Unexpected Gifts: Discovering and Nurturing the Strengths in Every Child

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.

Friday, January 25th, our daughter, Katie, turned 26. Happy Birthday, Katie! As we were talking on Friday, she commented on how she has always loved her birthday because it’s been our family tradition of making each person’s birthday a day of recognition and celebration, complete with cake and candles, a specially prepared dinner and presents to open.

Knowing how much each of us enjoy the recognition and celebration of our birthday has helped me realize the importance and power of celebrating, every day, the strengths and gifts of each child as we accept and celebrate their differences. Here are just a few of my reasons to accept and celebrate every child’s learning differences:

1. Accepting and celebrating differences respects and honors the individual learner. It demonstrates an important understanding that all children learn differently and benefit enormously when teachers differentiate the instruction to provide access to and acceleration of the curriculum to meet the diversity of student needs.

To read more about all the different ways our brains are wired and why we all learn differently, check out Mel Levine’s website, All Kinds of Minds. It’s listed my Blogroll. You’ll also want to read his phenomenally helpful book, A Mind At a Time.

If you want to learn more about differentiation, click on the link in the Blogroll.

2. Accepting and celebrating differences is an acknowledgement of the truth that not all students learn best from a logical-mathematical perspective. This limited logical-mathematical perspective is one of the main criticisms of the high stakes testing children are subjected to these days. If we truly want to leave no child behind, we are going to have to honor all the ways children best demonstrate what they have learned.

Howard Gardner, in Frames of Mind, identified the theory of multiple intelligences over 25 years ago and paved the way to accept learning differences. You can read about Gardner and his theory of multiple intelligences by checking on the link in the Blogroll

3. Accepting and celebrating differences in our children is really all about affirming and loving our children as unique individuals who all have strengths and gifts.

Just as we celebrate our child on his or her birthday, now is the time to truly accept and celebrate the differences in all of our children and expect our child’s teachers to do the same in the classroom.

What are your reasons for accepting and celebrating your child’s differences? I’d like to hear from you!

Late this summer, my husband and I had a chance to visit Alaska and fell in love with this unique state where at times you have a feeling that you’ve stepped into another country. One of our favorite side trips during our two-week stay was a visit to a coastal temperate rainforest, one of the few left in the world (http://www.akrain.org/).

As we hiked along the trail, we were amazed at the diversity of the plants, insects and animals. Thanks to our knowledgeable and witty guide, we truly gained an appreciation of how every plant and animal plays a vital role in the life of the mystical and incredibly lush green rainforest we visited.

It is this same appreciation for the diversity of our learners in our homes and classrooms that Thomas Armstrong, a psychologist and author, www.thomasarmstrong.com, has written about in many of his books and articles. In one of his articles posted on New Horizons for Learning, www.newhorizons.org, Armstrong talks about the concept of neurodiversity, a concept that states that “atypical neurological wiring is part of the normal spectrum of human differences and is to be tolerated and respected like any other human difference such as race, gender, sexual preference, or cultural background:”
http://www.newhorizons.org/spneeds/inclusion/information/armstrong.htm.

Certainly all of us have been educated to be more sensitive to the outward signs of diversity all around us in our community, schools and workplace. Yet, it is only when we recognize that diversity in learners is so much broader and deeper than traditional differences that we will be able to effectively help our children and students reach their true learning potential.

Without a doubt, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has received both support for its noble core goal of helping struggling students to improve and criticism for the realities of its implementation, narrow focus on basic skills testing and punitive labeling as failing for a growing number of schools across America.

While most of us in education will agree that the overall intentions of NCLB are admirable, it’s impossible to pick up the newspaper or any educational journal or publication without getting a sense of the growing frustration of teachers, administrators and parents. Time and time again I hear stories of the gradual transformation of classrooms as former environments of joyous learning into testing preparation centers with little time for creative expression, critical thinking opportunities, social studies or the integration of the arts.

Yet thanks to the Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development’s (ASCD) recent focus on the whole child, http://www.wholechildeducation.org/ , the current emphasis on high stakes testing is beginning to be put into proper perspective.

According to The Report of the Commission of the Whole Child, “Current educational practice and policy focus overwhelmingly on academic achievement. This achievement, however, is but one element of student learning and development and only a part of any complete system of educational accountability.” The report describes a whole child as:

o Intellectually active
o Physically, verbally, socially, and academically competent
o Empathetic, kind, caring and fair
o Creative and curious
o Disciplined, self-directed, and goal oriented
o Free
o A critical thinker
o Confident
o Cared for and valued

Included in the report is a call for entire communities to get involved as partners with our educational system so that schools can truly access all the resources that are available that will allow them “to become powerful agents for change in the lives of their students and families.”

If you believe that this focus on the whole child is truly a better way to ensure that we leave no child behind, I urge you to let your legislators and our presidential candidates all know what you think. Our children’s future is clearly at stake. You can make a difference if you add your voice of support to the ASCD’s whole child initiative. Please encourage other parents and educators to join in and do the same.

Welcome to 2008 and to a new name for this blog, originally named in April of 2007 as Gifted and Twice Exceptional Matters. The focus of this original blog has also broadened to include more families around the world whose children have strengths and gifts yet to be identified.

Making these changes seemed like a great way to start off 2008. Yet I know the best way to navigate 2008 is by setting some New Year’s Resolutions - so I thought I’d share my own Top Ten Resolutions for 2008 with you:

1. Focus on the whole child.
2. Create an awareness of the diversity of all students, including gifted and 2e.
3. Celebrate and accept the differences present in every learner.
4. Remove the barriers that block student learning and educational equity.
5. Help turn the strengths of every child into pathways of success.
6. Share stories of effective teaching strategies for the classroom and for the home.
7. Promote the use of technology for access and acceleration of the curriculum.
8. Encourage parents in their role as their child’s first and most important teacher.
9. Increase collaboration and networking among advocates of all children.
10. Use my voice to make a difference in the lives of children.

I will admit that this is a rather ambitious list. You might even have a few more resolutions for me to consider that might be on your Top Ten New Year’s Resolutions list. So I definitely hope you’ll share those with me, along with your suggestions, comments and feedback. Thank you and Happy New Year!

Welcome to my EduBlog, Gifted and Twice-Exceptional Matters!  My name is Cathy Risberg and I am an educational consultant and advocate for gifted and twice-exceptional children and their families and can be reached at mindsthatsoar.com. In addition, I am a member of the Illinois Association for Gifted Children (IAGC) Underserved Populations Committee.

The purpose of this blog is to help create a network of concerned parents, teachers and school administrators who are interested in protecting and strengthening gifted education programs in Chicago, across the state of Illinois, across our nation and around the world. By joining together, we can make a positive difference for all gifted learners in our public and private school systems. These gifted learners include those who are twice-exceptional (2e), students who are gifted and have learning differences, such as dyslexia, ADD and autism.

This first posting of this blog is dedicated to the gifted students in Chicago, Illinois, especially to the parents and students from Pulaski Fine Arts Academy, Orozco Community Academy and Greeley Elementary. I met these parents and students this past Wednesday, April 18, 2007, when we rode a bus together to Springfield to celebrate the second annual “Please Don’t Leave Our Gifted Child Behind Day.” 

Two other buses filled with parents and gifted students from Beasley Elementary and Lenart Regional Gifted Center in Chicago were also part of our group. Upon our arrival in Springfield, we joined over 500 other parents, students, educators and gifted advocates from all over the state who came to talk to their legislators about reinstating gifted funding in Illinois, funding totally eliminated by the Governor’s office in 2003. Since 2003, with all the focus on NCLB testing and a lack of gifted funding by the state, gifted education in Chicago and across the state has been truly compromised through local programming cuts and under-identification of our gifted students.

This has especially been a problem for our underserved populations: Latino and African-American, English language learners and our twice-exceptional students. It is vitally important that we protect and strengthen existing gifted programs to guarantee that these underserved gifted students have an equal educational opportunity. Just as NCLB focuses on the needs of our struggling learners, we cannot lose sight of the importance of focusing on the unique needs of all of our gifted and twice-exceptional students. We cannot afford to deny these students the programs and services that they need to reach their potential as learners. 

To ignore the needs of learners who are struggling or those who are gifted and twice-exceptional would only serve to undermine the goal of providing what’s best for all children.It is this desire to do what’s best for all children in Chicago that was evident in a recent comment made by Chicago Public Schools’ CEO, Arne Duncan.  He stated that he wanted Chicago to be ”the best big city school system in America.” If this is his goal, then adequately funding gifted education programs and maintaining existing gifted programs is essential for this goal is to be reached.

That is why I was so unable to understand a recent announcement to be discussed at Wednesday, April 25th Board of Education meeting. The announcement was that testing for the 2007-2008 third grade gifted program at Greeley Elementary and the first grade gifted programs at Pulaski Fine Arts Academy and Orozco Community Academy has resulted in the identification of either too few or no gifted students to permit the gifted program in those grades to continue in the fall. 

Yet, it is so important that this gifted program, which was successfully designed and implemented for 16 years, be allowed to continue to serve and meet the needs of the gifted Latino students and English learners, who certainly have not suddenly disappeared this year. Parents of students in these schools are being urged to contact their local schools for information so that they can attend the board meeting to make their voices be heard.

It is essential that the successful program of identifying gifted Latino and English learners continue to serve these students.  This can be accomplished by the use of testing and identification tools properly administered and interpreted so that gifted students from diverse populations in all grades are correctly identified. 

Given their public support of building a great school system in Chicago, both Mayor Daley and Arne Duncan, Chief Executive Officer of the Chicago Public Schools, would be interested in knowing how parents feel about this change in gifted programming and what it means to their children and to the future of education in Chicago, so please make your voices be heard by contacting Mayor Daley’s office or Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan’s office. Also, please contact your state legislator.

As educators and parents, we certainly can all agree on this:  If Chicago is to maintain its image as a world class city that embraces and celebrates its diverse community, a city “that works” and a city worthy of hosting the 2016 Olympics, it cannot afford to neglect and undermine the current successful programs that meet the needs of its gifted and twice-exceptional students, especially those programs that presently serve its Latino, African-American and English learner populations.

Thanks for joining me at my EduBlog, Gifted and Twice-Exceptional Matters. I look forward to hearing your perspective and opinions on protecting and strengthening gifted programming in Chicago and across the state. To learn more about the gifted and twice-exceptional education and resources, please visit http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/ For a wonderful newsletter with information on twice-exceptional children, visit www.2enewsletter.org/