Raising Bright Sparks: Book 2 -Teaching Gifted Students

By Michele Juratowitch

While teaching a postgraduate course in Gifted Education some years ago, I was struck by responses from a couple of teachers undertaking the course. One teacher announced at the start of the course that she had been teaching for thirty years and had never had a gifted student in her class. It quickly emerged that this teacher’s perception of a gifted student was significantly different to the characteristics and identification of gifted students, as taught within the Gifted Education course. Another teacher, attending the same postgraduate Gifted Education course, was in tears by the first break when she realised the large number of gifted students she had missed identifying throughout her career as a teacher. I felt both responses, from these experienced teachers, were tragic.

Two bi-partisan, Australian Federal Senate Select Committees, held in 1988 and 2001, identified gifted students as the most educationally disadvantaged students in this country. Together with a number of other recommendations, the earlier report included the statement: “The Committee recommends to teacher training institutions that pre-service training courses include sufficient information about gifted children to make student teachers aware of the needs of those children and the special identification techniques and teaching strategies which the student teachers will have to use with the gifted on graduation.”
Despite key recommendations in both Senate Select Committee Reports, the Melbourne Declaration statement about developing gifts and talents and ACARA’s Australian Curriculum Student Diversity statement: “Gifted and talented students are entitled to rigorous, relevant and engaging learning opportunities drawn from the Australian Curriculum and aligned with their individual learning needs, strengths, interests and goals”, there has been very limited teacher exposure to Gifted Education, via pre-service, postgraduate or professional development courses.

I trust this collection of articles will help to inform educators about the characteristics and learning needs of gifted students.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michele Juratowitch
• Release date: Oct 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9780992288228

Michele Juratowitch

Michele Juratowitch is Director of Clearing Skies and supports gifted children, parents, institutions and organisations through a range of services, including counselling and education programs, professional development, project management, consultation, advocacy, research and resource development. Through her work with GERRIC, at UNSW, Michele lectured in postgraduate courses for teachers, delivered and managed programs for parents and students. She was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to study the needs of gifted children. Michele presents at conferences, writes articles regularly, wrote Study: The Simple Facts, co-authored Make a Twist: Differentiating curriculum for gifted students and Releasing the Brakes for High-ability [e-mail]

Book preview

RAISING BRIGHT SPARKS

BOOK 2

Teaching Gifted Students

by

Michele Juratowitch

Published October 2020

Copyright © Michele Juratowitch 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or copied in any form without the written permission of the publisher.

Published by Gredbrook Pty Ltd

Contact Clearing Skies at [e-mail]

http://clearingskies.com.au

ISBN: 978-0-9922882-2-8

Teaching Gifted Students

CONTENTS

Introduction Gifted Education: An issue for us all

The Gifted Child in School

Equality and Equity

Curiosity

Growth Mindset

The Making of Make a Twist

Ignite Learning

Literacy

Pace

Learn Fast; Think Slow

Clustering

Teetering at the Edge

Underachieving Students

Fail Forward!

Courage

Acceleration

Flow

Maths Reasoning

Conscious Competence

Academic Athletes

Academic Courage

Cognitive Benefits of Language Acquisition

Bilingual Brain Benefits

MaximisingBrain Power

Endings and Beginnings

The Battle of Midway

Bloom on the STEM

Lessons for Life

Learning for the Future

Parents as Partners

Lessons

About the Author

References

Introduction Gifted Education: An issue for us all

While teaching a postgraduate course in Gifted Education some years ago, I was struck by responses from a couple of teachers undertaking the course. One teacher announced at the start of the course that she had been teaching for thirty years and had never had a gifted student in her class. It quickly emerged that this teacher’s perception of a gifted student was significantly different to the characteristics and identification of gifted students, as taught within the Gifted Education course. Another teacher, attending the same postgraduate Gifted Education course, was in tears by the first break when she realised the large number of gifted students she had missed identifying throughout her career as a teacher. I felt both responses, from these experienced teachers, were tragic.

Neither of these teachers had undertaken a Gifted Education course during their pre-service Education degrees, so both teachers had entered classrooms without knowledge of the characteristics of gifted students, an understanding of how to identify gifted students nor the requisite professional skills to address gifted students’ intellectual, academic, social and emotional needs. As a result, these teachers – and numerous others – have been unaware of gifted students in their classrooms. Like many others, they had failed to identify and teach gifted students because they had not, during their pre-service tertiary undergraduate studies, been exposed to the knowledge, research findings, academic literature, psychoeducational interventions and pedagogy required to identify, understand, stimulate, teach, engage and extend gifted students.

Parents frequently assume that teachers have a broad knowledge of gifted education, gained during their pre-service studies in Education and further, through school-based professional development; however most teachers have received no exposure to information about gifted students’ needs during their undergraduate or ongoing studies. Some teachers received brief exposure through elective subjects while at university. Relatively few teachers have undertaken postgraduate courses in Gifted Education. Teachers who have undertaken undergraduate or postgraduate courses in Gifted Education tend to be very knowledgeable and passionate about identifying, teaching and supporting gifted students.

Two bi-partisan, Australian Federal Senate Select Committees, held in 1988 and 2001, identified gifted students as the most educationally disadvantaged students in this country. Together with a number of other recommendations, the earlier report included the statement: The Committee recommends to teacher training institutions that pre-service training courses include sufficient information about gifted children to make student teachers aware of the needs of those children and the special identification techniques and teaching strategies which the student teachers will have to use with the gifted on graduation.

Despite key recommendations in both Senate Select Committee Reports, the Melbourne Declaration statement about developing gifts and talents and ACARA’s Australian Curriculum Student Diversity statement: Gifted and talented students are entitled to rigorous, relevant and engaging learning opportunities drawn from the Australian Curriculum and aligned with their individual learning needs, strengths, interests and goals, there has been very limited teacher exposure to Gifted Education, via pre-service, postgraduate or professional development courses.

I trust this collection of articles will help to inform educators about the characteristics and learning needs of gifted students. [back]

The Gifted Child in School

Everyone has relative strengths, but children whose abilities fall within the top ten percent of the population in any area are regarded as ‘gifted’, according to Françoys Gagné, Emeritus Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Montreal. Michael Pyryt, from the University of Calgary, described the difference between strengths and giftedness as similar to weaknesses and handicaps, saying we all have weaknesses but we don’t all have handicaps. Miraca Gross, Emeritus Professor and Director of the Gifted Education Research, Resource and Information Centre (GERRIC), at the University of New South Wales, said: Every child is a gift; every child, irrespective of ability levels has relative strengths and weaknesses; but not every child is gifted. The term ‘gifted’ is a psychological and educational term.

Gagné explains a developmental process is required to transform a child’s natural abilities or ‘gifts’ (when occurring in the top 10% of the population), into systematically developed skills or ‘talents’ (when occurring in the top 10% of the population). A child can be gifted without being talented (because the talents have not yet developed); however an individual cannot be talented without first being gifted. There are a range of factors that impact positively or negatively upon the developmental process. A child may have a natural ability, but if s/he does not enjoy the activity, lacks motivation and does not put in sufficient effort, this ability is unlikely to develop into a talent. Gagné highlights the impact of people, resources, events and opportunities in a child’s life. The development of talent depends on what the family, school, culture and the child contribute.

Parents can consider gifted children as those who are advanced, reaching developmental milestones much earlier than most children of a similar chronological age. To determine if a child