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