In medicine, we treat the condition, and it would seem absurd to disregard it.
In education, we often disregard the condition of giftedness, and it seems absurd to many to treat it.
Words. Everyone in education will say that we must do everything we can to help the individual student. The difficulty is the difficulty. It is extraordinarily complicated to be flexible when you have a vastly heterogeneous chronological age group, and you are determined to put them in the same instructional program, regardless of their intellectual age, regard1ess of their high or low motivation, regardless of their previous exposure to content, regardless of their interest in material, regardless of their characteristics.
Uniform processing is not the equity required in education. Doctors do not give every patient uniform processing. Each year, a hospital will perform hundreds of appendectomies, but only on patients who need appendectomies. And each appendectomy might require different details. In a different part of the hospital, another specialist will treat patients with respiratory ailments. And in a different wing, doctors will deliver babies.
Educational patients don't get anything so logical. In too many schools, all of the education patients are treated for Algebra I, everyone has their civics removed and each patient gets an Englishotomy.
Depending on their age.
But education should not be about age; it should be about need.
Need. Gifted children should receive professional educational treatment. The educational curricula and practices they receive should be the educational curricula and practices that they need...
Need. Hollingworth did pioneering work showing that in an undifferentiated school setting, moderately gifted children wasted half their time, and highly gifted children wasted almost all their time.
Need. What kinds of instructional differentiation do gifted children need? They need instruction that responds to their extra curiosity, to their urgency for meaning, to their advanced vocabularies, to their interest in complexity, to their fast comprehensions, to their vast memories. Gifted children need choice-- individualized and self-regulating experiences that are appropriate to their self-motivated independence. They need higher-order thinking activities that give their abstract minds a workout. They need Socratic, the energies of their inherent, constant questioning. They need advanced levels of subject matter because they can learn them and short instructions because they will understand them immediately and quick paces through difficult material because they don't need many things repeated. Gifted kids do need research; they don't need many workbooks. They do need a variety of learning experiences; they don't need just more amounts of the problems in the textbook.
Everyone does not need these kinds of differentiation. Gifted kids do. Gifted children need educations that would defeat and obstruct many other students, and other students need educations that stop gifted students, leaving them bored and defeated.
James Gallagher said at this year's NAGC that many schools for the gifted, such as the North Carolina School of Science and Math, could not run the rigorous programs they do if they were required to admit heterogeneous groups of students. Since they can group gifted students together, they can differentiate their programs to the necessary level of rigor.
The language of differentiation, in gifted research, features terms such as choice, rigor, complexity, depth, individualization and faster pace.
These are critical concepts; they are useful in using and constructing models of differentiation, but we must still be careful because any differentiation model will fail if it is teacher-centered. Choice allows students to self-differentiate in ways we cannot begin to predict.
Gifted education is under attack, and if we, who intend to educate gifted children, do not come forward and advocate for their interests, there will be no one else to do so.
In his book The Road Ahead, Bill Gates discusses the coming Information Highway revolution. Gates tells us that the advance elements of the revolution are arriving now, and that the information revolution will transform our lives as much as the invention of printing, the industrial revolution or the scientific revolution. It will change how we work, how we live, how we communicate, how often we travel, how we gather information and what we are able to know. Electronically, it will bring everything everywhere. The planet will become an electronic social hologram.
Do you have any doubt that Gates is either right or so close to right that the difference is meaningless?
That being the case, I am not prepared to abandon the concept of academic giftedness. Certainly multiple abilities and talents combine to make up our humanity, but I want school systems to target academic ability. I want school systems that do not abandon the great Aristotelian disciplines. I want school systems to increase, not decrease, their emphasis on the great subjects of science, mathematics, language, foreign language and history...
One of history's great changes is at hand, and I want school systems that will prepare students for the onrushing world. The United States cannot afford what we saw in the TIMSS Report: for its brightest students to be 31st out of 34 nations in science and math.
Academic intelligence will continue to be central and critical in our efforts to keep pace.
For all of their problems, individual I.Q. tests still provide valuable information about a student's academic ability. While we cannot rely on them exclusively, it makes no sense to abandon them completely.
For all of its limitations, a rigorous education that is soaked in literature, foreign language, mathematics, science, computer science and history is still the most valuable possession a young person can carry into the new millennium.
In education, we often disregard the condition of giftedness, and it seems absurd to many to treat it.
Words. Everyone in education will say that we must do everything we can to help the individual student. The difficulty is the difficulty. It is extraordinarily complicated to be flexible when you have a vastly heterogeneous chronological age group, and you are determined to put them in the same instructional program, regardless of their intellectual age, regard1ess of their high or low motivation, regardless of their previous exposure to content, regardless of their interest in material, regardless of their characteristics.
Uniform processing is not the equity required in education. Doctors do not give every patient uniform processing. Each year, a hospital will perform hundreds of appendectomies, but only on patients who need appendectomies. And each appendectomy might require different details. In a different part of the hospital, another specialist will treat patients with respiratory ailments. And in a different wing, doctors will deliver babies.
Educational patients don't get anything so logical. In too many schools, all of the education patients are treated for Algebra I, everyone has their civics removed and each patient gets an Englishotomy.
Depending on their age.
But education should not be about age; it should be about need.
Need. Gifted children should receive professional educational treatment. The educational curricula and practices they receive should be the educational curricula and practices that they need...
Need. Hollingworth did pioneering work showing that in an undifferentiated school setting, moderately gifted children wasted half their time, and highly gifted children wasted almost all their time.
Need. What kinds of instructional differentiation do gifted children need? They need instruction that responds to their extra curiosity, to their urgency for meaning, to their advanced vocabularies, to their interest in complexity, to their fast comprehensions, to their vast memories. Gifted children need choice-- individualized and self-regulating experiences that are appropriate to their self-motivated independence. They need higher-order thinking activities that give their abstract minds a workout. They need Socratic, the energies of their inherent, constant questioning. They need advanced levels of subject matter because they can learn them and short instructions because they will understand them immediately and quick paces through difficult material because they don't need many things repeated. Gifted kids do need research; they don't need many workbooks. They do need a variety of learning experiences; they don't need just more amounts of the problems in the textbook.
Everyone does not need these kinds of differentiation. Gifted kids do. Gifted children need educations that would defeat and obstruct many other students, and other students need educations that stop gifted students, leaving them bored and defeated.
James Gallagher said at this year's NAGC that many schools for the gifted, such as the North Carolina School of Science and Math, could not run the rigorous programs they do if they were required to admit heterogeneous groups of students. Since they can group gifted students together, they can differentiate their programs to the necessary level of rigor.
The language of differentiation, in gifted research, features terms such as choice, rigor, complexity, depth, individualization and faster pace.
These are critical concepts; they are useful in using and constructing models of differentiation, but we must still be careful because any differentiation model will fail if it is teacher-centered. Choice allows students to self-differentiate in ways we cannot begin to predict.
Gifted education is under attack, and if we, who intend to educate gifted children, do not come forward and advocate for their interests, there will be no one else to do so.
In his book The Road Ahead, Bill Gates discusses the coming Information Highway revolution. Gates tells us that the advance elements of the revolution are arriving now, and that the information revolution will transform our lives as much as the invention of printing, the industrial revolution or the scientific revolution. It will change how we work, how we live, how we communicate, how often we travel, how we gather information and what we are able to know. Electronically, it will bring everything everywhere. The planet will become an electronic social hologram.
Do you have any doubt that Gates is either right or so close to right that the difference is meaningless?
That being the case, I am not prepared to abandon the concept of academic giftedness. Certainly multiple abilities and talents combine to make up our humanity, but I want school systems to target academic ability. I want school systems that do not abandon the great Aristotelian disciplines. I want school systems to increase, not decrease, their emphasis on the great subjects of science, mathematics, language, foreign language and history...
One of history's great changes is at hand, and I want school systems that will prepare students for the onrushing world. The United States cannot afford what we saw in the TIMSS Report: for its brightest students to be 31st out of 34 nations in science and math.
Academic intelligence will continue to be central and critical in our efforts to keep pace.
For all of their problems, individual I.Q. tests still provide valuable information about a student's academic ability. While we cannot rely on them exclusively, it makes no sense to abandon them completely.
For all of its limitations, a rigorous education that is soaked in literature, foreign language, mathematics, science, computer science and history is still the most valuable possession a young person can carry into the new millennium.