Gifted centers vs. in-school enrichment

A good gifted program does many things, but here are two key parts: First, children are challenged to the extent of their abilities. Second, they're surrounded by intellectual peers who help their learning along.

To try to achieve that, Pinellas County in Florida has been busing students at elementary schools with no gifted services to gifted centers one day a week. This allows the district to concentrate such students. The problem, though, according to this article from the Tampa Bay Times, is that busing eats up quite a bit of instructional time.

So under a new program, all elementary schools will now offer gifted programming, part or full time. The district is investing close to $1 million in these new services (though saving some cash on transportation costs).

I've been pondering these alternate set-ups, and have a few thoughts.

First, I'm happy to see any district spending more money on gifted education -- certainly not the usual course of events these days.

I also think that one day a week at a gifted center doesn't really constitute an ideal set-up. While that one day will certainly serve a social function of bringing gifted kids together (no small thing, really), doing something special one day a week isn't really about challenging kids if they're in their regular classes the rest of the time. In this sense, full-time (or even part-time if it's more than 3-4 hours/week) instruction in a home school would be better.

But on the other hand, why the interest in having home schools? In an ideal world, perhaps Pinellas County's 11 gifted centers could have become full GT schools. Kids could be bused straight there in the morning 5 days a week, rather than their home schools. That would solve the problem of missing instructional time.

The fear is always that a school will hire a gifted coordinator, but then somehow only wind up with a small number of students in the gifted class. When resources become tight, people will wonder why a teacher is teaching 10 kids instead of 27. The program will be disbanded, and the gifted coordinator sent around to offer "in class enrichment" or pull-outs to those 10 kids, plus 10 kids at 3 other schools. And we'll be back down under the 3 hours kids were getting at the gifted centers. Minus the chance to learn in an environment with their intellectual peers.

What would you see as an ideal set-up if a district was trying to create a good gifted program?

Getting kids to practice

I give a fair number of speeches these days. But even though I have given the same speech many, many times, I always practice beforehand. I've realized that part of being a polished public speaker is knowing your material so well that you can use your extra brain power to read the audience, riff off things they say, move faster through material if you see their attention lagging, etc. This makes getting up in front of a big group of people a fairly easy thing to do. And that makes speaking a lot more fun.

I also know that practicing is a discipline I've come to somewhat later in life. I played the piano for years, but I never really wanted to devote large amounts of time to practice. I run, but I'm still not into doing the drills I know would make me faster. I do writing drills of sorts -- kind of what I consider my other blog -- and I can see my first drafts getting faster over time. So I know it works. I also know it's hard to embrace.

And so I've been trying to figure out how to convey this idea to my son (who just turned 6 last week). We aren't doing any sports or music right now that would require a practice schedule. But his kindergarten class is putting on a play. He has a few lines and a song he sings by himself. He seems to like some of the other songs in the play much better. And so he'll practice the other songs a lot. But not the one he personally has to sing.

I dislike nagging, or going all Tiger Mother on the concept of practice, so I've tried to just matter-of-factly say "Ok, we're going to run through your song once now and then once more after dinner." But he's resistant. Yesterday, I tried to explain exactly why we practice something like this. He may not like the song, but in two days, he'll be up on a stage and he'll need to sing it. And he'll feel much better being up there if he knows the words well enough that he can have a little fun. Things feel different on stage. Even if you vaguely know something in a practice situation, you have to really know it to not have being on stage affect you.

Or, then again, maybe this will just be a good learning experience about why practicing matters.

Do your kids practice music, sports, or other such things? Do they want to? If so, how do you go about encouraging this?

Changing a name

The Davidson Institute sends me a list of gifted-related headlines each week. This past week, a short article from Davis, CA announced that the school board had voted to change the name of the gifted program from "Gifted and Talented Education" (GATE -- a common acronym) to an "Alternative Instruction Model."

When I hear such news, I'm struck by two things, which point in different directions.

On one hand, I generally suspect that few school boards are excited about the concept of gifted education. Indeed (if I'm reading the story right), the Davis board seems to be moving away from self-contained gifted classes, and to in-class enrichment. This is a problem. It basically means watering down gifted education and depriving gifted children of the opportunity to be challenged with their intellectual peers.

On the other hand, I don't dislike the idea of calling gifted education something else. The "gifted" label can become a bit of a lightning rod, which is one reason that school boards like getting rid of gifted education. It seems to satisfy some false egalitarian urge, as opposed to being what it really is (choosing to under-invest in part of their student population). An "alternative instruction model" is, in reality, what gifted education is. Some children's needs cannot be met in a regular classroom. They need alternative instruction, just as children with other special needs do. Calling gifted education something more neutral could turn the whole discussion from something political to something more practical. Here's what we do to help some children learn best. Here's what we do to help other children learn best.

What do you think of alternative names for gifted education?

AP classes: helpful or not?

The Washington Post picks up on a new report challenging various assumptions about Advanced Placement courses -- college-level courses taught in high schools. The College Board holds national AP exams that young people can take to show they've mastered this material (and potentially place into more advanced courses in college).

The report claims that while students who take AP classes are more likely to go to and do well in college, this may be a correlation vs. causation issue. Obviously, the kinds of kids who are interested in earning college credit, and taking challenging classes, likely have their sights set on higher education anyway. That's worth keeping in mind, since expanding AP offerings is often suggested as a way to increase the proportion of college-ready students graduating from high school. The report also frets that since AP classes are smaller, and tend to be taught by top teachers, they siphon resources away from the rest of the school.

I certainly don't think AP classes are perfect. I took a great number of them in high school. My take away, as with so much of education, is that the teacher matters. I am the same person, with the same study habits, and while I got 5s (the top score) in BC calculus, chemistry, and biology, I got a 2 in physics. I am not holding myself blameless, of course. A more motivated student might have studied hard enough to do well regardless of how the class was taught. But I do feel the others did a better job of presenting the material and checking for understanding.

My problem with this analysis, though, questioning the efficacy of AP classes, is that this is one of the few nationally benchmarked ways we have of aiming for high standards and challenging classes in high school. If a certain teacher produces mostly 2s on an AP exam, and another produces lots of 4s and 5s, you have a pretty good indication of which is covering the subject better (you can argue that the AP exams don't really show knowledge, but given how many colleges do accept the scores, I think there's something to what they show). There is little accountability in much of education, and the AP exam at least creates that. Passing such a class -- perhaps early in high school -- might also give a gifted young person a credential for taking college classes. Early college is another good way that kids can be challenged.

As for siphoning off resources, well, this is the same argument that gets hashed out about gifted education in general. Some educators really do not think that high achieving kids should be a priority. As it is, in the NCLB era, gifted kids have become much less a priority than those who, with a push, might achieve grade level standards. AP classes are at least something of a bone tossed to high achievers in high school. It would be a shame to take them away too.

In other news: President Obama recently hosted the third annual White House science fair. You can read about some of the projects here.

And in personal news, my 5-year-old just won first prize in a local poetry contest for younger students. I am so proud! He's telling me he wants to be an author and an illustrator.

Bill Gates on curious kids

Fast Company's Anya Kamenetz interviewed Bill Gates for the most recent issue of the magazine. In it, Gates touches on ideas for boosting teacher skills, MOOCs, and the like.

But I thought Gifted Exchange readers might find this part most interesting. Kamenetz posed this question: "You've said that when you were in high school, you followed your own interests, taking on independent study, working on computer programming day and night. Is there room for that kind of student-driven learning in a highly rigorous, metrics-based environment?"

Gates answered that "People who are as curious as I am will be fine in any system. For the self-motivated student, these are the golden days. I wish I was growing up now. I envy my son. If he and I are talking about something that we don't understand, we just watch videos and click on articles, and that feeds our discussion. Unfortunately, the highly curious student is a small percentage of the kids."

What do you think of this? Will the brilliant and curious do well under any system? Are these the golden days for self-motivated students?

On one hand, there certainly are a lot of resources now, available online for anyone. If you're interested in learning advanced math, nothing is stopping you from watching Khan Academy for hours. My 5-year-old son is really into maps right now, and he's been studying Google maps, sometimes announcing how many miles it is between two random destinations, and exactly how long that will take by car, mass transit, or foot.

But I'm not sure that schooling is in a golden age for the curious. As Gates points out, the campaign to measure what kids are learning is not a bad thing. But some schools, obsessed with pass rates on grade level standardized tests, have decided that kids who easily meet the bar don't deserve any attention. One way to close the achievement gap is to lower the ceiling, rather than raise the floor.

What do you think? Are these the golden days for self-motivated, curious students?

Is ability grouping back?

A few weeks ago, the Brown Center released its report on education called "How well are American students learning?" This report looks in particular at the practice of ability grouping in 4th grade, and the acceleration of students into advanced math in 8th grade. The campaign to "detrack" schools -- vocal, if nothing else -- pushed the decreased use of grouping in early grades, and the idea that as many students as possible should take algebra in 8th grade. Some previous writings have labeled algebra as a "gatekeeper" course, and the idea is that if kids took the course in 8th grade, they'd then be able to fit all of college prep math into high school. Kids who didn't take algebra in 8th grade risked forever being left behind.

While grouping became something of a dirty word in educational circles, it never disappeared. According to the report, in 1998, 28% of fourth grade teachers were grouping students by ability for reading. Some 33% used some other grouping (like "interest") and 29% did not do grouping.

Now, it seems, ability grouping is experiencing a resurgence. In 2009, 71% of fourth grade teachers reported grouping for reading by ability, with 21% reporting some other kind of grouping and only 8% not grouping.

It's interesting to ponder why that might be. Between 1998 and 2009 there was increased emphasis on reading test scores. There have been small increases in reading scores in benchmarked assessments over this time. Certainly, teachers asked a few years ago about teaching mixed ability classes were quite likely to report that classes were so heterogeneous that they couldn't teach effectively. Grouping -- whether it is treated as an educational no-no or not -- may be done simply as a practicality. Theory is nice, but how do you actually help kids learn? You give them material matched to their level of preparation. How do you do that? You group by ability.

As for 8th grade algebra, the Brown Center reports that states with widespread acceleration into 8th grade do not do better on the NAEP than states that don't push as many 8th graders as possible into algebra. Earlier claims that algebra was a gatekeeper course suffered a bit from the correlation/causation problem. Stronger math students selected into 8th grade algebra, and these students were more likely to take and succeed in college prep math in high school. Students who wouldn't have selected into algebra in the past did not magically become stronger students by taking it.

It's an interesting report in general. What it reminds the reader is that moving the needle on education -- an undertaking that involves millions of students with very different backgrounds -- is hard. Various simple solutions (get rid of grouping! put kids in algebra in 8th grade!) can not, by themselves, change much.

Why do you think ability grouping is back?

Toy Story and blended learning

We spent spring break in DisneyWorld. We did this last year and had so much fun that we went again (thanks to my very generous mother-in-law).

One of the few "big" rides that we didn't do in 2012 was Toy Story in Disney's Hollywood Studios. When we showed up in 2012, the line was 2 hours long and the FastPasses (Disney's way you can commit to a specific time and skip the line) were gone for the day.

So this year I vowed to do it. We showed up at the park early, and got our FastPasses (which were already for mid-afternoon!) The line was already 90 minutes and would soon stretch to 180. Of course, when I saw that, I was definitely intrigued. What is it that makes this ride so fun?

The answer is that it's a combination of carnival games (think shooting at things that pop up) and video games. You spin in a little cart to the front of a screen, and start aiming your little toy gun at the bullseyes and such. You get points, which you can see on your cart, plus your accuracy rating and (good for competitive sorts) what your family members in the same cart are scoring.

This instant feedback is not only helpful in improving skill -- I realized that by slowing down and aiming I could do better on points and get a 58% accuracy rating -- it's kind of addictive. It's fun. That's why kids love to play video games. You know instantly how you're doing, and that instant feedback becomes a game. You're challenged and developing skills.

I've been thinking about that topic a lot lately as the Philanthropy Roundtable just released my short book called Blended Learning. While primarily aimed at philanthropists and people who work at foundations, the book gives an overview of the topic for general audiences, too. Blended learning might also be called "tech assisted teaching." The idea -- at least in the perfect form of it -- is that computers can gamify the rote learning of skills that is part of education. While part of education is about deep, critical thinking, you need to develop competence at certain skills in order to have space for higher-order thoughts. If you can read with ease, you can ask deep questions about the text. To learn to read with ease, you need to practice, and figure out what you're getting right and wrong. A computer can help with that. Likewise, math involves all sorts of skills that can be practiced (the reason teachers have long assigned problem sets). Why not have adaptive games that make this more fun?

The hope is that this frees up teacher time to tutor children, and the adaptive software challenges children to the extent of their abilities. There are few places doing this today, but the technology is getting better, and some places (which I write about in the book) are trying.

Anyway, the book is a free download if you're interested in checking it out. I've discovered that the more I blog, which has some instant feedback aspects associated with it, the more clear the logical order of an essay appears to me in drafts. That cuts down on the number of drafts I need to do.

Do your kids like educational software games?

Should gifted classes be open to all?

Slate magazine ran a story recently by Sarah Garland on who should be in gifted programs. Garland attended a magnet school in Louisville, KY, shortly after desegregation. Southern school districts (as mine did, in Raleigh NC) discovered that by putting a gifted magnet program at a school in a predominantly lower-income neighborhood, you could keep middle-class kids in your district. Indeed, you wouldn't just keep them in your district, you'd keep some of them in what might otherwise become the most stressed and under-funded schools.

Garland seems to have a problem with this. She notes that her gifted program had fewer African American students than her school at large (though certainly not zero; the numbers she cites are 11% vs. 20-40% in the school district). "The problem was that gifted programs tended to foster racial separation inside schools, undermining the very goal they were supposed to support." Maybe. In my school, the gifted classes were only for a few hours a day, and everything else -- including art, music, PE, lunch, recess, etc. -- was a non-tracked undertaking. All parents would be in the same PTA; the parents of more privileged students who wound up in these schools would still be advocating for better staffing, would be volunteering in the schools, would be noticing maintenance problems, etc.

Since I tend to think that was a smart move by these districts, I have to say, I did not have high hopes for Garland's article. But after she got the usual complaints about gifted programs out of the way, she raised a rather interesting question: what if parents and kids can simply self-select into them?

The upside is that this would remove all possible questions about testing bias -- about whether intelligence tests measure intelligence or are measuring other things. One could also imagine that open-enrollment gifted programs would have more political support. It's not a lifeboat strategy, really, if anyone who wants can get on the lifeboat.

The downside, though, is that the point of gifted education is to challenge and meet the needs of children whose needs can't be met in traditional classrooms. Teachers naturally instruct toward the middle of their classes. Good teachers are constantly assessing how many children have figured things out and how many have not, and if most are confused, the teacher will stay on the matter at hand until she or he gets a satisfactory percentage of students over the hump. The challenge would be to make sure that the rigor of such classes remained as high as they should be.

Garland discusses some pilot programs in Washington DC that take such an approach. There are two realizations that the pilot programs have involved: first, they have to be well-staffed, so if kids are struggling, something is done about that. Second, there also needs to be a lot of outreach and some explanation of what a gifted program is. Not all parents are familiar with the concept, and whether that would be something for their kids to try.

I'd also add a few other thoughts. First, such gifted programs should not be the only "good" programs at a school. You want parents and kids to opt into gifted classes because they think they need them, not because it's the only way to get a class with few discipline problems. Second, there also needs to be a seamless and non-judgmental way to transition out of them. Frankly, all gifted programs suffer from this problem. In districts that do have gifted programs, if you're identified once in an early grade, sometimes you're in for good, even if it turns out that wasn't the right placement. There should be some good way to move in and out of programs, evaluating every year what is the right fit.

What do you think of the concept of open-enrollment gifted programs?

Is boredom good for kids?

Gifted kids learn things quickly. Left in a class with their age peers, they spend a lot of time waiting for other kids to catch up. The result: boredom. Which raises a question: is boredom good for kids?

I was thinking of this while reading a post on this topic at the blog Grumpy Rumblings of the (Formerly) Untenured (blogger NicoleandMaggie sometimes comments here). Some well-meaning sorts acknowledge that gifted kids might get bored, but they tell concerned parents that learning to cope with boredom is an important life skill for kids. After all, not all of adult life is scintillating. It's like learning to cope with difficult people too.

But the problem is that as an adult, you have more choice about how you spend your time, and you also have other options for changing your environment. If you are thoroughly bored with a job, you do have the option to find another one. It's a bit harder for a 2nd grader to, on her own, remove herself from a boring classroom.

Adults also get to draw on more strategies than we tend to allow children in schools. Bored on a train? Pull out your iPhone. Bored in class? Often not allowed.

Furthermore, much of adult life is far more ability-grouped than school. I wrote a post several years ago here about an academic researcher who was vehemently against grouping...but whose university department bragged about how selective it was. So, there's that.

Personally, I think that one of the worst things we teach gifted kids in "regular" school is that learning should be easy, and also boring. Discovering new things is actually quite exciting! But it's also a lot of work. When children think they should be able to figure out anything required of them quite quickly, and then wait for the rest of the world to catch up, they miss an opportunity to learn how to stretch to understand something that seems just outside their reach. That's why we need to challenge gifted kids, rather than bore them.

How does your child handle boredom? What do you tell him or her about boredom?

The kid with his head in a book

My 5-year-old made a fascinating discovery the other day. He can read! Of course, he knew he could read words on signs and worksheets and in his picture books and the like. But the other day he discovered that, really, all books have words in them, even long chapter books, and if he wanted to find out what happens next in Peter Pan, or the Magic Tree House books (insert number here, we're like on 18 or something) he didn't have to wait for an adult to read it to him. He could just pick the book up and read it himself.

It's kind of a fun moment. I remember a similar moment when I was around that age and my parents had been reading me some book (I forget which, now). I wanted to see what happened next, so I kept reading. I soon learned that books had great stories, and you could become completely absorbed in those worlds. Once, I was wondering around outside reading a book and I stepped on something sharp. I was too absorbed in my book to pay much attention. When I finally put down the book later, I noticed blood all over my foot from a rock or some such. I was just too engrossed in the story to care.

My son seems to have inherited a bit of this as well, because we're now trying to establish a few reading rules:

1. No reading during family meals. I won't say no reading at the table, because I've been known to read the newspaper in the morning if the kids are doing something else and I'm sitting with my coffee. But if we're all there at dinner, it's not the right time for Dingoes at Dinnertime.

2. No reading while walking. Apparently the bus driver made sure my son got off the bus at his stop (I'm sure he would have kept reading to the end of the line, otherwise), but he was reading while walking down the bus aisle and down the steps. Not a good idea.

3. No reading while someone else is trying to talk with you. A difficult one to be sure, as no doubt 9 times out of 10 whatever is happening in the book is more exciting than whatever the other person is trying to convey. Nonetheless, we need to be polite, and put the book down and answer. That's why one learns to go hide away somewhere in the house if you want to read undisturbed.

What rules do you have for voracious readers?

Would you let your child blog?

At one of the blogs I read regularly, Modern Mrs. Darcy, Anne recently posed a question. Her 7-year-old daughter, who is homeschooled, loves to write. She sees her mom blogging. So she asked for a blog for her birthday. Should she get one?

On the one hand, blogging is a great way to practice writing. There’s also some evidence that people take writing more seriously when they know there’s a big audience (no kidding!) I’d add as a side benefit that many of us need a digital platform these days for whatever aspect of Brand You we’re promoting later in life. Building a blog readership is hard and takes time. Imagine if you started at age 7!

But, of course, there are downsides too. A blog takes a lot of time...for the parent, who will have to monitor what the child posts (e.g. not your home address), moderate all comments before the kid sees them, and so forth. There’s always the chance that a child will write things she’ll later wish she hadn’t written. I guess we’ve all had this experience, but as grown-ups, it’s easier to be rational about this than if you’re a kid. And the kid could get bored of the whole thing after you’ve gone to the trouble of setting up the website.

I suggested Anne give her daughter a regular guest-posting gig on Modern Mrs. Darcy for a year and see how it goes. That way, Anne would already be moderating comments, and the child would have a built-in audience. It’s quite possible she’d lose interest in a year, and then you know that there's no need to set up her own blog. If she keeps up the writing, however, she could get her own real estate.

What would you recommend? Do any of your kids have a blog?

Homeschooling, a la carte

Scholastic.com's Administrator magazine ran an article recently called "The Homeschool Twist." Aimed at principals and district leaders, the article encourages them to consider partial homeschooling for gifted students whose needs can't be met fully during the regular school day. The idea is that a child can take some courses at school (language, art, music, PE, electives, or any subject where the regular classwork will suffice) and then others elsewhere. Perhaps this is at home via online courses. Perhaps this is at home via tutors, or the parents, or perhaps it's through a local college.

There are all sorts of ways to structure such a program. My favorite example in the piece is a school district that lets high schoolers enrolled in online AP classes miss the first hour of the school day. You can take the class whenever you want (so 9pm works, too) but you get to sleep in! Not a bad deal.

As the article notes, "With partial homeschooling, gifted students still have access to other children and activities and parents can work or have personal time without paying for child care. Students can take advantage of master classes in a talent area, and spend time on individualized study or hands-on learning." This is getting at one of the main obstacles to homeschooling -- namely, that many parents need the school day as a form of childcare while they work (though we've written here about homeschooling and working).

Anyway, I'm a big fan of the school day being less set. Some districts -- and some parents -- view the school vs. homeschool issue as black and white. You're either all in or you're all out. If you're all out, there's no participation in anything -- which some parents, who might be homeschooling for philosophical or religious reasons, might be fine with. But if you're homeschooling for more practical reasons, then an a la carte approach to school has a lot going for it.

Frankly, there's no reason to limit this a la carte school choice to gifted students. Perhaps another child might want to take his core classes during the morning and run a business during the afternoon. Someone else might want to do a morning internship and take classes in the afternoon. As school changes, and as methods of content delivery evolve, there's no reason to have school mean what it has in the past. One can envision a system where schools are reimbursed per course, and if students take an online course while in the school building, the school could be partially reimbursed as "rent" for providing the computer, the broadband, and supervising adults.

Have you tried partial homeschooling? Is your district or school for it or against it?

How we discourage creative children (in 1963)

I’ve been reading a lot of women’s magazines from 1963. It’s the 50th anniversary of The Feminine Mystique this year, and comparing consumer titles from the early 1960s and now show how things have changed...

...and in some cases haven’t. In March, 1963, Redbook ran a story called “How we discourage creative children.” The sub-headline noted that “This surprising report explains why teachers, parents and even intelligence tests fail to spot the real talents of seven out of ten of our most truly gifted youngsters.” The story leans heavily on the work of Dr. E. Paul Torrance of the University of Minnesota, sometimes called the “father of creativity.” He told writer John Kord Lagemann (yes, men used to write for women’s magazines, and not just as the guy’s-point-of-view columnist!) that “IQ tests do not measure creative talent. By depending on them we miss seventy per cent of our most gifted youngsters.”

Torrance noted that “creativity involves getting away from the obvious, safe and expected and producing something which -- to the child, at least -- is new.” This, the article says, “makes extra trouble for teachers and parents. The child’s constant questioning, experimenting and exploring can make him trying to other people.”

What’s most odd about the article, though, is that this constant questioning and experimenting is presented as something that high IQ children don’t do. As Torrance said, “Suppose the problem was to improve oil lamps...The IQ mentality would apply all the known facts about oil lamps to build a better model. The creative mentality would invent the electric light.”

This either/or mentality -- that what we’d think of as “book smart” people aren’t creative and vice versa -- is often present today too. Since Torrance is lionized by the gifted community, I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what’s going on. Reading a little deeper, it seems that the “IQ tests” being discussed -- at least as written about in Redbook in 1963 -- weren’t what many of us or our kids have taken. Sample questions include “How many weeks in a year? How many hours in a day? Where is Peru? If you start with ten newspapers and sell four, how many are left?” This is sheer factual knowledge, something that aptitude tests are supposed to lean less on. The creativity tests Torrance was proposing had such questions like “list all the uses you can think of for empty tin cans.” But, of course, there’s no reason such questions couldn’t be incorporated into tests for gifted programs (and often are). The article also seems to advance the idea that intelligence and creativity aren’t simultaneously present, which seems to be the author and editors’ attempts to hook readers. Torrance is known for the threshold hypothesis, which is that low IQ and low creativity are related, but that past a threshold (around IQ 120) they’re not necessarily related. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be both present -- and in many cases, are, as any parent who’s fielded questions from a 5-year-old on whether you can add and subtract from infinity, and whether you’d still pray to God if you lived on Mars? and what about Pluto? knows.

That said, the advice on how to nurture creative children is fascinating, with some interesting ideas:

Don’t discourage fantasy. “One of the qualities of the creative person, young or old, is his ability to move freely back and forth between the world of facts and reason and the vast realms of the mind that lie just below the surface of consciousness.”

Don’t hold him back. Let your kids try things and fail. “It’s never too early for self-initiated learning,” said Torrance.

Make creativity rewarding. “Sixth graders who are rewarded for originality and interest produce much better stories than children who are rewarded for correctness, but they also make many more mistakes in spelling and grammar.” (OK, I’m not so keen on this one -- there’s no reason you can’t check your spelling and grammar in a second draft! Then again, we live in an era of spell check and word processing programs, which no one had in 1963)

Avoid sexual stereotypes. “Sexual stereotypes are destructive of creativity,” Redbook noted (we’ll just ignore that this is in a magazine full of cooking and diet advice). A little boy who refuses to play with dolls because his parents criticize it is missing out on lots of forms of expression.

Don’t judge him by his reading and writing. “Creative children often lag behind the group in verbal abilities” -- well, they could, especially if you have a gifted child with dyslexia. On the other hand, there are plenty of gifted creative writers who do great on this front. I’d call this a wash.

Allow freedom to experiment. “Instead of laughing at him, encourage him to test his statements, imagine what the world would be like if they were true. Don’t pin him down to ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ Parents and teachers both have a tendency to confuse getting right answers with being morally right.”

Help him use his creativity in social relations. “One of his biggest problems in life will be getting along with others without sacrificing the qualities that make him creative and ‘different.’ Help him use his sensitivity to be kind, his insight to be understanding and tolerant of those who don’t see things his way. Show him he can assert himself without being domineering, work alone without being withdrawn, be honest with others without being overcritical. Prepare him to accept the fact that anyone who has original ideas must be prepared to be a minority of one, at least for a time.” That’s good advice for parents of any kind of gifted child.

If not 'gifted,' what?

News flash: many people don't like the word "gifted." Even if they recognize the concept -- that some people have swifter cognitive processing power than average -- they dislike the word.

I was reminded of this while reading Stacy Hunt's column in a New Zealand newspaper (the Otago Daily Times) on how 'Gifted Should Be Retired For Good. Some of the column is just puzzling. Hunt writes that the whole gifted concept leads to separating a group of people off, which is news to me. If only modern gifted programs actually separated children into homogeneous groups for any real period of time! The reality is often small pull-outs which cause the problems of separation but give none of the benefits. Other parts of the column rehash the usual arguments (yes, motivation matters. And so does intelligence -- these are not either/or concepts). Others are a bit more sensible ("some children show unusual aptitude in specific areas of learning. Our society should provide support and resources to give them the chance to realise their potential.")

Anyway, this piece -- and the many, many others like it I've read over years of looking at gifted education -- got me thinking again about the word "gifted." Is it helpful or not? There are certainly other ways to describe the same idea of helping children who can learn swiftly be challenged and reach their potential. One can talk about talent development. One can talk about "readiness" for different levels of challenge. One can talk of being accelerated, or advanced. Or then there's the euphemism of "special needs," which could certainly be adapted to other contexts. Perhaps, if there is broad adoption of "personalized learning" then giftedness will simply manifest itself in kids moving forward in progression much faster than their similarly-aged classmates. She's in level 10 and someone else is in level 4. Ho-hum, just another day of personalized learning.

But here's a question for people who don't like "gifted" -- is there another word or concept you would use? Or no? "Gifted" is, of course, not perfect. But I suspect many people who don't like the word don't like the idea of gifted education in general, and so this is not an easily mollified problem.

Is there a word you like better than gifted?

My kid's other mom

Some children have an imaginary friend. My 5-year-old has an imaginary mom. He calls her “My other mom,” and regales us with all sorts of tales about her life. And she has quite a life! While I sometimes think I’m doing OK in my attempts to have it all, I have nothing on this woman:

*She works for McKinsey, the management consulting firm

*She has 18 children. Curiously, two of the other children are my 3-year-old and 1-year-old; I like that even in his alternate universe, my 5-year-old kept his siblings

How, you might ask, has she done all this? She’s 99 years old. My son isn’t aware of the dilemma of the biological clock, so in his mind, she had much of this time to build her career and family. She isn’t doing it on her own. She’s married to my son’s other dad, though we hear less about this gentleman than we do about the other mom. His other dad was, for a while, 33 years old. I think my 5-year-old picked up that we thought this was funny, and so now he’s started saying the father is 45. Not that that’s less cougar-ish, really. When my son got into watching Crocodile Hunter, he claimed Steve Irwin was his other dad for a while. We haven’t told him the story yet of what happened to Steve Irwin (who died 8 months before my son was born).

Recently, he’s decided that Steve Irwin is not his other dad. But his other mother has similarly crazy adventures. She’s taken my 5-year-old to Australia, to Africa, to Russia, to Hawaii, to the myriad other places he’s studied on his maps and his atlas. She’s patient with him on plane trips, though as he told me this morning “People thought she was crazy to take a 3-year-old on a trip to Australia!” She lived in Botswana for a while. This came out when my son once told me that “You’re my favorite mommy!” I thanked him and he clarified that “You’re my favorite mommy in the United States.” His other mother had sub-Saharan Africa covered.

Crucially, she lets him have a cat. This is a major point of contention between us. I am adamant that I can’t have another living thing depending on me -- I’m not even watering my house plants anymore -- and the kids aren’t old enough to take care of a pet. My son’s other mother doesn’t have such problems because hey, she can do anything. Remember the part about her big career and 18 kids?

The other mother ebbs and flows in the frequency of her mentions. I thought she’d stayed in San Diego this summer when my son didn’t mention her for about two weeks after the trip. This would be keeping with a fine family tradition of imaginary friends staying on the west coast. When I was growing up, my family lived in San Diego for three months when I was 8 and my little brother was 3. He had a friend called “Baby Crunchy” who did everything with us, but stayed behind when we moved back to North Carolina. Alas, after a few weeks, the other mother was back, and she’s been with us pretty steadily since.

Have your children had imaginary playmates or parents?

Cross-posted at LauraVanderkam.com

A new year, a new start (and silly mistakes)

It's been a while since my last Gifted Exchange post (OK, more than 6 weeks). We'll call it a long holiday break, and I'll try to dive back in.

Today's topic: small mistakes on assessments, and the outsized impact they can have. Many parents of gifted kids can sympathize with this problem. A child has moved far ahead in math on his own, and zones out during class. He makes some small mistakes on a test on grade level material because he hasn't been studying it. But then the take away is, well, how can he be advanced? See, he gets Bs on tests!

How should a parent address this? Is it worth encouraging a child to really pay attention during tests? To spend time studying what the child already knows? How should one explain this? (Yes, we know you know how to do this, but other people at your school don't spend as much time with you and don't know it?) How does one convey that a child is doing more advanced work at home?

I'm curious how parents have dealt with the problem of small mistakes.

Montgomery, acceleration and the Common Core

We've covered Montgomery County, MD a few more times on this blog than seems probable, but the issues there seem to reflect the challenges and thinking in many other "good" school districts around the country. So here we go again.

According to a Washington Post article, the district has revamped its math curriculum. Tied to the new Common Core standards, the curriculum aims to cover fewer topics in more depth. The curriculum should be more challenging at grade level, which means that fewer children would need to be accelerated in math. The article says the district claims they'd over-accelerated in the past, with high school math teachers needing to re-cover material that children should have been exposed to before, and with some families needing to hire tutors to help kids keep up in the alleged pressure-cooker.

Of course, the side effect of this, according to some parents, is that it's now harder for kids to accelerate at all. So kids who could zoom ahead are bored, and to add insult to injury, the tone seems to be that frustrated parents just don't "get" the new math emphasis. It is true that some people like to race through things without any understanding, but there are certainly highly intelligent kids who understand pre algebra concepts quite well and deserve to be challenged. This move away from acceleration is putting multiple issues in the same bucket.

I know I sound like a broken record about adaptive digital learning, but one of the reasons I do hope we move toward that system is that kids will ideally be able to move at their own pace (particularly in subjects like pre-algebra math, for which there is a lot of software already). Then acceleration won't mean scheduling issues and sending kids to different classes, which for whatever reason makes a certain proportion of educators go nuts.

Challenging the kids at home

My 5-year-old is really enjoying kindergarten. He's a social little boy, and likes being around other kids who are not his younger siblings. Riding a school bus turns out to be tons of fun, as are certain life experiences like taking money to the school book fair and choosing a book that fits your budget. Since he came into kindergarten reading and doing two-digit addition and subtraction, however, there hasn't been a lot of opportunity to move beyond that in the roughly two hours of daily instructional time that half-day kindergarten provides.

So we're working on challenging him at home. The first thing I thought I'd try was DreamBox, the adaptive math program. I'd heard good things about the program, and my son was initially interested in it. But he doesn't really like playing on the computer that much. When he gets computer time, he'd prefer to look at Google Maps and find photos linked to different spots ("Mommy, there's the Sydney Harbor Bridge!" and "Mommy, look at this village in Kenya!") So I'm not sure I'll be buying the program after the initial trial period just expired.

He will do math problems straight up, however. He spends a few minutes in the morning working with our sitter on math worksheets. In his perusals of map books, he's come across charts on precipitation, temperature, etc., and so he's been making his own graphs for fun.

As for reading, this seems a bit more straightforward. He is checking out books from the library to read, and is writing and illustrating his own. At the moment, they seem to resemble the Magic Tree House books pretty closely, but hopefully Mary Pope Osbourne won't mind the copyright infringement... :) We've tried to encourage him to tackle more challenging books, for instance reading the text in an atlas under pictures he finds interesting, and puzzling through what the words must mean.

I welcome suggestions on any other ideas for keeping the brain stretched. What books or software programs have you found helpful for early elementary school aged children?

At CNN.com last week, Carolyn Coil wrote a post on Ten myths about gifted students and programs for gifted. The list touches on many we've discussed here (like not ID-ing kids until 3rd grade under the misguided belief that everything evens out by then). But my "favorite" myth, if one can use that word, continues to be #9 -- that if a gifted child already knows a topic being covered, it's a good strategy to use the gifted kid as a tutor for struggling classmates.

I've often argued from the perspective that gifted children deserve to be challenged with appropriate work. They often already deeply know whatever topic they're being asked to teach to peers, and hence aren't going to learn it better. Time spent tutoring is time they could be working ahead. But while Coil mentions this argument, she also throws out another one: teaching is a skill. Assigning children to teach each other "assumes that teaching struggling students is something gifted kids innately know how to do. Most gifted students do not know how to tutor others. They often are frustrated that struggling students don’t understand what they perceive as easy."

Some kids like to learn how to teach, and want to get better at it. Some do not. This is a different skill set than having mastered certain math concepts.

Yet peer tutoring remains quite popular as a strategy. I think some educators see it as win-win. The more advanced child is given something to do and the child who is struggling gets extra help. But it may be lose-lose.

Have you or your children been in classrooms that have relied a lot on peer tutoring? What did you think of the strategy?

Raising the ceiling

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Arthur Levine, former president of Columbia University’s Teachers College, writes of “The Suburban Education Gap.” Long-time readers of this blog know that America doesn’t have one education gap. There are really two. The first -- the fact that children from disadvantaged backgrounds are far less likely to graduate from high school college -ready than children from more advantaged circumstances -- gets much of the attention. Education reform efforts are usually focused on raising achievement levels for these children, which is certainly a worthy goal.

When Americans hear that our children do poorly on international comparisons (like TIMSS and PISA) we assume it is because of high levels of poverty in inner cities. That’s part of it. But it’s only part. As Levine reminds us, “of American 15-year-olds with at least one college-educated parent, only 42 percent are proficient in math.” Even when you look at ritzy suburbs, only a few perform as well as students in Finland or Singapore. Evanston, Ill. does well. So does Scarsdale, N.Y. But places you’d think would be stellar, such as Greenwich, Conn., or Montgomery County, Md., or Grosse Point, Mich., do not outshine the international competition, Levine writes.

Why is that? I’ve been pondering this in light of some observations of my own school district. Lower Merion in PA is known for being very good. The high school students win various academic competitions, and in that nice marketing letter accompanying my property tax bill, I learned about all the wonderful colleges they are admitted to. My son’s kindergarten class has iPads! But looking at what my son is being assessed on, the expectations for being at benchmark largely center on being able to recognize numbers and letters. If you can do that, all is good.

In a world of many woes, raising the ceiling does not feel like an urgent educational priority. But it should be. As Levine writes, “The international achievement gap makes the U.S. less competitive and constitutes a threat to national strength and security. Stanford economist Eric Hanushek has estimated that America would add $1 trillion annually to its economy if it performed at Canada’s level in math.”

So why aren’t we focused on raising achievement levels among kids who aren’t stuck in basket case schools? I don’t think it’s an either/or proposition, that by raising standards for such children, we’ll take our eyes off the ball for kids from disadvantaged backgrounds. You can raise the ceiling and the floor. Refusing to look at how low our ceiling is amounts to sticking our heads in the sand.

The existence of the “suburban education gap” is why I get frustrated by narratives lamenting pushy parenting and how much pressure children in well-to-do suburbs are allegedly under. We need to relax and not push academic achievement so hard, the story goes. But while there’s no point in making children miserable, the reality is that we’re not asking nearly enough of kids. There is no kindness in failing to challenge a bright child’s little mind in the days when she still thinks learning is wonderful.

What to do if your kid wants to be an artist

Those of you who follow my other blogs know that I've been writing a lot, lately, about what sort of career advice parents should give children. Specifically, what should you do if your child wants to pursue a creative career? (see my post at CBS MoneyWatch, and over at LauraVanderkam.com).

I've been writing about this question after reading a guest post at the Motherlode NY Times blog from Dan Fleshler. His nearly grown-up daughter wants to make documentary movies. He debates what to tell her, with the shadow of his own career hanging over the discussion. He wanted to write novels; he wound up doing public relations. This question gets at one of the fundamental tensions at the heart of parenting. You want to prepare your child for the world. The world of creative careers is not known for being easy (and to a degree, these days, the academic careers that young mathematicians and historians and the like might pursue are not that straightforward either). On the other hand, you also want to encourage your child. The world is full of people who will stomp on his or her dreams. Why should you do that too?

Parents of gifted children face particular challenges in this regard in that sometimes children show prodigious talent in certain fields, or have very ambitious goals. Should one spend 18 years encouraging a child to be creative, and then zoom in with the practicalities? Should one encourage practicalities all along -- but hopefully delivered in a "this is possible" tone of voice?

My vote is for the latter. Musicianship, artistry, or research on the cutting edge of a field often involves years of practice and a discipline aimed at getting better. Hopefully as a child is working on the discipline of a creative calling, he or she is also meeting people who are pursuing this field, or have pursued this field, professionally. These people can show and tell what is involved, and explain the role of luck, timing, and being entrepreneurial. If you want to be a choreographer, it's important to know that there are very few organizations hiring people as full-time choreographers out of college just because they have a degree in dance. You'll need to be producing a portfolio, and being entrepreneurial about getting people to perform your works in visible places.

What advice would you give a child who wanted to pursue an artistic career?

In other news: I just read Practice Perfect, by Doug Lemov, Erica Woolway, and Katie Yezzi. The book consists of 42 strategies for "getting better at getting better" and has a lot of interesting ideas on how to practice one's craft. While the authors primarily train teachers, you can apply the strategies to just about anything.

I'm also going to two of my three kids' parent-teacher conferences this week and am mulling the concept of silly mistakes on assessments. Lots to unpack there, so look for that next week.

How to raise a prodigy

The New York Times magazine has a lengthy essay this week on "How do you raise a prodigy?" adapted from Andrew Solomon's forthcoming book, Far from the Tree. Solomon does a good job of introducing the topic of profound giftedness to the public, explaining that it is not an unalloyed positive. Such children do not fit into the normal mold of childhood, and so parenting such a child is a challenge. One has to walk a fine line between pushing too much -- the narrative of many a prodigy flame-out story -- and the less-told tale of not pushing enough. After all, a child with prodigious musical talent who isn't given access to good teachers and isn't given enough time to practice will not develop as he could. As one mother pointed out in this story, her child isn't normal. So why should he have a normal childhood? It's actually impossible. Solomon ends by saying that "I don’t think I would love my children more if they could play Rachmaninoff’s Third, and I hope I wouldn’t love them less for having that consuming skill, any more than I would if they were affected with a chronic illness. But I am frankly relieved that so far, they show no such uncanny aptitude."

That's a fascinating way to look at the issue. I wonder how often parents of children with profound gifts wish that things were more normal in their lives. I imagine it's not infrequent.

Handling a retraction well

Science is messy, and retractions of studies happens more often than we think. Indeed, there's a whole blog, Retraction Watch, devoted to such things! (One of its founders, Ivan Oransky, was my editor when I was writing at ScientificAmerican.com). Occasionally, retractions are a result of wholesale fraud, though usually the errors are more pedestrian: math mistakes, wrong assumptions, faulty methodology.

Recently, Oransky sent me a link to a Retraction Watch post about 2008 Davidson Fellow Nathan Georgette. This young man studied herd immunity. He had his first major study published in the International Journal of Epidemiology in 2007, and then later published another study on a similar topic in PLoS One in 2009. After taking a class on "Ordinary and Partial Differential Equations" at Harvard, Georgette reviewed his old study and realized that an assumption he made in building a mathematical model for the second study was flawed, and undermined the study's conclusions.

He wrote to the PLoS ONE editors, and asked them to retract the study, which they did. Oranksy points out that there are two interesting parts of this story. First, that the peer reviewers who reviewed the study didn't catch the problem, but second, the "rigor and transparency" with which Georgette handled the retraction. He found the error himself; he acted quickly to solve the problem. It bodes well for a future scientific career for this careful and honest researcher.

The lesson question

At my 5-year-old's annual check-up the other day, the doctor asked if he was taking any art or music classes. I mentioned that he quite likes to draw (my office paper and pens walk off with regular frequency; I later discover when hunting for them that he's written and illustrated a book). She suggested that I enroll him in an art class at a local arts center.

I have to say, I am torn. I've been reading and writing about talent development for years. Many readers of this blog have children with prodigious math or music talents. Part of developing those talents has been exposing the children to adults who can help them learn how to get better, early on.

But I also suspect that most kid art classes for 5-year-olds will be about encouraging creativity, or telling him to draw certain things. And he doesn't need grown-ups encouraging him to be creative or draw certain things. He draws whatever he wants right now and comes up with rather interesting ideas. He's in the process of discovering the concept of perspective ("You can't see my legs in this picture, mommy, because I'm behind the elephant") and setting ("You can see I'm in Arizona because of the cactus.") Right now he's drawing because he loves it. I'm worried that turning it into something you do on Mondays at 4 will undermine this intrinsic motivation.

Yet, like I said, I'm torn. And classes might introduce him to other types of art (sculpture, painting) that we don't do a lot of at home.

How have you decided to enroll your children in classes or lessons? Do you think it was a good idea?

(Cross posted at LauraVanderkam.com)

Absenteeism and ability grouping

I get press releases on various educational studies. Recently, one from Johns Hopkins caught my eye. Prof. Robert Balfanz authored a report on chronic absenteeism, defined as missing more than 10 percent of the school year. Balfanz and his co-author, Vaughan Byrnes, estimate that 10-15 percent of the student population misses this much school. The report finds that "missing school matters." Chronically absent kindergartners do less well in first grade. Sixth grade attendance strongly correlates with graduating on time.

This is obviously a problem for the students who are missing school, but what was noteworthy about the press release was how it was aimed at parents whose kids do go to school. "How often do your child’s classmates go to school? Whether fellow students show up for class matters more than you think," the release noted. Here's why: "Empty desks mean that teachers will either re-teach old material when chronically absent children return to school, which will slow the pace of every child in the room, or they will move ahead to new material anyway, often leading to behavioral problems as the children who have missed many days of school fall further behind their peers and disrupt the rest of the class."

That's certainly a reason to be interested in what one's school is doing about attendance, but it struck me that it's a reasonable argument for ability (or "readiness" as I prefer to call it) grouping, too. If the presence of a child who's missed 18 or more days of school in a classroom is that detrimental to the pace of the class, imagine how much more complicated things get if there are children spanning multiple years of preparation. Teaching to make sure the less-prepared kids get caught up will slow the rest, and not helping them get caught up can lead to disruptions. Wouldn't it be better to make sure most classes feature a relatively limited span of readiness levels? That way all kids could move at the right pace.

Hanushek and the economics of teacher quality

I recently finished reading The 4% Solution, a policy book released by the George W. Bush Institute. The chapters, including five by various Nobel laureates, look at what sparks economic growth, and what exactly it would take to make US GDP grow by 4 percent per year.

While people who don't share the former president's politics will find plenty to argue with in some of the essays, others are much more neutral politically, and focus on numbers. Eric A. Hanushek's essay on "Education Quality and Economic Growth" fits in this camp.

Hanushek studies the economics of education, and has done several studies into teacher quality. What teacher attributes affect student outcomes? In this essay he makes the case that increases in cognitive skills contribute to economic growth; basically, as people learn more and become better problem solvers, they use this knowledge and these skills to create efficiencies and new products and start businesses and so forth. He argues you can put specific dollar amounts on changes in US test scores on international assessments (particularly the PISA). If US achievement levels on the PISA rose by 25 points -- putting us at the level of Germany -- this would have a present value of $44 trillion for the United States over 80 years. Putting this in perspective, the entire US economy is currently $16 trillion. Getting up to the level of Finland -- one of the top countries -- would be worth $100 trillion over 80 years.

Hanushek then looks at the impact of teacher efficacy on student outcomes. His studies try to measure the "value added" contribution of teachers, looking at how different teachers instructing similar populations have wildly varying outcomes. He claims that replacing the least effective 5-8 percent of teachers with average teachers could bring the US up to a level of student achievement equivalent to that of Canada. Replacing the bottom 7-12 percent of teachers would eventually bring the US up to the level of Finland -- which was worth $100 trillion over 80 years. As he puts it, "the rewards for improvement are enormous. The economic benefits of reforming America's public schools far exceed the potential gains of a short-term focus on flattening out business cycles and from recovering from recession."

It's a fascinating concept, and if true, suggests a fairly stunning amount of economic growth almost there for the taking. But, of course, improving educational quality has been a long and not particularly successful battle. He notes that "The appropriate policies to achieve these changes in teacher quality are beyond this discussion." But hopefully some people will ponder that question, and come up with solutions that could put that $100 trillion in reach.

Too few kids for a class?

It's a common problem, particularly in the primary grades. A school would like to offer an advanced math option for kids at that level of preparation, but there aren't quite enough kids to justify a class. That handful of children can't just go to the next grade's math class, because it isn't being taught at the same time. What to do?

When I was in 4th grade, I remember joining 3 other children sitting in the back of one teacher's classroom. She'd give us a do-now type assignment, go teach the other class, then while that class was working, she'd come back and work with us.

I imagine this sort of arrangement happens pretty frequently, but earlier this week, I saw a more technologically sophisticated approach at a handful of Catholic primary schools in Philadelphia. Teacher Terri Danella instructs a small advanced math class at Resurrection school in northeast Philadelphia. As she teaches, she's being broadcast to 4 other schools (I was watching from St. Peter's near 5th and Girard). She's got a split screen that shows her all the students in the different locations, and when a student speaks up, the camera pans to that child. This makes the format relatively intuitive (when someone speaks, you look at her).

The technology itself obviously costs money, though this was underwritten by the Connelly Foundation, a Philly-focused charity that promotes technology in Catholic education. But it's cheaper than having an extra math teacher at the five different schools. And this method retains slightly more of the human touch than having these children take an online course.

How do your schools handle this issue? What do you do for children who need advanced math?

Testing prep and gifted education

Sometimes I sound like a broken record: gifted education should not be a reward. It should not be the only "good" class in a school or the only "good" school in a district. It should not indicate that a child has achieved something. It should be an educational intervention for children who need it.

But of course, that's not the way many educators and parents see it. I was reminded of this by a press release put out by TestingMom.com, a company co-founded by Karen Quinn, author of The Ivy Chronicles. According to the release, the site had been re-launched, "giving parents a whole new set of tools to help their children succeed in the increasingly competitive world of gifted education."

If it's increasingly competitive most places, that must be because schools are cutting seats -- partly because gifted education doesn't seem like a priority when it's spun as something for kids who've been prepped extensively for a test.

Tests inherently have the reality -- perhaps the problem -- that you can prepare for them. When the stakes are high, people will prepare more (witness the cram schools in a place like South Korea). Certainly by doing logic puzzles, you can prepare for IQ tests, and it's possible you'd do better. When gifted education is perceived as a reward -- or, as in NYC, where it gets you out of paying $40,000 in private school tuition if your kid can score a seat in a good program -- people have every incentive to use test prep products.

I'm not sure what to do about that. Perhaps a good screening program could involve all kids doing some amount of test prep. Almost every law school graduate takes a bar prep course; it's kind of built into the system. But I also think it's important to recognize the limits of test prep. Tons of children take SAT prep classes -- and such classes probably raise their scores. But very few children who've taken SAT prep classes or do SAT tutoring actually get perfect scores. The test is not completely coach-able or you'd see people acing it left and right. A high score still shows something.

I'm curious if blog readers have seen an assessment program for a school or district that they thought was done really well.

In other news: I wrote about the Bedtime Math Problem over at Citibank's Women & Co site.

IQ and Grit

There's a curious narrative running through some big thought pieces lately. The big idea is that Americans are obsessed with IQ. How obsessed are we? We even have gifted programs! But IQ turns out not to be the be-all and end-all of success. Character traits such as persistence matter more -- ergo we should stop pushing children.

The most recent piece along those lines was called "Opting out of the 'Rug Rat Race,'" which ran in the Wall Street Journal's review section this past weekend. It was excerpted from Paul Tough's book, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character. There is much to like about Tough's book, but I'm a bit wary of the way some of the discussion is framed.

As regular readers of this blog know, American schools are most definitely not obsessed with IQ, at least to the point of doing much about it. The vast majority of gifted children -- even if they are identified -- are then given nothing more than 90 minutes of pull-out a week. Maybe they'll get to move a year ahead in math, but that's about it. The predominant focus of American education is on getting kids in the middle to meet grade-level tests.

One piece of evidence Tough cites that test scores don't matter is a study of GED recipients. The GED is a test that high school drop-outs can take to show they understand high school material, and hence can go on to higher education or signal to employers that they are the equivalent of high school graduates. Tough cites a study finding that, while GED holders are more intelligent than high school drop-outs, they do about the same in life as high school drop-outs, whereas high school diploma holders do much better. The character traits that got kids through high school seem to matter more.

Which is well and good -- but I'm not sure anyone would argue that character traits like persistence don't matter. I'm also not sure how you can control for the life circumstances that lead to people getting GEDs instead of high school diplomas. Beyond that, I think a lot of the folks arguing how much more grit matters than intelligence are looking at the world from their own perches of it. Everyone who works at the New York Times magazine (where Tough is a contributing editor) has a pretty high IQ. Academics look around their academic departments -- where everyone has made it into or through graduate school -- and see that the people who are most persistent and have the most self-control and discipline do best. This does not mean that you could pull two people off the street and only the person with the most persistence will do better in life. Wide differences in intelligence will matter too.

What Tough writes -- that I agree with -- is that many of America's children, "especially those who grow up in relative comfort, are, more than ever, shielded from failure as they grow up." But a big reason kids don't experience failure is that they're never challenged. They're never given work that is truly right at the edge of their abilities... partly because we aren't obsessed enough with IQ. We aren't obsessed enough to make sure that highly gifted children are identified and then put in situations where they'll actually have to work to grasp the concepts they're trying to learn. That is how you learn grit.

I pretty much coasted through school until I went to the Indiana Academy for Science, Mathematics and the Humanities back in the mid-1990s. This public residential school for gifted children featured extremely challenging classes, and for the first time, I really had to work hard to get good grades. Sometimes, I didn't get good grades -- a flirtation with failure that made me realize I could work harder and change a situation. I didn't have to learn persistence until I was truly challenged. I worry that today's highly gifted kids won't get that chance to be challenged the more people repeat this story that intelligence doesn't matter and that we should just step back and let kids be kids.

In other news: The Davidson Institute just announced the 2012 Davidson Fellows. You can read more about these inspiring young people -- and the amazing things they've done -- at the Davidson institute's website.

Kindergarten orientation

Today was a milestone for me - I accompanied my "baby," now age 5, to kindergarten orientation. He had bright shiny white shoes and an even brighter smile. He was so excited to go wait at the end of the driveway for the bus. Today I got to ride with him. Tomorrow he goes on his own. His class, he told me afterwards, has 14 kids -- this is the upside of taking the PM kindergarten option!

I hope that he'll learn a lot this year and most importantly, will keep thinking learning is fun. As we were hiking over Labor Day weekend, he kept wanting me to ask him math questions. "I love this, mommy! This is my favorite game!" I hope that he'll keep thinking that puzzling through problems is an exciting way to pass the time.

What are your hopes for the school year?

Religious schools and gifted ed

Close to 5.5 million American children attend private schools. The majority of these schools are religious in nature. Over 40% are Catholic, another 15% are "conservative Christian," and a smaller proportion are Lutheran, Baptist or Jewish.

While 5.5 million sounds like a lot of kids, the number of children attending Catholic schools in particular has declined precipitously over the past few decades. Many have closed, and some are trying to reinvent themselves.

One possibility? Take a page from the playbook of a Queens, NY Lutheran school, which just reinvented itself as a school for gifted kids.

Lutheran School of Flushing & Bayside was struggling to attract students. But the folks in charge noticed something. NYC tests and identifies kindergartners for its gifted programs, but then doesn't actually have enough seats in the programs for all the kids identified. So now the school is enrolling children who meet the NYC standard but don't have a seat in the public schools in a program designed to meet their needs.

I think it's a neat idea. In large metropolitan areas, a school for gifted kids offers the best of all worlds: ideally, the academics are tough enough to cause kids to stretch, and they can learn in an environment with their intellectual peers. Because the high population means there's likely a concentration of gifted kids, you can actually fill a school.

NYC has some gifted schools (think Stuyvesant) but not nearly enough. A private Lutheran school is obviously not the perfect solution: plenty of gifted kids aren't Lutheran (and their families won't want them taught as such) and there's the matter of tuition. If public schools exist for kids, and especially when they identify kids as gifted, it's crazy that they then don't actually have to do anything about that fact. But, given that we don't live in a world where that's happening, having other schools around that do try to meet gifted kids' needs is a major plus.

Obviously not all religious schools could or should reinvent themselves this way. But if there were 10 Catholic schools in a city, why not designate one to have gifted & talented education as its niche? If there are 6 Protestant schools in a town, maybe they could have a gifted program at one of them and share some teachers and courses for 2 days a week. This would give parents of gifted kids more options. Because the sad truth is that it's usually assumed that if you can afford private school, that will solve all educational problems. But parents of gifted kids soon learn that even being able to pay tuition is no guarantee that an appropriate education is there in your town for the taking.

Does algebra for everybody help anybody?

Over the past two decades or so, there's been a push to raise standards in schools with the goal of increasing the number of kids who graduate college and career ready. There are certainly logical reasons to do this. In California, for instance, entrance to the state universities requires a certain set of courses. Yet many students, over the years, have graduated from high school without having taken those courses. If students later want to try college, they need to take remedial classes to do so.

One form this push for higher standards has taken is "algebra for all" requirements. The idea is that all 9th graders will take algebra, so they have the background for college prep math and science in later grades. But some studies have found that requiring students to take algebra doesn't actually result in higher college enrollment rates. And now a new study finds that algebra-for-all has a downside: less progress for higher achievers.

You can read the Education Week story on the study, published in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, here.

In essence, what happened is that schools eliminated remedial courses. By putting lesser prepared students into the same 9th grade math classes as more advanced students, the schools created more mixed (heterogeneous) groups, skewed toward a lower level of preparation than before. Teachers naturally teach to the middle of the group. An experienced teacher who can see that half her class hasn't quite grasped the concept she introduced is going to spend more time on it, assign more homework on it, and so forth. But there is a limited amount of classroom time, and so the teacher doesn't delve into more advanced topics, or move as quickly as she would if she could see that 70% of the class had mastered the material. Students who could handle more didn't get more.

As the article notes, any talk of grouping students by readiness (some say ability, but I prefer readiness) causes controversy. It is certainly possible that one could create a mixed-readiness class that met every child's needs. But doing so is very, very hard to do in real life as opposed to in educational political theory. Worse results for high-achievers without corresponding gains for students who needed more help doesn't sound like a result anyone would aim for.

It's OK to be wrong

(Cross-posted at LauraVanderkam.com)

Over at CBS MoneyWatch today, I have a post on “5 reasons you should fail more often.” This post came out of an experience last week on vacation of doing puzzles with my 5-year-old. I realized he seemed hesitant to try pieces, in part because he viewed trying a piece in the wrong spot as making a mistake -- something one wouldn’t want to do. This was obviously slowing the puzzle-doing down considerably. I don’t care about doing puzzles quickly but I do hope my child doesn’t get too hung up on the idea that everything has to be done right the first time. I hope he doesn’t think people are “good” at puzzles and “bad” at puzzles and trying a piece in the wrong spot indicates that you are “bad” at such things.

I’ve written before of Carol Dweck’s famous experiments on praising children for effort rather than ability. When children view their performance on a task as a result of some innate and unchanging characteristic -- you’re a smart kid or you’re good at puzzles -- they become risk averse. After all, failure would show your label is wrong. So best not to attempt anything too difficult, and put that identity in question. When children view performance as a result of how hard they are trying, however, then failure is less scary. Maybe you just didn’t try hard enough. You can always try harder, whereas you cannot magically become more smart.

So I dutifully spouted such motherly advice as “Look, I’m trying pieces in the wrong place too! That helps me figure out where else they might go! We just have to keep trying. That’s the fun of puzzles!” I praised my kid’s effort and made sure not to say “wow, you are good at puzzles” or any such thing.

But broadly, I have been thinking of other activities that reinforce the idea that trial and error is part of life, and not a case of Error with a capital E. Blogging for different outlets has certainly helped me with this. One of the beautiful things about blogging is I can try lots of different ideas. Some get no attention whatsoever -- the blogging equivalent of failing -- and some just explode. Oftentimes, I am completely wrong about what people will find interesting. Good to put things out there as concepts before I invest too much time in them.

The Olympics is also a good example of the inevitability of failure (with a little f). The best volleyball teams give up points against good competition. Imagine how many times those divers belly-flopped as they learned those beautiful somersaults! If they failed once and stopped they certainly wouldn’t be competing now. Missy Franklin doesn’t win every heat she enters. In her amazing 2-events-in-10-minutes performance yesterday, she squeaked into the finals in her first swim before winning gold in the second.

How do you teach your children that getting something wrong, or losing, isn’t always, or even often, bad?

Obama's $1 billion master teacher program

Two years ago, an advisory group on scientific competitiveness recommended that the US create a "master teacher" corps in STEM fields. These highly compensated teachers would mentor other teachers, create new lesson plans and aid in professional development. Recently, the White House threw its weight behind this idea, calling on Congress to create a $1 billion master teacher program for science, math and technology.

While it's unclear any new spending will get passed these days, it's a fascinating idea. Several years ago, I wrote about a program called Math for America that provided extra professional development and bonus checks for math majors who became teachers. People with STEM degrees may be in more demand in industry, so education represents a potential income cut that might not be as pronounced for an English major. A program that paid them more and gave them an elite status could help with recruiting.

Broadly, the idea also hints at extending the reach of knowledgeable teachers. This raises the whole class size issue again. In recent years, there have been several programs to reduce class sizes. The problem is that if it's already hard to get good math teachers, getting more of them is going to be even harder. If you have to dip lower into the applicant pool to get smaller class sizes, the class sizes might not wind up being the deciding variable.

So what I'd love to see is this master teacher idea combined with a blended learning program, so that even more kids could get access to the best math lectures, and work on problem sets, and then get one-on-one time from master teachers, who could potentially handle classes with 40 kids or more with an instructional aide. Maybe that aide could be a student who's a math major, apprenticing with one of these master math teachers. It's an idea...

What do you think of the master teacher idea?

The trouble with "broadening reach"

Humans are social creatures. Like anyone, gifted kids enjoy being around their real peers -- people who understand them and can have conversations on the same level. In big enough districts, a good way to offer this is to create magnet gifted programs that pull kids from lots of schools to receive instruction targeted at a higher level. Gifted kids get challenged and, as a side benefit, they often learn there's more to their personalities than just being "the smart one."

I have never understood why so many people are so opposed to such programs, but they are -- and a recent article from Gazette.net on Frederick County, Maryland showed one way school districts have found to disband such programs while trying to claim they're still serving gifted kids' needs.

The argument? Claim you're broadening the reach of your gifted teachers. Rather than send kids to a magnet program, keep them in their home school. Then send around your gifted teachers to do enrichment programs for an hour or two at a time at each school. That way, more students can participate.

But why, exactly, do more students need to participate? If there are gifted kids who aren't being served by the magnet program, make more seats in the magnet program. If the kids and their parents don't want to go to the magnet school, a grade skip or subject matter acceleration can work for individual cases. I suspect that the desire to broaden reach is really that school districts don't like creating special programs for "the 1%" (to borrow a phrase from a different subject). By sending gifted kids back to their home schools, their test scores get included in those schools' results. Gifted education becomes a small and more easily cut part of the day. And as teachers struggle to meet everyone else's needs, the needs of gifted kids will be forgotten.

School officials may argue differently. According to the article, "School board President Angie Fish said on June 28 she understands how parents ... can be concerned. But she also was confident school staff will ensure advanced learners receive the services they need, regardless of the other challenges of their schools."

Sure. Except that it usually doesn't happen.

Disrupting class

I recently read Clayton Christensen, Curtis Johnson and Michael Horn's book, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. Christensen is best known for his book The Innovator's Dilemma, which chronicles how various industries have been wiped out by technological progress over time. Personal computers ultimately replaced the mainframes of yore, but in the early years, they didn't compete for the same market. Disruptive innovations usually come in from below. They're much cheaper. Only over time do they become better. But become better they do. Meanwhile, established companies focus on better serving their existing customers, but as a result, they don't change to accommodate the disruption until too late.

The question in Disrupting Class is what this will look like in education. The book was written in 2008, so the predictions are already almost obviously old, and yet many that seem obvious haven't entirely come to pass either. Education is a resistant entity. If what you want to do is listen to a lecture on the quadratic equation, there is no reason not to hear it from the absolute best conveyer of the quadratic equation on the planet. Any kid who wants to take any language should be able to (Disrupting Class features a speculation about a high-achieving student wanting to take Arabic, and being able to through an online class). Years ago, I had a history teacher whose approach to US history involved putting questions and answers on the chalkboard, which we then spent the time in class writing down. What a waste of time when, these days, you could be listening and watching lectures from the best professors of US history around. Kids could look at those same questions and answers on a computer. And yet in many cases, these things don't happen.

Why? There are vested interests, of course. But even in the theoretically more efficient and adaptable private sector, established companies can almost never innovate into new versions of their same industry. So Christensen, et al, see disruptive innovation coming from outside the usual channels. Hence, Khan Academy. Online and digital learning is more likely to take hold first in after school programs, summer school programs, and in alternative education programs (credit recovery, juvenile detention centers, etc.) Charter schools, likewise, might give it a whirl. At first, it's not as good. But over time, it gets better. And eventually, school will look very different.

Or at least that's the idea. The authors predict that by 2014, about 25% of kids will be doing some kind of digital learning, and it will be at a tipping point. We're probably not that close now, but the field is changing rapidly, so it may not be too far off.

Fitting in

Over in Australia, a recent study of the state of gifted education has found that gifted kids face enormous pressure to fit in. According to a story in The Age, the report finds that children frequently face bullying when they don't conform to the social standard ruling everyone else their age.

While I'm glad to see this issue get some attention, I can't say I'm surprised. Growing up in "normal" schools in heterogeneous classes, the gifted child soon gets one identity: the smart kid. While a few other attributes can expand that identity (massive athletic talent, for instance) generally "the smart kid" is what you're stuck with. You soon learn that "the smart kid" is not necessarily the cool thing to be. So you don't stick up your hand. You don't ask a lot of questions. Or you do, and suffer the consequences.

People always talk about how heterogeneous grouping helps with socialization, but I think this world view misses what happens in real life. In a homogeneous grouping, the gifted child gets a one-dimensional personality. In a heterogeneous grouping, where "smart" isn't necessarily the biggest thing distinguishing you, the gifted child can discover other aspects of her personality, and how to relate to people in ways that aren't just about being the smart one. You learn that maybe you can be funny. Nice. Inquisitive. A prankster. Or anything else. These social skills are good to know, because eventually, many people wind up in semi-homogeneous situations on their own. At university, for instance, or in the workplace. It's probably safe to say that most software engineers at a major tech company are pretty smart. So what else do you have going for you? Unfortunately, many gifted kids don't get to think about this until much later. Or they dumb themselves down to fit in -- and miss out on opportunities for a better life later on.

Summer reading time

I have fond memories, from when I was a kid, of using my summers to read. Summer hours seem to have less filling them, and while I read on the bus to school, skipping that daily commute and the 6 hours in the classroom opened up many more hours for paging through books. I'd get so absorbed that I have a memory of absentmindedly walking around the yard with my head in a book, feeling something sharp, but ignoring it. Later I looked down and saw my toe was covered in blood. Never even noticed!

This is the first summer that my 5-year-old can read in a way that would make reading fun. I've started reading aloud the Winnie-the-Pooh stories to him (before this year he couldn't sit through a whole one...they're not short!) He reads through his dinosaur and astronomy books, but I'd love to introduce him to some easy reading but enjoyable books for young readers. I welcome suggestions. The first chapter book I read was called something like Squanto, Friend of the Pilgrims, but I'm not sure it was great literature. I loved the Little House on the Prairie books, too, but I'm curious if little boys get as excited about those books as I did.

Of course, I'm also nostalgic about all this summer reading because it seems these days I rarely read novels. The last one I made it through was Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, and that was almost a year ago now. I think I'm reading and writing too much for work now, and it takes some of the fun out of digging into something meaty. Maybe I'm hoping that reading through some literature with my son will put me back in that frame of mind. What are you reading with your kids? To your kids? And what are they reading on their own?

Note: A purely self-promotional aside... I have a new ebook out this week called "What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast." You can read a review here at MoneySavingMom, and an excerpt at FastCompany.com. Available in Kindle, Nook and all other e-reader formats. It's short and cheap ($2.99). Thanks for checking it out.

In praise of abnormal childhoods

USA Today has a quick post today on Sho Yano's graduation from medical school at age 21. Yano also earned a PhD in molecular genetics and cell biology, but that wasn't in the headline -- I guess people still like the image of Doogie Howser, MD, all these years after that show!

My favorite lines from the post: "The average age of students entering medical school in the U.S. is 23, and there were schools that refused Yano admittance because of his age. School officials worried that the difficulty of medical school would hurt Yano's ability to have a normal adolescence, the Tribune reports...."I never understood that," Yano said. "Why would being allowed to challenge yourself be considered more damaging than being totally bored?"

Exactly. There is nothing "normal" about being bored in school, or about being forced to learn certain things and not learn others solely because of your birthdate. If being able to learn to your full potential is an abnormal childhood, well, I'm all in favor of being weird.

NYC's gifted programs...and mine

I lived in New York City for 9 years, and my oldest two children were born there. We'd started thinking about the whole school question before we left -- though we didn't get very far down that road before moving to Pennsylvania instead.

Anyway, this past week, the NYC school system mailed out its letters informing parents whether their K-3 child landed a spot in one of the city's gifted programs. Unlike many school systems, NYC has quite an elaborate network of GT classrooms. On the other hand, getting in one is not all that straightforward. A child is tested and is labeled gifted if she scores above the 90th percentile. But there aren't actually enough seats in programs for the students who receive that label. Some 13,508 students got scores high enough to qualify. Of those, 7,562 applied for spots (the others presumably chose private schools or found other non-GT programs they preferred -- maybe a neighborhood school or a language immersion program). Of these, 5,486 received offers. The other confusing part is that there are two tiers for the program. Scoring above the 90th percentile qualifies you for "regular" gifted programs, but scoring above the 97th percentile qualifies you for "citywide" gifted programs. These, at schools like Hunter, are the most popular. But because more kids score above the 97th percentile than there are seats, in effect, you have to score at the 99th percentile.

Reading about all this has me pondering what we're doing with my 5-year-old next year. We moved to a school district outside Philadelphia that is known for being good. Certainly the offerings of contests and courses dwarf anything I experienced at the local schools in Indiana I attended for a few years. His elementary school is about a mile from our house. To enroll him, all I had to do is show up at the district office with his immunization record and birth certificate. I'm really quite grateful to have skipped all the stress of figuring out if he'd have a spot in a certain program, applying to private schools, and all that.

I have no idea if my son is officially gifted or not. We'll likely have him tested next year. But on some level, I'm not sure it much matters yet. Kindergarten is half day here. So he'll be in school for a grand total of 2 hours and 45 minutes per day. If it's all playing on the playground, we'd deal, because my son winds up doing a lot of academic work at home. He writes stories, reads books and informs us of various things he's learning about dinosaurs and planets. We sometimes do our bedtime math problems. Or we stumble into it. He's become obsessed with this guide book on San Diego (we might visit in August). He's informed me multiple times that it's 77 degrees in August (per the average high in the table). But he was trying to figure out, does that mean it's 77 degrees on August 1? or 10? or 20? So we started discussing the concept of averages (which I'm having a hard time explaining, by the way).

Anyway, I feel like next year will be about easing into school, seeing how it goes. I'm glad to have avoided the high stakes system of NYC, even though I'm glad NYC even has a system. What are your school plans for next year?