wrong to suggest that the top 5% of achievers are G&T. It shows a lack of understanding of the G&T issue by the authors of the report.
Many teachers don’t have the skills to recognise the gifted kids in their midst.
Sending them off to another school that is perceived to be a ‘good’ school may not make a difference to G&T kids if the teacher they are put in front of is unable to recognize a G&T child and how to address their needs.
The best way to cater for the needs of G&T kids is to provide professional development for teachers to be able to identify them, assist schools to pay for the assessment to determine exactly where their gift or talent lies and then provide teachers with the professional development to cater for those specific needs.
I’ve said it before that the way to raise achievement is to invest in teachers.
“I’ve said it before that the way to raise achievement is to invest in teachers”
But we are told that 30% of all teachers are bad teachers, if this is the case they still wont be able to spot G & T students.
This report isnt realy about teh top 5% or the bottom 20%, and why would it not be open to all students.
This report is about taking a step to making education in NZ more privately run.
Thanks Kelvin for backing the need for professional learning and support for teachers! I agree 100% with your assertion that professional development is the way forward, but sadly we saw the axing of our advisers in gifted and talented with Vote Education 2009. I am pleased that this report does acknowledge gifted and talented children and young people, but I am concerned about issues related to being able to make informed choices and equity of access – and of course support for teachers!
@Waterboy agreed.
Kelvin you raise some good practical points, and it’s a relief to see someone pointing out the very significant difference there can be between the high achiever and the gifted child. I too have some considerable unease as I read through this document. As the person responsible for the first nine years of the One Day School programme which catered for hundreds of gifted kids throughout New Zealand, I’m obviously in favour of “choice” when it means recognising that different kids have different needs and providing the opportunity for those needs to be met, and to do this we do indeed need to be flexible, innovative, and concerned about quality and accountability. But good innovation needs good information and good logistical planning, and these are not clearly evident here. My concerns are:
[1] References to gifted children are in fact few and rather vague, except for quoted statistics from the ERO report.
[2] The document consistently contrasts gifted students with underachieving students in the bottom 20%. There seems to be no recognition that many if not most gifted students are also significantly underachieving.
[3] Goals for gifted students, by implication, seem to be related solely to “success” or “progress” measured by age-based assessments, standards, competitions or examinations. Identification seems to be similarly based. Where is the provision for creative minds, the innovative and lateral thinkers for whom success and progress cannot always be so tidily defined? How does this approach provide for underachieving gifted students who are not performing at a gifted level, for twice-exceptional gifted students, for Maori gifted students and Maori perceptions of giftedness, for Pasifika gifted students and their perceptions of giftedness?
– Maori and Pasifika students are mentioned only in the context of school failure, and while that is a very real concern, I suggest that issue cannot be resolved until society recognises that students from these cultures are just as likely to have exceptional ability as are students from Pakeha or Asian cultural backgrounds.
[4] There is no recognition anywhere in this document that provision for gifted children entails anything other than attention to performance outcomes. How about social-emotional needs? Many of these children suffer significantly emotionally and socially from the insensitive reactions of others. Creating better and more sympathetic understanding has to be a component of provision for gifted children.
[5] Even more scarily, there seems to be an underlying assumption that gifted students all come from families able to afford the travelling from one venue to another that this document implies – the tragic myth that gifted students are confined to one sector of society. There is no recognition of the practical dimensions of this policy for families with limited incomes. What we’re seeing here is choice for the few UNLESS funding provides for such practical dimensions of accessing the supposed choices, and it does not.
[6] There are a number of practical considerations. I certainly have met some gifted five-year-olds who could tell a learning broker exactly what they felt they should be learning about, but on the whole that’s a big ask – or is the implication that provision for gifted students has to wait until they are high school age? This certainly seems a possible and worrying interpretation of this document. What about very basic things like moving between schools which both (or all) require uniform? How about tracking attendance? How about managing time lost in moving between different premises? What about families who have more than one child needing special provision? I am not saying that issues like these cannot be resolved (we faced some of them in One Day School), but they do need to be acknowledged and thought through.
[7] While it is fine that the document promises funding for “special factors”, I note that it proposes to provide this funding by “re-distribution” of existing funds. The question schools and parents should urgently be asking is about what will have to be cut to create this re-distribution. The question those concerned with gifted children should be asking is about what this will do to sympathy for the cause of gifted students.
There is an interesting article by Brian Easton in next week’s Listener commenting on the failure to think through the possible implications of changes in building regulations which led to the immense financial disaster of the leaky-house syndrome. We can’t fix kids as easily as we can fix houses – and look at the trouble we’re having with that. By all means let’s gratefully acknowledge the fact that the Step-Change document does recognise gifted students as genuinely needing specific appropriate support, but let’s also ensure that what we set in place is thoroughly thought-through, practical and feasible. And yes, that does mean a focus on profesional development as an integral part of achieving this change!
Ouch! please correct the typo in the last line of my post – I do know that “professional” has two “s’s”!
I wholeheartedly support Kelvin’s concerns, and those expressed by Tracy and Rosemary, and would like to add a few comments as someone who has been actively involved in special education and gifted education for many years;
1) Research has shown that comprehensive professional development support for teachers had been provided for those schools considered to be catering appropriately for gifted and talented students, and yet the advisory service was axed.
2) The report states that performance of all students involved in this programme will be monitored and assessed (presumably against national norms). How can this make sense for gifted children who may already be achieving at the ceiling level of the assessments against which they are measured? Many gifted children reach assessment ceilings with ease but are not reaching their own personal potential and may not be thriving (in terms of their holistic development) in an environment where their social/emotional needs are not taken into account first and foremost.
3) My particular area of interest is in gifted children who experience serious difficulties with aspects of learning and, as stated previously by Kelvin and Rosemary, are highly unlikely to be identified using the ‘top 5%’ method. Yet these children remain amongst the most underserved in our school population; they are certainly not achieving their personal potential.
4) I am committed to students receiving an education that allows them to thrive and also recognise the sound advice provided by researchers such as Russell Bishop, John Hattie and Helen Timperley, but teachers ARE currently implementing many of their recommendations and require time and support to consolidate their own learning before the effects are likely to be experienced by the children they teach.
5) I also take exception in the report to the implication that the ‘top teachers’ are overseas. I know many very competent teachers who are currently overseas, but there are many more top teachers who have demonstrated both high levels of competence and commitment to New Zealand children, and choose to remain here.
I am strongly supportive of continually striving to improve learning opportunities for children and acknowledge that we need to adopt more flexible conditions for learning but bringing in the ‘voucher system by another name’ is not going to achieve this.
Kelvin, I am so relieved to learn that someone in the House recognises and understands that many of our gifted children will not be in that ‘top 5%’ if standardised school assessment measures are the only way of identifying who they are. In my years as a gifted education specialist teacher, I have taught many exceptionally intelligent, creative, articulate children who were not top achievers academically but thrived in whole day grouping with other gifted children and achieved high-level learning which would not have been valued in their regular classrooms – because their areas of giftedness were not in the standard curriculum areas. Providing access to wider opportunities for these children is essential, but I doubt that they would be the ones who would ‘qualify’ for what is proposed here.
Rosemary has raised salient issues in her post, so I will not repeat these, save to say that I agree with every one of them. I cannot fathom the lack of thought which went into the implications of axing the advisors and support for excellent PD provided by such organisations as the Gifted Kids Programme.
On a personal note, when my own children were of the age to be attending a gifted one-day programme, it would have been wonderful to (a) have their need to do so recognised by their school without barriers being thrown up, and (b) to have had the cost met by the State. My children received 80% of their primary education from the State and I had to fund the other 20%, despite paying 100% of the school ‘donation’ and my taxes. That is not equity!
I hate to tell you this but your latest post doesn’t open.
Kelvin and Rosemary and others: Well said. Thankyou on behalf of all those G&T kids and those teachers who manage to cater for those intriguing and challenging kids. (By the way its a pity that children seldom ask questions in the classroom. Encouraged to do so, and they display breathtaking thoughts.)
Great post. Especially the part about gifted people not just being the top 5% of the class. The point of giftedness is that your especially good at one thing, but at the cost of being especially bad at another.
They shouldn’t even call it Giftedness really, it should just be called having imbalanced or spread out talents, either that or having a high probability of not being detected at a young age and being subject to 10 years of an excruciating feeling of boredom and waste of time in school.
I don’t even feel like an arrogant snob when I say that I’m gifted anymore, I didn’t find out until I was 16 and it has sucked, it means I can wag and talk and not listen to the teacher in school and pass with merits and excellences in social sciences by wagging a few days to study at the end of the year, but fail at maths no matter how hard I try, and be incredibly bored and resentful of my teachers every single damn day of my life.
Finding these gifted children will save young people more crap than you can imagine. You can find them by finding the kid who causes the most $h!t in school whilst still passing. But that just sounds like arrogance doesn’t it? Maybe that’s why every single one of my teachers have hated me with a passion. And my friends who I hold closest who have gone through simular crap.
Basically what I’m trying to say is… Find these damn children because they are in for a very unpleasant time if they are not found. And the worst part of it all is when they try and explain why they don’t try in class they can’t because they don’t know what it is about their minds that is different and it really really hurts.
Dylan, you’re not arrogant. You are recognising a fact, as true for you as the colour of your eyes and equally beyond anything you could personally choose. All of us working in this field struggle with exactly this issue. It took me years and years to say out loud that I had two gifted children – it really did feel like “coming out of the closet” – and I was teaching in that field. In our society it’s okay to acknowledge you’re gifted with your feet (eg in rugby) but not with your head. We seem to have got that the wrong way round! But beyond that, I would endorse your comment about the suffering that many gifted learners experience at school. I’ve seen so many children who were utterly miserable, day in, day out, from little ones who had no chance at all of explaining to other children or to a teacher how they felt, through to older ones who were in a very dark place indeed because of the treatment they’d received at school – and all because they had such an intense capacity to feel and imagine and think. Kelvin Davis who started this blog for us wrote in a recent opinion piece that “School should be the best adventure in town”. A wonderful quote, striking at something very fundamental – and very absent for too many gifted young people. If we’re to change that, not only do we need the Minister to listen, we need young people to give her something honest and real to listen to, as you have done.