When Smart Kids Underachieve in School: Practical Solutions for Teachers

Along with their academic needs, just as important, if not more important, are the social-emotional needs of gifted children. Many gifted students, in addition to having a heightened sense of thinking, have a heightened sense of emotion. Something that might seem innocuous to someone else might upset this gifted student. For example, if students are told to get in line by alphabetical order and two students are standing in the wrong place, a gifted student might take exception to this and want the problem to be fixed, while other students do not pay it any attention. Especially prevalent amongst gifted students is a strong sense of fairness. If something appears unfair, a gifted student is going to have a tougher time accepting it than other students might.

Because these social-emotional needs can be intense, addressing them is important. If they are not addressed, they can often come into conflict with the intellectual abilities of a gifted child and lead to underachievement. For example, there are some gifted students who have great difficulty collaborating with others. This may be because they feel the group is not listening to them, it might be that they perceive they are doing more work than everyone else, or it may be that they feel they are being treated in an unfair manner. This perceived feeling of unfairness might cause the student to shut down and not work with the group any longer. It can appear to the teacher that the student is being belligerent, but in that child’s mind, he is just refusing to continue to contribute to a situation that is not fair to him.

You might look at this list and think: Are these not issues for most children? The answer, of course, is yes, but with many gifted children, the issues are magnified.

Consider sensitivity to global problems. Many students, even high school students, are not very globally aware. They see the world only 5 feet in front of them and believe the biggest problems exist within this vacuum. There are some gifted children who worry excessively about large world problems, such as hunger, war, global warming, and homelessness. They actually stay up late at night, unable to get to sleep because they are concerned with something occurring on the other side of the planet. Silverman (2011) stated, “I have found that the higher the child’s IQ, the earlier moral concerns develop and the more profound effect they have on the child” (para. 8). Because it takes maturity and resources before the child can do anything about the problem, he is simply left to worry about it. This goes back to gifted students’ strong sense of fairness, which manifests itself into a moral sensitivity about injustices not only specific to them, but also to the world. It is not fair that girls in Africa cannot get an education or that Northern hairy-nosed wombats are becoming endangered in Australia.

Table 3 is a list of the social-emotional attributes and potential problems amongst gifted students.

Gifted children have quirks. These are simply part of the gifted students’ personalities. Some interpret these quirks as negative and want to change them. It is the attempt to change these that causes gifted students to question authority. According to the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC, n.d.b), you need to keep in mind when working with gifted students that:

TABLE 3
Social-Emotional Issues of Gifted Students

Attribute	Potential Problem When Attribute is Not Supported or Developed
High performance standards	Unhealthy perfectionism Severe procrastination Significant mood swings
Internal motivation	Anxiety Poor resiliency
Emotional intensity	Easily emotionally hurt by others Overly self-critical
Empathy	Can trigger emotional intensity
Moral maturity	Rigid sense of justice Difficulties with peer interactions
Self-actualization	Existential depression at a very young age
Resiliency	Poor resources to combat anxiety and/or emotional distress

Note. Adapted from Understanding the Social and Emotional Lives of Gifted Students (p. 55), by T. P. Hébert, 2011, Waco, TX: Prufrock Press. Copyright 2011 by Prufrock Press. Adapted with permission.

» giftedness can lead to the masking and misunderstanding of underlying problems;

» not all gifted children are alike, as each has a unique social-emotional profile;

» there is no definitive strategy for maintaining a child’s emotional equilibrium;

» parents need to model balance and set the tone to reduce stress and anxiety in their child’s life; and

» gifted children can and should be taught tools for dealing with the ebb and flow of life (para. 3).

Understanding these social-emotional needs can go a long way in getting an underachieving gifted student to begin to achieve.

Because facts can come quickly to gifted students, they develop a habit of blurting out an answer before anyone else has had the opportunity to process the question in an effort to show others how much they know. Teachers and other students can view this as a lack of discipline. There is supposed to be order in a classroom. Students are supposed to raise their hand before answering a question and then wait to be called on. Anything other than this can be perceived as a behavior issue. But that is just it—it is a perception. The student is not blurting out an answer in order to defy authority. He has something to share that he believes will benefit everyone else.

Sometimes this lack of impulse control leads to a questioning of authority. Some students may do this because they have a lack of respect for adults, they come from a home where talking back is common, or the teacher consistently gets them in trouble and it has turned into a power struggle. For gifted children, questioning of authority more than likely stems from their innate curiosity. They are not questioning authority because they do not want to do what is being asked of them. They question authority because they believe the teacher is wrong. If a teacher is talking about the layers of the Earth and mixes up the mantle and the crust, the gifted student might raise his hand and point out, “Hey, you’re wrong.” Some teachers will chalk this up to trying to embarrass them and defying authority, but the student is merely trying to make sure the class has the correct answer. Or there might be a student who questions a teacher’s interpretation of a poem because she thinks it might be representing something else. There will be times when a gifted student will know more about a topic than the teacher. This disrupts the notion that the teacher is the expert. Some teachers do not like being questioned or see it as disrespect. Some gifted students do come across as pompous or know-it-alls, so the teacher does not see the questioning as someone who is being curious. She sees it as someone who is challenging her.

In some ways, there is a certain level of arrogance many gifted students possess. After having teachers and parents for years telling them how smart they are, they come to believe it. That means that others are not as intelligent as them. Because they think they are better than others, many gifted students do not suffer fools gladly. In other words, if someone they deem as less intelligent than them is trying to put forth an idea, the gifted student is not going to be as willing to listen. There needs to be a distinction made between better at and better than. A gifted student may be better at certain academics. It does not mean he is better than other students. But gifted students can easily become frustrated by classmates who do not understand content as fast as they do or who offer ideas they see as inferior.

This also applies to collaboration. There are some gifted students who just do not collaborate with others very well. Their know-it-all attitude is off-putting to the other group members, and their need to control the group because they think their ideas are better is a source of frustration if the group does not follow their decisions. They hold everyone in the group to impossibly high standards (Silverman, 2007). It makes it difficult for them to work with others and causes frustration because everyone is not performing like they are.

Another source of frustration can be the teacher. Gifted students are sometimes smarter than the people who are teaching them. They come to resent the fact that this person who is less intelligent than them is the one who is trying to teach them and evaluating their progress. They do not defy authority so much as lack respect for it. This can also be a place where the questioning of authority rears its ugly head. Sometimes questioning is intellectual curiosity, and sometimes it is truly a challenge of the teacher because the student thinks he knows better.

A final source of frustration can come at the expense of school itself. If the student is given a lot of repetitive work that she already knows, she will begin to become frustrated by school and shut down, either doing the work in a haphazard manner with little regard to quality, or simply choosing not to do it at all. If this develops early in a child and unless there is a really engaging teacher in later years, she will develop a resentment of school no matter who is teaching. School becomes labeled as a source of frustration, and anything that happens there just becomes more fodder to add to the narrative: School does not teach her the things she wants to know. This, of course, leads to underachievement.

Because gifted students tend to be more knowledgeable than their peers, they develop a reputation for always having the correct answer. This reputation can stay with them and lead to the expectation that this student will always have the answer. That becomes a problem when the student does not have the answers that once came so quickly. If there is any fear his response will be incorrect, the gifted student will not attempt the answer in a public setting because he wants to preserve his reputation of having the correct answers.

As educators, we know that making mistakes is part of the learning process. So what happens to a student who does not want to make any mistakes for fear she will look incompetent? She is going to be denied this process of the learning. Part of this process is also about taking risks, such as trying something you are not quite sure about to see if it will work (revisit Figure 1 on p. 10). In an ideal situation, you want students to be in the risk zone of this target of learning. That is where the most learning is going to take place. If the gifted student is reluctant to take any risks because he sees them as dangers, however, his learning target will look like Figure 5.

The student does not want to wander outside of the comfort zone because he sees everything else as danger. The major problem: If he is in a comfort zone and knows everything that is being covered, nothing new is being learned. There is a reason we call them challenge programs. Students are supposed to be challenged, but there are some gifted students who consider taking a risk a danger. Because of this unwillingness to take risks, this student just stays in the comfort zone and does not grow as a learner.

Figure 5. The danger zone.

Images

These social-emotional needs can impede the academic progress of a gifted student if they become too intense. A teacher who is aware of the social-emotional needs of his gifted students and understands their quirks can go a long way toward the students feeling accepted and not allowing social-emotional problems to get in the way of their academic progress.

Some gifted students like to challenge the teacher. Let them. Make it part of the culture of your classroom. Students should know it is all right to challenge the teacher as long as it is in a positive and productive manner. In order for this to happen, you have to create opportunities where students can challenge you. This way, when they have something challenging they want to say to the teacher, they know it is a safe place to do so. One way you can do this is by handing out written assignments that have a mistake in them. The mistake can be a misspelled word or bad grammar, a math problem that is not set up correctly, or stating a fact incorrectly. Whatever you choose, challenge students to challenge you by finding the mistake.

There is a typo in the following parent letter. The first student who discovers it and provides the correction gets a piece of candy:

The Ivy Program is taking our first field trip of the year. The field trip will be on Wednesday, December 18. A bus will be coming around to each building and picking up students between 9:30 and 10:00. We will be traveling to the Museum of Art. It opens at 10:00. For the first part of the day, we will be taking part in the Look, Think, Discover Tour arranged at the museum. Their will be docents present to guide students through the exhibit. The second half of the day will involve students exploring the museum, finding a specific piece of art they would like to write a critique on.

In this case, the students would have to read through the letter and figure out that the incorrect version of their was used instead of the appropriate there.

How much can an elephant eat? Somewhere in this list of facts there is something wrong. Research and figure out which fact is incorrect, and correct it before answering the problem.

An elephant eats a lot of food in the course of a day. See if you can figure out just how much.

1. On average, an adult elephant will eat 300 pounds of food in a single day. How many kilograms of food would this be (1 kilogram = 2.7 pounds)?

2. Elephants are grazing animals, which means instead of eating a few large meals a day like humans, they are feeding and nibbling the entire day. An elephant can spend 20 hours a day feeding. How many pounds of food do they average in an hour?

3. Elephants live to be 70 years old. How many pounds of food would they consume in their lifetime?

4. Around 45% of an elephant’s diet is grass. How many pounds of grass would that be in a day?

5. Elephants also need to drink a lot of water. For every gallon of water they drink, they eat 6 pounds of food. How many gallons of water would they drink in a day?

Students would have to look through the facts and determine which ones might not be correct (they would learn through research that 1 kilogram actually equals 2.2 pounds).

Another way to allow students to challenge you is to take part in discussion or debate that allows the students to argue with you in a constructive manner. For example, in science class you are debating which is better, paper or plastic. You have taken the side of plastic and have asked a student to argue the side of paper. You are allowing the student to challenge your opinion in a constructive manner. Or, if you are talking about a piece of literature, there might be a discussion over the intent of a character. You might even play devil’s advocate to add fuel to the discussion and get students to a place where they feel comfortable challenging you.

A final way to allow students to challenge you is to allow them to make a case for their grade. Typically, (1) students work on an assignment, (2) the teacher grades it, and (3) when the teacher gives the grade back, the student looks at it and accepts it. There may be an occasional grade grubber seeking an extra point or two, but there is usually no room for discussion about the grade that was assigned. What if you gave students the chance to make a case for their grade? This would not involve them trying to convince you to assign them a different grade. Instead, this would involve sitting down and conferencing with students using a rubric, where they would place themselves in various categories and justify why. You might use a rubric like Figure 6, an example of a group presentation rubric.

Figure 6. Sample group presentation rubric.

Presentation Rubric

Overall

Content

Presentation

Product

Excellent

• Includes many details and examples to defend choices.

• Provides clear evidence that answers the learning outcomes on the students’ contracts.

• Spends more time answering the higher level thinking outcomes than the ones that can be answered with facts they looked up.

• Speakers present clearly and consistently throughout, and do not read to audience.

• Everyone is clear on what his or her role is, and transitions between learning are smooth.

• Presentation is organized in a professional manner, making it easy to follow what is being discussed.

• Product looks professional, like something that would be used by a teacher.

• Clearly adds to the content of the presentation through the use of visuals, demonstrations, or simulations.

• Product is easy for people to view and/or understand.

Good

• Includes details and examples to defend choices but is missing them in a few places where it would make the defense clearer.

• Provides evidence that answers most of the learning outcomes students have created on their contracts, but a couple are not as clear as they could be or need more evidence.

• Speakers present clearly most times, and read to audience only occasionally.

• Most everyone is clear on what his or her role is, but there are some transitions between learning outcomes that could be smoother.

• Presentation is organized, making it easy to follow what is being discussed, but it is not as professional as it could be.

• Product looks somewhat professional, like a good-quality school project.

• Adds to the content of the presentation through the use of visuals, demonstrations, or simulations, but there are opportunities where more could have been done.

Needs Improvement

• Includes few or no details and examples to defend choices.

• Does not provide much evidence that answers the learning outcomes students have created on their contracts. Instead, makes blanket statements that are not backed up.

• Speakers do not present clearly, often reading to the audience.

• Some are not clear on what their role is, and transitions between learning outcomes are cumbersome.

• Presentation is not organized, making it difficult to follow what is being discussed at any given time.

• Display does not look professional, and looks like something an elementary student would make.

• Does not add to the content of the presentation through the use of visual, demonstrations, or simulations.

• Product is not easy for people to view/hear, leaving many details out or unclear.

A student would then have to decide which level she falls into under each category, justifying her answer by citing examples from her performance and how they match up with the descriptors. Any arguments she makes need to be based on the rubric. For instance, if the student places herself in the “good” level in the “presentation” category, she would have to make a case for how the presentation was organized but not as professional as could be, and admit to mistakes in consistency of her speaking and transitions. By grading in this manner, students will feel they had some sort of say in their grade because they were a part of the process.

Challenging the teacher does not work if sometimes you let students challenge you and other times you forbid it. You might fear that you are opening up a can of worms by allowing students to challenge you. The students might ask why they have to learn about something. Of course, if you have trouble justifying why you are asking them to do a particular activity, should you be having them do it? By controlling and allowing for challenging, you do not create a power struggle. Instead, you create an environment where students are comfortable challenging their teacher without resorting to talking back or becoming discipline problems.

Sometimes gifted students just need someone to listen to them. This might be a peer, a family member, or even a teacher. One way you can facilitate this listening is to arrange for advisory groups. This involves gathering a group of gifted students and letting them talk about things that are on their minds. The topics could be as simple as worrying about an upcoming test, or as serious as depression. You would be responsible for providing the space, giving structure to the conversation, and monitoring progress, but you have to be careful that you do not dominate the conversation or prevent the free flow of ideas and thoughts.

In 10th grade, for example, you might identify a cluster of 15 gifted students and invite them to be part of the group, making very clear its purpose. You arrange a time, maybe during their study period, when other students are receiving intervention, or during the latter half of their lunch. You also arrange a space in your classroom or a conference room, but it needs to be somewhere you can close the door and other students and teachers are not going to come in and interrupt. Students sit at desks or chairs you have arranged in a circle. On each desk is an index card. You ask each student to write something that is bothering him or her about school. You can provide a couple of examples, such as “Too much homework in chemistry class is stressing me out,” “My geometry teacher doesn’t seem to like me,” or “I’m worried about getting into college.” Collect the cards and read them aloud, not indicating who wrote each, but asking for some feedback on each issue. Like kernels snapping into white, fluffy pieces of popcorn, the conversation might start slowly at first, but then it will pick up steam and begin to pop. Your role is to maintain the momentum of the discussion so it has enough time to grow and take off. Once this happens, the discussion will take on a life of its own, and you can sit back and watch as students resolve their own problems, knowing they are being listened to.

Be sure to set norms for how students behave in the group. These should be established together. You can give students 5–7 sticky notes and provide them with the following prompt: What do you need in order to be successful in this group? Have students write one need per sticky note. After giving them some time to do this, invite them up to the whiteboard or a piece of butcher paper hanging on the wall and have them cluster their sticky notes with other students’ similar norms. If eight people had something about being respectful, group those sticky notes together. Or maybe half of the group thought it was important to participate. Fairly quickly you will see what is important to the group as a whole. If there is an outlier sticky note with no other similar notes, then the issue is specific to that student and may not be a group norm. From these clusters, create anywhere from 5–7 norms the group can agree to (many more than seven can cause things to become confusing). It might look something like this:

Notice a few of these norms are negative in tone and include “no” and “don’t.” Try to encourage students to keep things in a positive tone. “No teacher bashing” becomes “Keep your criticism of teachers professional.” “Don’t be mean” becomes “Keep your comments positive,” and “Don’t be late” becomes “Be on time.” Review the norms at the beginning of each advisory meeting. The group should police itself.

There may be times the advisory group wants to talk about things without a teacher in the room. This should be an option for the group. If appropriate, you should be willing to step out into the hallway until you are invited back in. This might allow students to open up even more and help each other with issues.

If you have a magnet program for gifted students, you can divide all of the students into advisory groups of no more than 20, providing a teacher to head up each one. You can even invite the principal and school counselor to lead a group to keep them small and intimate. Have advisory groups meet about every other week and be informal, where students bring up all of the issues, or there could be monthly themes that are discussed in the groups. A year full of topics might look something like this:

Or, you might use an existing structure, such as The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens by Sean Covey (2014). Each month a different habit could be focused on and talked about:

No matter how you decide to set up your advisory group, it is a nice outlet for students to have. Many times we focus only on the academic, so having some time carved out of the school day to allow them to address social-emotional needs will make for more balanced and well-adjusted students.

To allow students who avoid taking risks to learn, a classroom needs to be a safe place. You need to create this environment—a place where it is okay to make mistakes. That means:

» not berating or teasing a student who gives the wrong answer in classroom discussion,

» making sure there is a classroom management system in place where other students allow mistakes to be made, and

If the only time you assess a student is when he is taking a high-stakes test, the student is going to feel that there is no wiggle room for mistakes because each one lowers his grade. There needs to be other opportunities to show the student has mastered the content other than just pencil-to-paper tests.

One way to encourage risk-taking in the classroom is to employ inquiry-based learning, which involves students pursuing topics they are interested in and exploring them more in depth. They must create a product that shows what they have learned about the topic. In a nutshell, it is learning by experiencing. Students are not just absorbing learning, but rather they are building it. In order to use inquiry learning in the classroom, there are a few conditions that have to be met (Grotzer, n.d.):

2. the curriculum needs to allow for some uncertainty and ambiguity about exactly what children will learn, and

3. students need opportunities to learn forms of thinking that embody risk-taking and openness.

Consider a language arts class reading The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells. There are tons of themes in the book, including foreignness, warfare, rules and order, community, exile, power, foolishness, fear, technology, modernization, fate, free will, etc. Have students pick a theme they are interested in learning more about. Different students will pick various themes that speak to them, meaning everyone in the class might be working on something different. You can even have them form groups based on their interests. Then, have students create essential questions for their chosen theme. For the theme of foreignness, for example:

2. The Martians are obviously foreign to the humans, but are there times in the book when the humans seem foreign to the Martians?

Then, using these themes, have students create a radio broadcast that encapsulates them by drawing parallels to real-life incidents. A class discussion about Orson Welles’s 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds, the use of propaganda, and the controversy it stirred up might be necessary. Students might add to their essential questions:

1. How do people deal with foreignness when they first encounter the Martians? Can you think of any instances in history where people have had similar experiences?

2. The Martians are obviously foreign to the humans, but are there times in the book when the humans seem foreign to the Martians? Do you see any parallels between this and our views on immigration and terrorism?

3. How does foreignness lead to war in the book? Can you draw a parallel to a historical war that was caused by foreignness?

During this process of inquiry-based learning, the classroom needs to be an environment that supports risk-taking. This means that (Grotzer, n.d.):

» “mistakes” are valued for the learning they provide and as natural parts of the inquiry process,

» theorizing and considering evidence is considered more important than a “right answer,”

» ideas are discussed for their explanatory potential, ability to solve the problem, and so on as opposed to being called “good” or “bad,” “right” or “wrong” (Sec. II, para. 5).

Part of a teacher’s job is to focus on the academics of his or her students, but equal attention should be paid to the social-emotional needs. If a seemingly bright student is becoming a behavior problem, reflect on the way the classroom is set up. Is the environment one in which the students can challenge the teacher in a productive manner, or one where the students feel safe to take risks? Having an outlet for students to share their feelings, such as an advisory group, can go a long way in making gifted students feel heard and understand they are not alone.

If you would like to read more in depth about one of these strategies or topics, a good resource is I’m Not Just Gifted: Social-Emotional Curriculum for Guiding Gifted Children by Christine Fonseca.