Highly Able Students – Are they a threatened species?
Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much.
Matthew 25:21
One of the long term scandals of Australian education is the relative lack of differentiated attention to gifted and talented students or, as we call them at Shore, High Potential Learners. Often these students in schools are not identified according to their wonderful gifts and, even if they are, specialised provision for them can be rather scanty. After decades of observing and pondering this problem, it seems to me that part of our national problem is our cultural cringe as Australians, our anti-elitism and the national determination to cut down the tall poppies. This is sometimes seen as an aspect of Australian egalitarianism. If this analysis is correct, it is ironic that it does not apply to sport. Australians seem all in favour of elitism in sport where we attempt to empower our champions to achieve on the world stage.
As long ago as the early 1960’s, an Australian academic, Donald Horne, analysed some of these issues in his groundbreaking book The Lucky Country. Horne’s contention was that, Australia, led by second rate politicians, was riding its luck, such that continuing to do so was its only real plan. Horne’s view was that luck cannot last forever. Real substance and strategising is needed. It is a profound irony that most people who have heard of Horne’s book regard it as a celebration of Australia’s luck, rather than a cynical comment on luck as a plan and a clarion call to actually do something to control our national destiny.
Lack of provision for Australia’s gifted young people has led to the famous “brain drain” where highly successful young Australian professionals and entrepreneurs need to go overseas to find a place where they will be nourished, fully appreciated and resourced.
In Australian schools, frequently those who are particularly able “dumb themselves down”, not feeling free to express their giftedness in case they are rejected by their peers. Young people often have fragile egos (despite bravado) and just want to fit in. A further reason for disguising their giftedness is that often further work for those who can complete tasks easily and quickly, is to simply be given more of the same rather than any appropriate extension activities. In short, such students are often stultified by repetition of what they have already mastered rather than challenged and excited by genuine extension opportunities.
It has been a shortfall in Australian teacher training that, in the past, there has been very little preparation for teachers to cater for giftedness. There has been a general and wishful expectation that gifted students are so gifted that they can look after themselves and that specific coaching is unnecessary. The drop out rate from formal education of the highly gifted is a national disgrace and indicates that self-management by gifted students is neither sufficient nor appropriate. The loss of such people from formal processes of exploring and extending their talents diminishes the whole nation and its future.
A particular area of lack of training for teachers through universities over a long time has been failure to equip teachers with the skills of accurately diagnosing those of specific abilities. As a result, with no lack of good will, teachers across the nation have tended for decades to identify the very compliant, lovely and quite able students as gifted. Often these students fall short of the threshold for identification as gifted: they are able, but not superbly able. Gifted students can sometimes be found amongst those who are messy, non-compliant and bored as the class material does not challenge or satisfy them.
Sometimes in schools, attempted specific provision for gifted students receives opposition from parents whose children manifest various disabilities. The concept here is that this is a “zero sum game” where provision for the most able comes at the expense of those who may need assistance. This is a false dichotomy. Both these categories are potentially disadvantaged without recognition and resourcing. In any case, a new concept has recently entered the educational lexicon: that of “twice exceptional”, which, as unpacked, means that many students within these categories embody both in their person – great giftedness in some areas and disabilities in others. One example can be a student who has been diagnosed with high functioning autism. An instance from a school I led 20 years ago was where a staff member completing a Masters degree in Mathematics needed the assistance of a Year 5 student to solve a mathematical problem with which she was confronted in her coursework.
Our national sense of egalitarianism has often played out in schools in the past in an attempt to provide an equality of outcome without considering whether this is adequate given the variability of inputs (one of which is a proportion of students who are highly able). A better proposal seems to me to be equality of opportunity, insofar as we can manage that, in a single school. An implication of this stance is that we don’t want gifted students to be disadvantaged by a failure to cater to their individual needs.
Investing in the talents of young people resonates with Biblical mandates. Indeed, Jesus’ Parable of the Talents praised those servants which used them to maximise their value (a talent in the Classical Age was actually a very great deal of money) and criticised the servants who let the talent sit inert. Jesus said to the servant who multiplied the investment from five talents “Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much” (Matthew 25:21).
Now to enter the home straight and bring all of this to bear on Shore. A few principles need to be enunciated at this point:
- There are not as many students who are genuinely gifted and talented as people might imagine. Gifted and talented is a higher category than those who are simply very able. Parents are not always objective observers(!) and some in schools are given to advocating a case for their children where the evidence does not support it. Ardour from parents who are convinced their child is gifted is short of actual evidence! Gifted students may comprise 1% of the population of young people in schools. This is not to suggest for a moment that students who are very able should not be recognised and have their capacities extended. Indeed, we would want that for students at all levels. An example may assist: at my last school one of our students gained admission in the top 1% of applicants to American universities. This was highly creditable. However, he was in Year 7 at the time! More than that, he was a triple accelerant and on age should have been in Year 4! That is a clear instance of genuine giftedness, in fact across all his subjects. He sat the HSC at the age of 15. At Shore, we have a significant enrolment of students who are highly able and some who are genuinely gifted. Our desire is to support and extend them all.
- At Shore we encourage our staff to undertake further training in gifted education. While this can be achieved through a Diploma or, indeed, a full Masters degree, at least the main rudiments can be conveyed through Mini-COGE (a short course in a Certificate of Gifted Education through the University of NSW). In fact, quite a few of our staff have done this.
- There is already effective extension provision for our identified High Potential Learners, through creative and robust programmes organised by Ms Geersen in our Prep School and Mr Massey in our Senior School. These splendid initiatives are amongst the best kept secrets at Shore. I have asked that our community be informed by shortly placing some of this information on our website.
- In some schools the attention to gifted students is focused entirely on external competitions they may enter. I regard these as very helpful but I also prefer to see differentiated attention by way of extension to such students within the regular classroom. In many ways, Shore is implementing this through streaming of classes into top sets, such that the most able students, in the company of others so gifted, may “fly” academically.
- Shore has far less of a problem than is experienced in most schools of gifted and highly able students “hiding”. We have sufficient highly able students at Shore to normalise achievement and we celebrate excellence, whether in the realms of academic, co-curricular, sport or various aspects of citizenship. Our academic results are almost invariably very significantly above any state norms.
Gifted students? At Shore we want to nourish, challenge and empower them. The first step is to identify them. Students with disabilities or who need special assistance? We will give them as much as we can manage. Students in the so-called middle, with neither spectacular gifts nor learning disabilities. We see you. We want to encourage you and give you the best education possible.
Dr John Collier
Headmaster
