Friday, June 05, 2009

Good article about giftedness in freebie magazine

If you are an Australian parent you may be familiar with the free colour magazine that goes by different names according to which city you live in: Sydney's Child, Melbourne's Child, Perth's Child etc. It's pretty good for a freebie. I don't have a lot of time for the personal stories in the magazine written by Mums and (less often) Dads, describing at length their emotional reactions to various family events and parenting dilemmas (yawn), but occasionally I've found some authoritative articles that are informative, and the recent debate about the diagnosis of Asperger syndrome in children in the letters pages has been somewhat interesting, but hardly revolutionary. This month I was particularly impressed with the piece in the June 2009 edition by Dr Kerry Hodge titled The intellect effect. It's not that I learned anything new from this article - I've already been through the drama of having a gifted child who's giftedness was identified and accommodated much too late in the child's education. I was impressed by the article because if the educators involved in our situation had read and taken on board the information in Dr Hodge's article before we had come into their lives, the whole sorry episode might not have been as painful for all involved.

Kerry Hodge is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Children and Families Research Centre at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. I've had dealings with some other academics working in other parts of Macquarie University, and I've been quite impressed.

Dr Hodge wrote that "...few teacher-preparation courses include input on gifted education...". This is a scandalous situation! If you are a teacher or a school principal who in not a "full bottle" on giftedness, or a parent who suspects that their child might be "at risk" of being intellectually gifted or possessing special talents, then I do recommend that you have a read of this article. The federal government has made available a professional development package on 2 CDs about identifying giftedness and differentiating the curriculum, which has been distributed to every school in Australia, and it can also be downloaded from the web site of the (federal) Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations.

I do have one major concern about the effectiveness of with this package and the ideas behind it. I doubt that any teacher on their own can implement any effective educational programme for gifted students. The idea that every student within a wide range of different ability levels in a classroom can be working at their own pace on individualized educational programmes simply doesn't work in real life - I speak from experience. It is a brute fact of life that neither gifted child students nor their teachers have the time nor the inclination to construct a complete individualized educational curriculum, and then study it or teach it. Sorry, life is just too short! Some gifted students are very self-directed and educationally independent, but certainly not all are like this. Kids generally go to school to be taught, not guided, and intellectually gifted kids are smart enough to realize that they are being exploited when they are used as free tutors for their less gifted age peers. It is a socialists' dream that a child with FAS, ADHD, violent tendencies and no breakfast in his stomach should be educated in the same classroom as a child who had all the luck when God was handing out brains, with the help of IEPs, flexible educational programmes and elaborate disciplinary policies, but it is sadly nothing more than a fantasy. Both children are neglected (or remain neglected) under this type of regime, and will eventually develop behavioural or mental health issues, and harmful attitudes toward the self or others. Pull-out programmes for gifted students have their place, but are more of a band-aid than a solution. It is an unavoidable fact that the two most effective ways to provide an appropriate education to gifted students are acceleration and sorting the whole school into classes for individual subjects according to levels of ability and achievement. A lone progressive teacher cannot bring in these policies - principals need to approve or create these solutions. Dream on, dreamers.

Gifted Education Professional Development Package (downloadable)
Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations
http://www.dest.gov.au/sectors/school_education/publications_resources/profiles/gifted_education_professional_development_package.htm


Vulnerability of young gifted children

(interesting article by Dr Kerry Hodge listing indicators of giftedness in young children, possible indicators and also non-indicators, and child and family characteristics that can mask giftedness)
http://www.togetherwegrow.com.au/speakernotes/SessionC3.pdf

Web Child
http://www.webchild.com.au/

Children and Families Research Centre, Macquarie University
http://www.iec.mq.edu.au/cfrc.aspx



2 comments:

witsy said...

I also enjoyed the article. I am currently working out the best approach for my daughter who is in reception and clearly (to me) gifted. I've tried talking to the teachers, but as an inexperienced school mum, I'm not sure how far to go with it all. Do I leave it be and see how things go, or do I push to find a better way for her to fit in the class or get her evaluated by a proffessional? It sounds like it was left too late in your situation and this was a bad thing?

Lili Marlene said...

For privacy reasons, I'm not keen to give too many details about our experiences. The way that government primary schools in Australia identify and educate gifted students varies from state to state, from city to country, from district to district and from one time to another. With all of this variation, obviously not every school is offering the optimal educational interventions for gifted kids. It often appears that they are making it up as they go along! Our kids have been given the standard regime with regards to testing for giftedness, age of testing and type of educational programme offered, for the time and place in which they were. This was inadequate for one of our kids, and this was partly the result of the general mediocrity of the local school. With high staff turnover in the school teaching profession, a good school can revert to mediocre over the summer holidays, so beware! My best advice is to listen to your child, and get your child into the best school that you can find or afford. I wouldn't expect that an evaluation from a psychologist would change the attitude of any teacher or principal who has previously been uninterested in your child's needs, but you may wish to get it done for your own info. I'd advise to check to see what giftedness screening testing your local school system does automatically before paying to get it done yourself, and I'd take a close interest in all of the testing, evaluations and reports that you normally get from teachers. Our local schools appear to have an obsession with checking the reading ages/levels of students, and this info is available for free by speaking with the teacher.