Unexpected Gifts: Discovering and Nurturing the Strengths in Every Child

What strategy has the most potential to transform classroom practices and improve teaching and learning and develop creativity here in the United States and around the ever-increasing “flat world” of today?

That’s a question parents and educators all over the world have been debating over the past few years. If you were to answer this question, which of these strategies would you choose?

1. After-school tutoring – requiring students to receive extra help
2. School choice – allowing parents to transfer their children to a school that has met its annual testing goals
3. School restructuring - hiring a new staff in schools where a certain percentage of students fail over several years to meet test standards in math and reading
4. Professional development for teachers in educational technology – training in the effective integration of technology tools to provide students access and acceleration of the curriculum and active, engaged learning opportunities

Certainly each of these strategies has its merits. The first three represent components of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) “toolkit” here in the United States. However, the last answer, professional development for teachers in educational technology, is included in the provisions of NCLB and might have the most impact on actually bringing about the much needed changes in our educational system here. It also might hold the key to transforming education in general around the world.

In some of our classrooms here and abroad, there is an emphasis on the use of conventional paper and pencil/scripted teaching strategies with a focus on worksheets and yearly testing results. While this traditional and time-honored approach of paper and pencil might work with a limited number of students, it is not the answer for all students. In fact, this approach is often a barrier to both the access to and acceleration of learning for many of our students with learning differences.

Research has shown that for students who are still working on mastering the basic skills and those students who are reading, writing and thinking several grade levels beyond their peers, technology tools can provide both access and acceleration of the curriculum that conventional methods often fail to provide.

These tools represent digital diversity and were described by Grace Rubenstein in her 2006 Edutopia article, “What’s Next: Our Look at the New (School) Year.” She talked about “universally designed technology” that is designed to meet the needs of all students and allow teachers to have the instructional flexibility to focus on student strengths.

I strongly believe, as do many of my colleagues, that helping teachers understand the need for instructional flexibility, provided by the use of digital diversity, is key to improving teaching around the world. It is also essential to improving learning and developing creativity among our students who are communicating, collaborating and competing in a new world, a “flat world,” as Thomas Friedman has written about in his book, The World Is Flat.

If you agree with this need for a focus on professional development in educational technology for teachers, then there is something that you can do. If you live here in the U.S., you can contact the U. S. House Committee on Education and Labor, listed in the blogroll on the right, and let them know what you think so they can incorporate your feedback into changes to NCLB, which is still in committee and up for reauthorization either before or after the 2008 fall election. Tell them that you feel that a continued high-stakes testing focus, a reduction in time spent on science, social studies, P.E. and the arts and the punishment of a growing number of schools for “failing” is not helping our students or our teachers.

Let the Committee on Education and Labor know that all this testing and narrow subject focus is draining the joy and enthusiasm for learning and teaching from our students and our teachers and gradually breaking their connection with each other. Tell the Committee on Education and Labor that it would be wiser to provide an increased focus on needed professional development in educational technology. With this focus, teachers would then be more equipped to transform their classroom practices and create a more playful, relaxed and engaging learning environment that would truly meet the needs of a diverse student population.

If we all speak up and let our voices be heard, I am confident that we can help our schools transform classroom practices to improve teaching and learning. With digital diversity in place and teachers adequately trained to integrate technology tools, our students will be ready to become productive and creative citizens in our “flat world” and have an equal opportunity to compete on a level playing field in a global economy.

Looking for some truly effective teaching strategies for the classroom and at home? I’ve discovered that you don’t have to go far to find a wealth of material. By asking the teacher down the hall, a fellow educator at a conference or one of your carpool parents you will be amazed at what you can learn. Here are two of my own stories that might provide you with some tips on what works in the classroom and at home.

Finding My Instructional (and Parenting) Flexibility
When I decided that all my gifted students should be able to write easily and love writing because they were gifted, I was in for a rude awakening. Every year I was confronted with a few of the gifted students in my class who either had no confidence in their writing abilities or were such perfectionists that they seemed to get stuck during some phase of the writing process. It wasn’t until I allowed my students to give me more direction regarding their writing learning styles and I gave them more writing options that I truly learned the magic of instructional flexibility. Doug Kutner, a noted Portland, Oregon psychologist who specializes in helping gifted children and adolescents, was truly instrumental in providing me with a fundamental basis for the rationale behind the need for flexibility, especially with teaching writing. What he has to say about children and writing will provide useful insights that will be helpful to both teachers and parents: http://dougkutner.com/pub_toc.htm. Thanks to the lessons I learned from listening to the children and the wisdom of the researchers, I found my instructional flexibility and began to better meet the needs of all my students.

Learning How to Cultivate a Playful Environment and Use My Sense of Humor
Life, if you think about it, is sometimes a laughing matter. Our plans, so carefully laid, don’t always turn out the way we hope. Lessons we develop for our classroom don’t always go they way they should. As parents, we don’t always get the cooperation or respect we expect from our children. In all these examples, one thing we can retain and control is our sense of humor. I learned in working with gifted children and their families that having a sense of humor was key to survival as a teacher. Humor reduced my stress level, built relationships with children and parents and developed creativity and problem solving skills in my students. Finding, developing and utilizing my sense of humor came as a result of personal reflection and investigation of some helpful humor resources such as the Humor Project, http://www.humorproject.com/ and Diane Looman’s, http://www.dianaloomans.com/, wonderful book, The Laughing Classroom. Once I tapped into my sense of humor, I was able to transform myself as a teacher and later as a parent and spouse in ways I could never have dreamed possible.

I am confident that each of you reading blog post has a story or two to tell of what works in your classroom or home. Please consider taking the time to share your story so we all can learn from each other. Thank you!:)

Have you ever wondered what is the best way to help your child succeed in school? Do you think that high-stakes testing is really the answer to student success? These are important questions that legislators, educational researchers, parents and teachers alike are asking more frequently these days.

Despite the focus of the NCLB legislation on testing, remediation and addressing the perceived weaknesses of students, more and more practitioners in the field of education are looking for new strategies to help children succeed. These teachers are doing what could be considered a “best practice” in education because it truly works: teaching to student strengths as the answer to promoting learning success and raising achievement test scores.

Teaching through a child’s strengths is actually the best way to help a child improve in all areas of the curriculum, including math and reading. Like all students, twice-exceptional students, those identified as gifted and having a learning difference or difficulty, truly benefit from strength-based instruction. The Twice-Exceptional Dilemma, listed in the blogroll, provides an abundance of resources to help teachers and parents to implement these strength-based strategies

Dr. Thomas Armstrong, author of the 2002 The Multiple Intelligences of Reading and Writing, states in his book that “we need to pay much more attention to the neglected intelligences, especially those such as spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical and naturalist, that may be particular strengths of individuals who have had special difficulties in successfully making their way through our heavily linguistic schools.”

Marcus Buckingham, author of Go Put Your Strengths to Work, points out the dramatic increases in engagement and productivity when individuals in the workplace play to their strengths every day. Such engagement and productivity could be seen in Wilbur and Orville Wright.

According to an article in the most recent EPS catalogue (epsbooks.com), these two talented brothers had a hard time sitting still and concentrating, struggled to keep up with their lessons and were always at work on their inventions. Their mother “encouraged discovery” and their thinking and understanding of mechanics. Their father bought them a toy helicopter and as a result the two brothers decided to build an airplane. Despite their lack of high school education, they both possessed an incredible ability to “visualize a mechanical device, take it apart and put it together, and transfer working parts from other machines – without a single tool.”

This ability to “visualize a mechanical device” certainly isn’t a skill we could test today with NCLB, but it is a skill that has changed the world. So let’s encourage our children and their passions, strengths and gifts because we never know which of their strengths will lead to a pathway of success – just like the Wright brothers – and change our world.

As a classroom teacher, one of the greatest lessons I learned was the importance of utilizing instructional flexibility to ensure that my students had access to or acceleration of the curriculum. This flexibility developed when I realized that I had some fixed assumptions and generalizations in my mind about how students learn and that these assumptions could not be fairly applied to every child and every learning situation.

When I humbly came to the conclusion that it was important that I truly listen very closely to my students and to their parents, a whole new world began to open to me. I began to see that there were so many different ways to approach teaching and learning.

Fortunately, this all came at a time when the instructional strategy of differentiation was being promoted at the private school where I was teaching. By delving deeper into the rationale supporting differentiation, I learned so much that would be beneficial for parents to know and would allow them to play a more active part in their child’s education.

Here are a few tips that will help remove classroom barriers to student learning and will promote educational equity.

1. Understand the uniqueness and potential of your child.
2. Accept the necessity of optimistic and persistent thinking.
3. Employ the power of humor to make a positive difference and connect you to others.
4. Read and absorb the Twice-Exceptional Dilemma if you suspect that your child is both gifted and has learning differences or difficulties.
5. Start talking with your child to find out more about his/her learning styles and interests and communicate this information to his/her teacher and administrators.
6. Read anything by Mel Levine and Thomas Armstrong and learn more about differentiation in the classroom. Be sure to check out All Kinds of Minds on the Blogroll for more on Mel Levine.

I’d love to hear any other ideas that you might have regarding this, so please let me know what additional tips you would offer to parents that would help remove the barriers to learning and promote a true environment of educational equity.