Approaching the parent-teacher conference

Blog reader Sara asked on the previous post about advocating for your gifted child. The staff of the Davidson Institute posted a number of their online resources, which I recommend looking at. In this post, I'd like to talk about how people have approached parent-teacher conferences.

Ideally, there is plenty of communication going on between school and home. You've been in your child's class on occasion to help out; you've exchanged emails with the teacher already. The first parent-teacher conference isn't your first get-together, and so you've already established a working relationship.

My husband and I like to approach these things much as we would meetings for work. We discuss before hand our objectives and questions. We talk before hand with other stakeholders who won't be there (e.g. the kid himself, babysitter, etc.)

If one major objective is to convey that your child is capable of challenging work, and would like to be challenged, you want to bring in evidence to support that. Think a portfolio that represents what you see: stories the child is writing, what books he's reading, the pie charts he draws for fun in his spare time. Particularly if your child doesn't do his or her best on assessments -- because they're boring and cover stuff the kid already knows -- you want to show material that shows your own assessment of the child.

Obviously, if you've had the kid independently evaluated -- which ideally the teacher already knows about -- you'd bring that information in too.

Then, hopefully, it's a pleasant conversation -- approached as "what can we do to be supporting you" in making sure the child has work that challenges her brain and keeps her engaged. Take good notes; thank the teacher for specific examples of what's happening the class (like your kid being put in a small reading group tackling a higher-level book).

I'd love to hear how Gifted Exchange readers have approached parent-teacher conferences, and how they've gone. They've gone well for us, and I know we've been fortunate that way. I'd love to hear how you've navigated them, and I'd love to hear from teachers who read this blog about how they like them to go.

Building bridges -- but to where?

I have recently learned that my state, Pennsylvania, requires that gifted learners be identified and served. My local school district sponsored a small gathering on gifted education recently, which I'd hoped would feature a discussion of our district's policies and offerings for such children.

Instead, we got a discussion of the skills gifted students would need in the 21st century. And while it was fun, and fascinating, it reminds me of the trouble gifted advocates have gotten ourselves into, historically, in the way we've shaped the conversation on gifted education.

We spent much of the hour devoted to this conversation on gifted education building a bridge. Each table had a divider in the middle, and the teams on both sides of the divider had to build a bridge with a package of random materials. The catch was that it had to exactly match the bridge on the other side of the divider. Every 3-5 minutes or so, we'd send up a negotiator to talk with someone from the other team. They'd confer, they'd come back, and we'd all adjust.

It was certainly a more enjoyable way to spend an hour than many other things we could have been doing with our time, but the point was that we were using 21st century skills: problem solving, negotiating, team work, and so forth. These soft skills are the ones that employers say people most need. They're also the ones employers are likely to say people lack. These are the skills that gifted children will need in the 21st century.

Except they're also the skills that all children need. And this is where the gifted conversation goes awry. Because many pull-outs over the years have been built around fun project based learning. But all kids can learn that way, and all kids can enjoy going to science museums, or whatever other trips these pull-outs have entailed.

What gifted kids need in particular is work that stretches their brains to the extent of their capabilities, in an environment with their intellectual peers. Bridges can be part of that. But bridges can be part of everyone's learning. What belongs under the gifted education rubric is something a little different.

Starting your own school, part 2

In my last post, I asked a few questions of Robert and Susan Gold, the founders of the Feynman School in Bethesda. Feynman serves academically gifted children, and has a science-centered curriculum for these young explorers. The Golds were interested in starting a school in part because their own daughter needed such a place. While this is a labor intensive approach to meeting a gifted child's needs, it's one that some parents consider, so I wanted to share their experience.

Today's post is the second part of the interview.

Q. What did you try that did not work? What did you learn from that?

A. Well, let’s start on a positive note. Feynman School is fulfilling its mission to provide a high-quality education for academically gifted children. The resources we have gathered from NAGC, MEGS (Maryland Educators of Gifted Students), the College of William and Mary’s Center for Gifted Education, our Advisory Board members, and others, have allowed it to do so. Nearly everyone we have consulted with to this point has been very willing to help mentor us, a “pay it forward” mentality we try to impart to our students at Feynman.

On the other hand, the business side has been rife with struggle, heartbreak, trial and error, and in some cases, the same battles gifted advocates have fought for decades.

One of the first things we did after obtaining nonprofit section 501(c)(3) status was to try to raise money. We figured, this is such a great cause, won’t folks be lining up to write checks? When that didn’t pan out immediately, we sought the advice of professional fundraisers. One said he had recently raised more than one million dollars for another local independent school’s annual campaign, and even though our school was new, he thought he could realistically help us raise $500K.

Six months and $6,000 in consulting fees later, he still hadn’t raised any funds (for us, that is). Apparently, raising money for a new school is harder than fundraising for a school with 600 students, a one hundred year history and lots of wealthy alumni. Who knew?

We just took it for granted that our society would see the value of gifted education and early science education. But before we had even opened our doors, there were naysayers with the usual charges of “elitism”, “gifted kids are socially maladjusted”, why are we “pushing” kids so early, and “they’ll get all the parents who are THAT parent”. One of our favorites: an anonymous poster on a local chat board quipped, “sounds like another school for the financially gifted.” In reality, we try very hard to identify high-potential learners, and offer academic scholarships so that children who can best benefit from Feynman may do so regardless of socio-economic status.

Then, too, we have approached businesses that publicly pride themselves on supporting science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education, but when presented with a true opportunity to do so, will not respond. Is “gifted” the problem? Whether these businesses are looking to support STEM education for the betterment of society, ROI, or some combination thereof, we believe it is shortsighted to fail to recognize that academically gifted children are an underserved population. Most people seem to think these kids will do just fine on their own. Research says otherwise.

Some of the things we have learned in our fundraising efforts are:

* a private school for academically gifted children does not, on its surface, sound like a particularly needy cause;

* people invest in people, not causes;

* personal stories are important;

* fundraising requires great resilience; and

* silent auctions can raise significant funds and can be fun community-building events.

Q. What are the advantages of having a school like yours, versus homeschooling your child?

A. Funny thing is, parents at Feynman School have joked that we are homeschooling our girls—except with a campus, eleven teachers and forty other children around. Most Feynman families consist of working parents who cannot devote the time to homeschooling their children and are thankful to have a school that echoes their concerns and goals for their children’s education. These children get to be around their intellectual peers every day. Initially we were concerned that our classrooms would contain many chiefs! But the truth is, they get along extremely well. Our students come from a wide variety of ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds, but share the common bonds of inquisitiveness and the ability to focus their attention well.

We believe Feynman School offers the best of both worlds: highly individualized instruction, flexible curriculum—something that approaches the agility of homeschooling—along with some advantages of scale. The benefits of a strong, collegial teacher community with expertise in different academic domains (science, math, Spanish), and that prides itself on professional development cannot be overlooked when educating gifted children.

Further, being an approved nonprofit school has allowed Feynman to convene a strong advisory board with experts in the fields of math, science, gifted education, corporate management, entrepreneurship and psychology; work alongside colleges and universities to pilot curricula; raise over $300,000 in tax-deductible donations; and easily coordinate elective classes such as music, drama, chess, basketball and robotics.

Moreover, Feynman School’s parent community is largely comprised of like-minded individuals whose paths might not have crossed otherwise due to location (our students hail from Maryland, DC and Virginia). The bonds we have formed extend well beyond the walls of the school and benefit our students.

One parental solution: start your own school

Parents figure out lots of ways to get an appropriate education for their gifted children. Robert and Susan Gold's approach? Starting a school. I asked them to share the journey to starting Bethesda, MD's Feynman School, and I'll run the answers in two parts. This is part 1.

Q. How did you figure out your daughter was going to need a different sort of education?

A. Madeline just came out "ready" to take on the world! She reached developmental milestones early, ascending a flight of stairs at seven months; and by twelve months, looking up from her changing table and announcing, "Mommy, I'm irritated! I need some Aquaphor." Even as a toddler she could think abstractly. At eighteen months, entering a donut shop with her grandfather she surprised him by asking: "Papa, when you were a little boy did you like donuts, too?"

At Madeline's eighteen-month-checkup her pediatrician gave us our wake-up call. "You're going to have to watch out for her in school," he explained. "She's going to be bored if she isn't challenged enough." He added that parents and teachers need to be extra careful with gifted girls because often they don't let on how bored they are. Of course that's a gross generalization but in practice it does appear that bored, gifted boys are more likely to make their boredom manifest.

Fast forward nearly two years and, sure enough, Madeline's preschool teachers reported that having her in class was like having a third teacher in the room. We were thrilled that Madeline's teachers found her bright and helpful (she could be a bit bossy at home), but were concerned she wasn't seeing much new material. This was a kid who assembled 200-piece jigsaw puzzles and stayed up solving Sodoku puzzles for fun.

Thanks to Madeline's innate curiosity and her pediatrician's advice, our research on gifted education was in full swing well before Madeline's fourth birthday. We would only note how important it is to choose a pediatrician who has the know-how to identify talents as well as concerns. Madeline's pediatrician had himself raised an academically gifted son, now also a physician.

Q. Starting a school seems like a lot of work! What made you think this was the right choice?

A. It was the only choice. Around three and a half Madeline began asking big, sometimes philosophical questions: "Where does the sky end?" "What's inside the computer?" "Were there always people here?" (People where?) "On Earth?" For this last one we found an evolutionary chart online with Australopithecus and so on. Looking at the chart she exclaimed, "This is really interesting. Do you have a book on that?" So basically we threw up our hands and said, let's hire some very learned teachers who can answer her questions. That was the beginning of Feynman School.

All kidding aside, we knew there were other parents in the Washington DC area seeking a school for gifted young learners. Once we had figured out that Madeline would require gifted and talented programming to fully develop her abilities, we had researched the area to see if any schools fit the bill. Surprisingly in the greater DC metropolitan area, none did. This was 2009. There was no early childhood program or primary school where academically gifted children could explore and learn at their pace. One of our first contacts was Jeanne Paynter, Specialist for Gifted Education at the Maryland State Department of Education. We asked her if we had overlooked anything in our search. Dr. Paynter said no, we hadn't overlooked anything -- but she did get calls every year from parents looking for a school exactly like the one we were describing.

We also received an early vote of confidence from Dr. Joyce VanTassel-Baska, longtime Director of The Center for Gifted Education at The College of William and Mary and one of the world's foremost experts on gifted education. She met with us for nearly three hours at her Washington office and helped formulate Feynman School's curriculum and methods. It was Dr. VanTassel-Baska, for example, who suggested we start with science as the cornerstone of an integrated curriculum.

Emboldened, we searched nationally for successful schools catering to young gifted children. We visited Hollingworth Preschool at Teachers College, Columbia University, and Hunter College Elementary School, both in New York City. We saw Hollingworth students at the ripe age of four fully engaged in the study of architecture. Hunter's youngest students, meanwhile, were applying critical thinking skills on a daily basis in many subject areas.

At the 2009 NAGC convention in St. Louis, we were also fortunate enough to meet representatives from Mirman School, which educates young gifted children in Los Angeles. When Dr. and Mrs. Mirman opened the school in 1962, they had just nine students, in their living room. In 2013 the school enrolls over 300 students on a beautiful campus. The Mirman administration has helped us tremendously. Jocie Balaban, the Interim Lower School Head, has even been out to visit Feynman School in Bethesda and says we're doing the right things.

Many, many people in the field of gifted education have been generous to us over the last five years. So we haven't had to go it alone, or engage in a lot of guesswork regarding talent identification, curriculum or materials.

In sum, it was the critical need for a school like Feynman in the DC area, the support we received from the gifted education community, and also, our belief that our professional backgrounds, education and business law, were well-suited to opening a school, that persuaded us to go forward with the endeavor. When we see the growth and progress our students make and how happy they are to be at Feynman School -- they often don't want to leave at the end of the day -- we know for certain we made the right choice.

(Part 2 coming in a few days...)

The instrument question

I apologize for the gap in time since my last post. I've been trying to figure out what to write about -- not because I don't have topics to write about when it comes to the challenges of raising gifted kids, but because I am experiencing many of those things personally right now. I'm trying to figure out how to write about my children given that I am not particularly anonymous on the internet and they're increasingly literate.

But here's a topic I can write about -- starting kids on an instrument. My 6-year-old is quite interested in music. I have a keyboard he's talked about playing, and he has tried a few notes on. However, he also heard one of his friends' older brothers play the violin and was quite taken with that.

I think he'd like learning to read music and I think he'd find studying an instrument challenging in a way that aspects of school work are not. So what direction do we go? I'm curious what age Gifted Exchange readers started their children with various instruments and your thoughts on which are good for beginners. Are there good ways to try different instruments given that we probably won't take on lessons in more than one instrument at a time? I suppose one option would be to try violin first in a more structured lesson setting, given that I can show him how to play the piano. But I'm curious what people think, and your children's experiences with learning music.

Making homework worthwhile

My oldest child just started first grade, which in our district is when homework officially begins. It's supposed to be light at this age (10 minutes a night) and is done more for the idea of building the habit than anything else. My son's teacher also has the good system of assigning homework on a weekly basis. You turn it all in on Friday, so if you want to get it all done on Monday and not do it the rest of the week, fine. If you want to cram at the end, you can do that too. I think it will probably be a valuable lesson in time management, since much of life requires us to manage our own deadlines over multiple days.

Of course, homework can be done well or done badly. It's no surprise that in many schools, a lot of it is done badly. It winds up being busy work covering the exact same stuff done in school that day. That time could be better spent reading for pleasure. Or playing outside.

But some forms of homework can be very helpful. Annie Murphy Paul wrote, recently, at Mind/Shift on how to make homework worthwhile. A few ideas?

First, try spaced repetition. Rather than cover what the kid did at school that day, homework can revisit topics from earlier in the year. Or preview topics coming later! A history class may have moved on from the American Revolution, but revisiting the founding documents later in the semester may remind children of the ways those documents influence later events (being covered at that time in class).

Another option is "retrieval practice" -- which is basically quizzing yourself to make memories stronger. Tests don't just show what you know, they change what you know.

Paul also notes that knowledge is better burned into our brains if we have to work harder to learn it. People retain more knowledge from reading passages that are smudged, or in hard-to-read fonts, because they're working to decode them. Schools aren't really relying on those awful mimeograph machines anymore, but homework's difficulty level can be upped by putting different kinds of problems together. You don't get 30 subtraction problems in a row, you get a mixed bag of different functions and different numbers of digits. That keeps your brain working.

What kind of homework do your kids get? Do you think it's worthwhile?

Self-contained, with a broad definition of gifted

In Houston County (Georgia), the gifted program used to be a pull-out program. Students got one day a week of gifted instruction. This year, they've moved to self-contained classes, all day and for all grades. You can read about the change at Macon.com in this article. (As a side note, it's a really good article, talking about many issues stories of these nature miss, like that gifted kids have to work a lot harder in classes when they're no longer "stars").

One reason few districts do self-contained classes is cost. If gifted education is targeted at 1-3% of students, then self-contained classes are often small, even if you combine a few grades. This means you have to actively put money into the program beyond the normal per pupil cost. For a variety of reasons, some political, schools find it difficult to do this.

The choice Houston County seems to have made is to broaden the definition of gifted. According to the article, some 4000 of the district's 27,000 students have been put into gifted classes. This is about 15% of the population. At this level, you could have 6 classes in a grade, with one being a gifted class, and not need any extra staffing levels.

So is this a smart choice?

On one level, a gifted designation this broad will be tricky. There is a huge variance within that 15%.

On the other, any attempts at ability grouping (or "readiness grouping" as we like to say here) will increase the chances that a class will be taught closer to a highly gifted child's level. The differentiation within that class can offer the highly gifted child more than the differentiation within a far more mixed class.

And since pull-outs are sometimes more disruptive than worthwhile, I think Houston County is moving in the right direction.

If your child is in a self-contained class, are you satisfied with the level of rigor?

What age Harry Potter?

There's not much that unites our diverse world these days, but it does seem that reading the Harry Potter series is a pretty common thread for even quasi-bookish children. When the books came out over the past 20 years, children visited book stores at midnight to buy the first editions. They're exciting. They're fun.

They're also, at times, kind of dark. So here's the question: how old were your kids when they started reading Harry Potter?

I've been debating this as I see what my 6-year-old likes to read. We've gone through the Magic Tree House series. We've enjoyed or are enjoying some classic works like Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, and Charlotte's Web. I think Harry Potter would be a lot more exciting (and epic!) than Junie B. Jones.

But we've had incidents of being scared of the dark, and he's a bit blown over by the concept of death (naturally, really -- who wouldn't be?) So I'm wondering how scary he would find Voldemort et al.

What was your experience with reading the series? How old were your kids, and how did they react?

Congratulations to the 2013 Davidson Fellows!

Every year, the Davidson Institute awards scholarships to young people who have done outstanding original projects. Unique among the big scholarship programs, kids can be any age up to 18 to win. While most winners are high school students, there have been much younger winners too. The Davidson Fellows program also recognizes great projects in music and literature, along with math and science. This makes for a diverse crew (though most are science/math this year), and it's always fun to see who wins.

The Davidson Institute just announced this year's winners last week. You can read the press release here.

If you're the parent of a young person who's got a big idea, check out the frequently asked questions about eligibility for next year.

"Their mere participation in G&T programs entitles them to good grades"

John Rosemond has a nationally syndicated parenting column. He's often got an edge, which is fun to read -- though oddly enough, Kentucky seems to be accusing him of practicing psychology without a license (at least a Kentucky license that is) because of his sharp advice. As someone who freely dispenses my advice all over the place, I think this is kind of an alarming development.

But anyway, the problem for our purposes is that he seems to have it in for gifted children. I'm not quite sure what Rosemond has experienced that's led him to have a negative view of the whole enterprise, but that certainly comes out in his columns.

This past week, he wrote about "Motivating a smart kid who is lazy." The gist of the advice -- that people don't change unless the consequences of their behavior affect them personally -- isn't wrong. But he gets at that with some broadsides against gifted education in his response to a parent worried that a gifted son isn't doing his homework.

As he writes, "The fact that the school has identified your son as 'gifted and talented' may be part of the problem. My finding is that a good number of children who've been so identified seem to feel that their mere participation in G&T programs entitles them to good grades no matter how much effort they put into their schoolwork. So they do just enough to get by and no more. The further problem is that schools will not, generally speaking, lower the boom on these kids. Teachers continue giving them decent report card grades even though they don't complete assignments or turn in work, do poorly on tests, and so on. And once a child's been promoted to G&T status, demotion is virtually out of the question. These kids are smart all right. They're smart enough to figure out that the only consequence of their lack of effort is that adults get upset."

Note the use of the word "finding." It implies that there's some research backing this statement up. There isn't.

There are, of course, gifted children who don't do homework. Some may feel entitled. Some may be lazy. And some may object to spending big chunks of their lives doing work they've mastered years ago. Perhaps parents should teach that we follow the rules...and sometimes, perhaps, they should try to find alternate educational arrangements that actually challenge the kid. I know that in my life, some of my biggest educational accommodations have happened when I spoke up about why I shouldn't do certain assignments or classes. Adults don't always know best.

The point is that these situations are often not black and white. Education and parenting both require a lot of understanding of complex reasons for things. Especially when we're dealing with children with special needs of any sort. But Rosemond has decided that gifted kids are con artists, looking to lord their smarts over the rest of us. I'm sure plenty of readers from this blog could share stories pointing otherwise -- stories of gifted kids doing poorly on tests, and getting poor grades, and parents' struggles to figure out how to solve those problems.

As for entitlement and lack of effort? I maintain that the best way to undercut any entitlement in gifted students is to truly challenge them so they have to work. Which is far more likely to happen in GT programs than in regular classes, whatever Rosemond may think.

Spelling, punctuation, and the young writer

My 6-year-old son is an obsessive little writer. When we went to Cape May for a week this summer, and didn’t have a whole lot of paper or notebooks with us, he wrote stories on napkins. When he’d run through all our paper napkins, he moved on to the paper towels.

Mostly he’s been writing Magic Tree House fan fiction -- stories incorporating Jack and Annie as main characters, with some of the same conventions (they go to the tree house first every time, and it spins faster and faster, until “everything was still. Absolutely still.”)

It’s all very cute and fun, and I’ve mostly been like “that’s great, sweetie.” But on all of these books, he writes “Majic” Tree House. He’s seen dozens of the real books and has read this word many times, but still writes it as “majic.” So the question I’ve been pondering is whether it’s helpful or not helpful to bring up such matters as spelling, grammar, and punctuation with the young writer.

Part of me says no, I don’t want to in any way second guess his creativity. He’s having fun. He’s writing purely for the joy of it. Writing is play for him and I’m in no hurry for him to think otherwise.

But another part of me says that I’m bringing negative baggage to spelling and grammar and such that isn’t inherent in these things. I wish I’d had the finer points of grammar introduced to me far earlier. I also love the growth mindset inherent in writing a draft and then making it better. My son writes a story and then abandons it, rather than going back and doing it again and making it better and thinking about how he can improve it. That’s probably the part of writing I like best -- taking a rough draft and experiencing the joy of progress as I see myself making it better.

So, those are the two sides of this argument. What do you think? It occurs to me that I could let him type some of his stories and he'd see the indication in a Word document that something was spelled wrong.

Bedtime stories worth staying up for

Laura's note: This is cross-posted at my personal blog, LauraVanderkam.com

Like many parents, I try to read to my kids most nights before they go to bed. I find that I enjoy this ritual much more if the stories I’m reading are interesting -- with good art as a bonus -- than if they’re pedantic, as too many kids’ stories are.

Here are some books I’m really enjoying right now:

Bedtime Math. When I first heard of Laura Overdeck’s Bedtime Math daily email a little over a year ago, I knew it was a great idea. Too many people consider math this scary, difficult thing, as opposed to a neat way of making sense of the world. But what if math was presented to us in the same way bedtime stories are, with cuddles and introduced by a caregiver you love? Overdeck’s email blast has now evolved into a series of books, the first of which came out this summer. My 2 boys (ages 3 and 6) are loving this first installment. Each page has a silly little introduction to a subject (cooking spaghetti, the size of whales, etc), and then 3 levels of story problems: wee ones, little kids, big kids. My 3-year-old can do the wee ones problems counting on his and my fingers, and my 6-year-old does the little kids and (usually) the big kids ones. They’re finding this so fun that I have to tell them “Boys, we can only do 2 more math problems -- you have to go to bed!”

The Boy Who Loved Math. Artist LeUyen Pham was working on this book when I interviewed her for What the Most Successful People Do at Work. It’s a story about the life of Paul Erdős, the legendarily prolific (if eccentric) mathematician. My boys love that as a kid, Paul used to calculate how many seconds someone had been alive. The illustrations, needless to say, are a stunning mix of pictures and numbers.

Night of the Moonjellies. There are lot of books about kids at the seashore, but this is one of my favorites. Little Mark, age 7, works 2 days a week at his grandma’s hot dog stand that serves the best lobster rolls in New England. This story tells of his busy day filling the ketchup jars and grabbing straws, and then at night taking a boat ride to where all the moonjellies live in the water. Mark Shasha (the author -- and the main character) does a wonderful job recreating the seashore not just as a place where people relax, but where people live and make a living, too.

One Morning in Maine. This classic is a bit lengthy for a bedtime story, but worth it if the kids have somehow finished up their baths 10 minutes early. A little girl named Sal lives on an island in Maine, and wakes up one morning with a loose tooth. While the plot is about losing the tooth, and misplacing it, but getting her wish anyway, Robert McCloskey’s tale is more memorable for how it paints a picture of rural Maine, with people who need to take a boat to buy groceries, and who go dig clams in the morning to eat for lunch. That's a sort of locavore eating that’s now hip but used to be life. For 50 pages, you’re transported to a completely different world.

The Magic Tree House series. My 6-year-old is utterly obsessed with the stories of Jack and Annie, siblings who discover a magic tree house in the woods near their home in Frog Creek, Pennsylvania. The tree house belongs to Morgan le Fey, the librarian of King Arthur’s Court, and she sends the children on missions through time and space to solve riddles, save books, and the like. We’ve gone to visit pandas in China, to a Civil War battlefield, to the first Thanksgiving, to 15th century Florence, etc. Each 70-page story (a few special Merlin Missions go to about 110 pages) is fast-paced and the prose is simple enough to allow a new reader the thrill of making it through a chapter book, whether he does this alone or with a parent. I’ve probably read at least 20 of these books aloud now, and have found myself actually thinking I’d read -- of my own volition! -- through one of the installments my 6-year-old brought home from the library and finished without me. That’s saying a lot for early chapter books.

What’s on your list of bedtime story greatest hits?

When did you have your children tested/evaluated -- and why?

Children are tested and evaluated for giftedness at a variety of different ages. In New York City, with its oversubscribed gifted programs, kids can be tested going into kindergarten. In some other districts, gifted programs don't start until 3rd grade, so that's when children are evaluated. Some schools or districts screen all kids, and in some, children are privately evaluated.

I went to a magnet school with a gifted program starting in 1st grade, so I must have had some sort of evaluation or designation -- perhaps informal -- for that.

Then, if I recall correctly, I took an IQ test around 3rd grade from someone in private practice who did such things. It was partly so I could take Saturday morning classes in a gifted program in our area. I had a lot of fun in that program -- taking classes in Esperanto and the like -- though humorously one of my favorite classes was cross-stitching. You definitely don't have to be gifted to learn to cross stitch! (though I imagine the social component was a big part of all these programs).

Now, as we're figuring out school for my oldest child, who's 6 and going into first grade, I'm thinking through these issues again. When did you have your children tested or evaluated, and why? Was it triggered by the desire to put children in certain programs, or because it seemed a school wasn't meeting a child's needs? How did it go and, looking back, does that seem like the right age and time?

What's the point of tests?

School these days have lots of assessments. But what is the point of tests?

I was thinking of this after reading Jay Mathews's Washington Post column on a parent's frustration that a teacher wouldn't send home his child's math tests. The child was struggling in math -- getting bad grades on those tests -- and so the parent wanted the child to work with him and a tutor on figuring out why he was getting those problems wrong. The teacher wouldn't send the test home because the tests get re-used year to year, and the presumption is that copies floating about could be used for cheating.

There's a lot that's problematic about this scenario, but beyond the worry about cheating, it raises interesting questions about why kids are tested and missed opportunities.

In the traditional educational mindset, a test shows what you know at some point in time. The information is presented, and then you are tested on it. You get a grade -- say, 14 out of 20 questions right, which is a 70% or "C" -- but regardless of the grade, the class is moving on.

But there's another view of what tests should be -- one more represented by the parent in this column -- that tests are about diagnostic information. You see what a child knows at one point in time, and then you use that information to tailor instruction based on that information. The goal is mastery. A 70% isn't a sign that you're a mediocre student, per se. It's a sign that you don't know 30% of the material, and should learn that material before you move on.

Personally, I think the latter view is more useful. A basketball player in practice might shoot 20 3-point shots, and he studies why he makes some and why he doesn't. He's not assigned a grade that follows him around for his 50% success rate. The goal is to improve.

I'm sympathetic to the increased use of testing in schools over the past 10 years. In many cases this is the only real accountability put on schools -- the only way we have of knowing that a school that has great band uniforms and nice cheery classrooms has not, in fact, been producing graduates capable of succeeding in college.

But end-of-year testing is a very rough way of doing this, and doesn't provide nearly the information we need to actually get better at things. Instead, constant assessment -- maybe of the sort computer programs could do -- could help parents and teachers figure out where students stand on their math skills, and how to shore up weak points. Parents like the father in Mathews' column could be getting information every week on their child's progress and not be in the dark -- except for a grade like "C" or "D" -- on what the child knows. Especially in a subject like math, it seems it would be possible to have enough problems generated through software that it wouldn't make sense for a teacher to use the same tests year after year anyway.

What do you think is the point of tests?

Summer entertainment for the kids

Our family spent much of the past 2.5 weeks on the road. First, we traveled to Seattle and Washington State for 10 days, then we spent a week at a beach house on the New Jersey shore. Travel is generally good for stimulating kids. There are lots of new experiences -- from going to the top of the Space Needle (I forget how fun touristy things really can be for little kids) to beach combing on Bainbridge Island, to seeing snow on the ground at Mt. Rainier National Park in late June.

Now we're home for a bit, though, and are figuring out how to structure the days. My oldest two have been going to YMCA camp, and have liked it a lot. We're doing a lot of swimming, and are trying to load up on the books. I welcome recommendations of your favorite early chapter books that might appeal to a slightly sensitive 6-year-old boy. There's time for firefly catching at night. But we only signed up for 2 weeks of camp, so after that we'll have to figure out other things to keep them occupied. We've learned that when they're not occupied, there's a lot of whining and fighting.

How are your children spending the summer? What are they reading and what are they doing?

Should you let your child decide whether to join a gifted program?

The Fort Wayne News Sentinel ran a parenting advice column the other day from John Rosemond. Some parents wrote in saying that their 9-year-old daughter had recently qualified for a gifted program. She'd always liked school, but became quite upset when informed that she'd qualified. None of her friends were in the program, so she didn't want to be either. The school counselor didn't think the parents should let the daughter make the decision, but the parents wanted to know what Rosemond thought.

His answer revealed some of the deepest flaws of many gifted programs. As he wrote: "In most cases, and especially at the elementary level, the programs in question are examples of what are known as 'pull-out' programs. The children in GT programs attend regular classes and are then pulled out of class three to five times a week for enrichments of various sorts. I am unable to find any compelling research to the effect that these programs result in long-term intellectual or academic advantage. Their ultimate benefit, therefore, is questionable."

So if the child thought being singled out for special treatment wouldn't sit well with her friends, Rosemond said the parents should let her make this decision. You can still live a good life if you skip a gifted program, which he backed up with the evidence of his own daughter, who had a similar take on her pull-out program.

I've been pondering this answer. While in general I like the idea of children taking ownership for their education, there's a lot wrong with this scenario.

First, good gifted programs should be self-contained classes or even schools, not pull-outs. Second, they shouldn't appear to be special treatment for the smart kids who are somehow different from their friends. Gifted programs should be an educational intervention for students who need it. While one can imagine parents letting a child decide whether or not to use accommodations to address her dyslexia, one hopes they'd have a strong opinion on that matter.

I'm also a little wary that we're talking about a daughter here. Girls face pressure fairly young not to be seen as smart -- that being smart somehow works against you in terms of what's considered attractive. That she sees being put in a gifted program as upsetting may be rational...or it may be her absorbing a million awful media messages. Parents are supposed to counteract those messages, not indulge them.

Also, the point of school is to learn, not just to hang out with your friends. Our cultural narrative doesn't really see that -- witness the big deal made about sports teams and proms and other such things people fret about when acceleration comes up. But it's true nonetheless.

Personally, I'm not sure that pull-outs are worth much -- just as Rosemond says. But there's so much going on with this issue that needs to be discussed.

Would you let your child decide whether to be in the gifted program or not?

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.