Cause 3

NOT HAVING PEERS

Students worry about social acceptance because everyone wants to belong. It is human nature—from the forming of tribes in prehistoric times to people who obsess over how many friends they have on Facebook. Compared to typical students, gifted children may have far fewer options for peers. A typical 8-year-old might want to talk about why dinosaurs are so cool, but a gifted 8-year-old might be curious about what caused their extinction or how they evolved. By definition of being gifted and being in the top 5% of their age-mates when it comes to cognitive ability, there are not a lot of kids like them. Depending on the district the student goes to, there might be even less than 5% of his or her age-mates to consider as peers.

This is why you often see gifted children, even younger ones, preferring the company of adults, such as their teacher. These are people they can have a conversation with. If they try to talk to age-mates who do not have similar interests, they become labeled as weird. James Delisle, in his book, Parenting Gifted Kids: Tips for Raising Happy and Successful Children (2006), talked about how many times gifted students do not feel normal. They are often labeled the opposite—but no child should be made to feel abnormal. A better term to use is atypical. Thus, gifted students who are trying to fit in sometimes make one of two decisions (Fonseca, 2016):

1. they hide their talents and try to fit in with the rest of the crowd, playing dumb to look cool; or

2. they take it to the other extreme and embrace their differences, becoming an outcast who is susceptible to bullying (p. 8).

Both of these situations need the careful eye of an educator who recognizes and offers the support needed. For the first, it takes a teacher who sees the potential in this student and helps coax it out without calling him out in front of his peers. If a teacher acknowledges publicly the intelligence of this student, he will just go deeper into his act, showing his friends he is just like them. Bullying, a nationwide epidemic for quite some time, requires a teacher who sees the atypical behavior of the gifted student as how she interacts with the world. The teacher should be teaching tolerance instead of trying to get the student to change in order to fit in. By trying to make them fit in, the teacher is devaluing the uniqueness of the child.

When Gifted Students Only Have Age-Mates

For many gifted children, there is a large difference between age-mates and those they would consider peer-mates. Age-mates are other children the same age as them. Growing up, students are often placed with their age-mates, whether it be for school, sports, or social reasons. This is done because they are usually the same age, with the same interests and hobbies. A gifted child, however, may not have the same interests and hobbies. Gifted students, with their advanced learning skills, might know everything there is to know about space, but an age-mate might not have the same body of knowledge. If you think about your own school career, how many times were you regularly mixed with children of different ages? Unless you went to a Montessori school where they mix grades into one large class, probably rarely. Schools, instead, advance students with their age-mates, making the assumption that these students have the most in common with those who were born around the same time. It would be more organic to allow children to stray into another grade in order to find common social and intellectual ground, but instead, students are shoehorned into the same grade and expected to find peers.

A peer is someone who shares the same passion, humor, and drive as you (Delisle, 2006). A peer-mate can many times be an age-mate, but there are times when this is not the case. This is especially the case with gifted children who find more in common with people older than them. The cruel trick society plays on these gifted students, however, is that older kids who might be their peer-mates do not want to hang around with a much younger kid. Essentially, these students are peerless. School can be a very lonely place for some children, and the lack of peers may cause a gifted child to begin to resent school. When this happens, he stops caring about school, which causes underachievement.

When Gifted Students Play Dumb to Fit In

Because they seek the approval of their peers, some gifted students hide their abilities. Why would they do this? Just listen to the announcements at any junior high or high school. They are rife with the accomplishments of sports, and yet rarely do they contain anything about academic accomplishments. The football stadium is full of people on Friday nights, but how many people attend an academic quiz bowl or come to watch the robotics team? How many media members are present when an athlete signs a letter of intent, and yet when a student receives an academic scholarship, no one reports that. We have trophy cases at the front of most schools, yet where are the acknowledgements for the academic endeavors, the very things schools are supposed to foster in children? Newspapers have a whole section reporting the daily results of high school athletics, yet how many articles are about the good academic work of students? You do not see Bill Gates or Stephen Hawking promoting soda in commercials. You see LeBron James and Kobe Bryant. It is way cooler to be a star athlete in your school than it is to be on the science Olympiad team. That being said, if an athletic science whiz has to choose between one or the other, which one do you think he is going to pick?

If a student wants to be socially accepted by his peers, he stands a much better chance of doing so through his athletic accomplishments than any academic ones. Most students can tell you the captain of the football team, but can they tell you who has the highest GPA in the class or who is taking the most AP courses? We show children time and time again that as a society we value athletics, as we worship professional athletes and pay them millions of dollars, so why wouldn’t the social strata in schools reflect this worldview?

This is especially true with males, of whom more than 50% are underachievers (Weiss, 1972). This is because being smart does not fit the predominant macho image that prevails in junior high and high school. This desire to fit in by playing the role gifted students think will allow them to be accepted can cause them to suppress their academic abilities. It is simply not cool to be smart, so in order to meet these expectations, students play dumb, not reaching their potential.

When Gifted Students Are Bullied for Doing Well in Academics

Bullying is problem for kids of all ages. DoSomething.org (n.d.), a website devoted to the prevention of bullying, indicated that more than 3.2 million students in the United States are victims of bullying every year. Victims of this bullying come in all shapes and sizes, but it is especially prevalent toward gifted students. According to a study of 432 students in 11 states (Peterson & Ray, 2006), more than two thirds of academically talented eighth graders say they have been bullied at school. As a result, one in 10 children say they have tried to hide their science ability, and nearly one in five girls and more than one in 10 boys deliberately underachieve in math.

This bullying can be especially harsh on minority gifted students. Lisa M. Williams, coauthor of a study on bullying of high-achieving students, indicated the stereotype many hold about Black and Latino students is that they do not do well in school (as cited in American Sociological Association, 2011). Because they do not fall into this stereotype, high-achieving Black and Latino students may be especially vulnerable to bullies: Although all of the students who reported being bullied in the 10th grade saw a slight decrease in GPA by 12th grade, the change was more pronounced for Black and Latino students who tended to earn high grades (Huffington Post, 2011). Black students saw a 0.3-point GPA decrease in 12th grade from a 3.5 GPA in ninth grade, before they were bullied. High-achieving Latinos who were bullied experienced a 0.5-point drop in GPA from a 3.5 their freshman year (Cohn & Canter, 2003).

The effects of bullying are tough on any students, but, because of their increased intensity of emotions, gifted students may (Gordon, 2016):

1. view their academic gifts as flaws,

2. hide their giftedness,

3. take responsibility for the bullying,

4. become perfectionists,

5. experience strong reactions,

6. struggle to understand the bullying,

7. become self-critical, or

8. lose interest in school.

Many of these are causes of underachievement.

When Gifted Students Feel Bad for Being Smarter Than Peers

In the last chapter, the intensity of feelings of gifted children was discussed at length. Gifted students’ feelings are magnified. So, if a gifted student gets angry, it might be more explosive than a nongifted child. On the other hand, if a gifted student has empathy for something, he or she has an intense feeling of empathy, which is why many gifted students worry about global problems. This also applies to empathy for their peers. When another child is having a bad day or is sad, a gifted child is likely to pick up on it and offer ways to help get the other student through it. The gifted child feels bad that one of his classmates is feeling bad. This empathy can sometimes expand to the point where a gifted student feels bad that he is smarter than a peer. In his mind, if he gets a question correct, it means that everyone else did not, and he might feel bad as a result. In order to let other students feel good about themselves, this gifted student will deliberately do poorly.

Practical Solutions

Strategy 1: Magnet Programs

Because gifted students have difficulty finding peer-mates amongst their age-mates, and the older students who could be their peer-mates do not want to associate with kids younger than them, the best chance of finding a peer-mate who is also an age-mate is by connecting with other gifted students. The problem is that the pool of gifted kids may be a small one. Because gifted students are in the top 5% of their age-mates when it comes to cognitive ability, 95% of other students are not a good match. Finding that student who also falls into the 5% can be a challenge.

Imagine a school district with seven elementary schools. At each of these schools is a handful of gifted students spread throughout the various classrooms in each building. At best you have two, maybe three, gifted students in a class together who can be viewed as peers. Sometimes there might just be one. What if you took all of these gifted students from all of the seven buildings and pull them into one program where they are together? This is called a magnet program, and it pulls all of the highly gifted students from the district, or maybe from the county, and puts them in one classroom. The teacher who is hired to teach these students would ideally be a gifted intervention specialist (GIS), and these students would be able to move at a much faster pace, because everyone in the class can process information at a quicker rate. In an even more perfect world, a district would have enough students to create a gifted team, with a different, highly qualified GIS teaching each subject.

There are many academic benefits to setting up a gifted magnet program, but the biggest advantage is putting a group of like-minded individuals together, providing them with peers. Students who usually feel atypical in other settings then feel typical. They see others who act like them, talk like them, and think like them. Things that were quirks to other children and teachers become commonplace, and the students feel accepted.

There are other benefits to having all of the gifted students together in a magnet program. You can:

» accelerate them as a group;

» put them into advisory groups to address social-emotional needs;

» focus professional development on teaching techniques especially effective at challenging gifted students, such as higher order thinking;

» create competition, which can raise the bar;

» go for depth rather than breadth of material;

» identify a pool of potential National Merit Scholars;

» mix them according to ability, not age;

» expose them to academic extracurriculars, such as clubs;

» provide academic rigor designed for higher level thinkers;

» build a positive self-image;

» nurture a small school community;

» promote 21st-century survival skills;

» develop leadership skills;

» foster creativity; and

» prepare them for high school, college, and beyond.

There are other models a magnet program can take depending on the available qualified teaching staff, resources, and cost.

Model 1. Students are pulled from various classes and grouped based on a single subject and offered a specialized curriculum designed to enhance their abilities and improve their skills. For example, there might be a math program for fifth graders where all of the gifted students from the school come to one class. It could be a language arts class or even a science class where they work on a specific program, such as robotics or Invention Convention/League. In order for this to be a gifted magnet program, it would be best if all of the students have been identified in the area of focus. You would most likely only need a single teacher to offer this class.

Model 2. Students are bussed to a single school, one day a week, in order to receive services with other gifted students. They attend their home school the other 4 days. This class could be enrichment where the teacher spends a majority of the time challenging students with projects and content that are not so subject-specific but rather crosscurricular. This would need a single teacher, a generalist. Because it is only one day a week, you might be able to offer it to many schools across the district depending on its size and demand.

Model 3. Eighth graders in the district all attend one school and have all academic subject areas offered to them. This grade is focused on because it is a transition year. In this case, students are getting ready to start high school, so the magnet program can be designed to meet the needs of these students, such as developing the study skills to handle rigorous high school courses like Advanced Placement (AP) or College Credit Plus (CCP). Students are shown the pathways available for students of their intellectual ability and counseled on what their paths might look like.

Model 4. The magnet school is comprised of several different grades. Students enter the program at its earliest grade and stay with the program until it runs its course. For example, a program could recruit students from grades 5–8. This magnet program is housed at one of the schools in the district and becomes a school within a school. The program can fall under the umbrella of the building principal, or a gifted coordinator can oversee its administrative responsibilities. In a program such as this, teachers would be subject-specific and loop with the students for multiple grades. The language arts teacher may teach fifth and sixth grade, but the social studies teacher might teach fifth through eighth. By looping, teachers really get to know the students and their capabilities, and are better able to challenge them in subsequent years.

Model 5. The district or county is large enough to make one of its schools a magnet gifted school. Students from around the district are transported to this school. Everyone, from the teachers to the administrators, to the support staff, such as counselors and psychologists, has been trained to work with gifted students. The curriculum, but also the unified arts, extracurricular activities, and the schedule are all designed with gifted students and their capabilities in mind. By setting up the magnet school in this manner, if you have a sixth grader doing eighth-grade math, she simply attends the eighth-grade math course at the time she would be in her sixth-grade class. Or you could have third and fourth graders in the same language arts class working at the same pace. This teaming model would allow the curriculum to be based on ability rather than age. And, because the entire school is designed like this, you do not have any awkwardness when a 10-year-old is in an eighth-grade math class with students 3 years older than him having conversations about things ahead of his development. Instead, there might be several students who qualify for the eighth-grade class as 10-year-olds, so there is a group of like-minded age-mates to relate to.

As beneficial as gifted magnet programs can be, there are realities associated with them. With so much money being spent toward special education, many states receive little to no funding for gifted programs, meaning a district would have to foot the bill. There are those who would argue that gifted magnet programs are elitist and are simply a method to further separate the haves from the have-nots. Would not all students, no matter their ability, benefit from a program such as this? Magnet programs, however, are especially valuable to gifted students because they provide a community of gifted learners where these students are able to locate peer-mates as well as age-mates.

Strategy 2: Cluster Grouping

A more cost-effective way of placing gifted students with others like them is cluster grouping. Four to six gifted students are assigned to a heterogeneous classroom within their grade. This within-class grouping places gifted students with students of other achievement levels but not too wide a range. The teacher then differentiates within her classroom, allowing her to meet the needs of these gifted students and for gifted students to have peer-mates.

Table 4 is an example of several classrooms where cluster grouping is possible. Cluster grouping cuts down on the amount of differentiation a teacher has to do. In this scenario, the teacher of each class only has to differentiate for three skill levels. In Class 1, the teacher just has to worry about gifted, average, and below average. The five gifted students grouped into this class will have a good chance of finding someone who thinks like they do. Notice how there are no far-below-average students in this class. The teacher can challenge the gifted students without having to worry about remediation. He could address this with station rotations designed to challenge students at the different levels or projects that are scaffolded across the three levels. Similarly, the teacher in Class 3 only has to concern herself with high-achieving, average, and far-below-average students. Then, her strategies would differentiate across these skill levels. You will notice in this scenario there are no high achievers placed in the classroom with the gifted students.

TABLE 4
Sample Classrooms Where Cluster Grouping Is Possible

Without cluster grouping, the gap in the classroom between abilities becomes much wider, making it more difficult because the middle moves. Figure 7 is an example of a classroom with a lot of varying abilities. Notice the special education and gifted students begin to get pulled thin while the majority of learning is going in the middle. If you group students with higher abilities in a class together, the spectrum looks Figure 8. Because the gap is not as wide, the gifted are closer to the crux of learning.

Figure 7. Varying abilities.

Figure 8. A class with more high achievers.

It is important to have the right teacher with the right cluster of students. Look back at Table 4. In Class 1, you would want someone who is a trained gifted intervention specialist. However, depending on the state, these can be hard to come by. If you cannot have a GIS in the position, having a teacher with a track record of working successfully with high-level thinking students would be best. In order for a clustering group to be successful (Rogers, 1991):

» the teacher must receive specialized training,

» the teacher must be motivated to work with gifted children,

» the curriculum for the cluster must be appropriately differentiated, and

» the remainder of the class cannot contain difficult or demanding students.

The first three all have to do with having the right teacher in the gifted cluster. The last key for success deals with the grouping of the students.

Table 5 shows what it looks like when students are spread across the classrooms more evenly. In this alignment, the teacher has to be able to differentiate over five different skill levels. This makes it much more difficult, and many times, because it is such a wide expanse, teachers teach to the middle. In this case, the teacher will be focused on the average student with the far-below-average students having to catch up, but the couple of gifted students will be bored because they are not being challenged.

The main benefit of clustering is its economic advantage. Other advantages include (Winebrenner & Brulles, 2008):

» challenging gifted students every day, all day;

» creating learning and leadership opportunity for all students;

» empowering all teachers by expanding awareness and providing preparation;

» ongoing assessment of students’ strengths and needs; and

» providing all students with opportunities for extended learning.

TABLE 5
Sample Classrooms Where Cluster Grouping Is More Difficult

In addition to challenging gifted students, a cluster will give them more opportunities to find like-minded peers with whom they can relate.

Strategy 3: Acceleration

Although acceleration is not as effective as having a gifted magnet school, it is more cost-effective. Acceleration is sort of like an a la carte version of gifted services for gifted students who are able to move through content at a quicker pace than others. This can come in a variety of forms:

» grade skipping;

» early entrance to kindergarten;

» college-level classes such as AP, CCP, or International Baccalaureate (IB); and

» subject-based acceleration.

Accelerated students are usually placed in classes with older students who are handling more advanced curriculum. Because they are in these classes with peers rather than age-mates, these students can find people who are academically on the same level, giving them something in common to talk about. A student who is particularly skilled in math might be able to breeze through his ninth-grade algebra curriculum. He is then is placed in a 10th-grade geometry class so that the level of the curriculum lines up with his ability. This becomes easier at the high school level with so many choices for classes and different pathways for students to take. It is more challenging for younger students where classes are more prescribed. If a fourth-grade student is ready for fifth-grade math, but in his or her district, fifth grade is at the middle school, is the district going to bus the student from the elementary school over to the middle school for that one class? Most likely not. That is why a gifted magnet program can be the ideal choice.

There is a misconception that having a child skip a grade or content can be harmful to her social-emotional needs. Countless studies have shown, however, that more often than not, skipping is going to result in a good experience for the child: In a study of high-ability children who had been accelerated, 71% reported satisfaction with their acceleration experience (Lubinski, Webb, Morelock, & Benbow, 2001). Of the participants who reported they were unsatisfied, the majority indicated they would have preferred more acceleration.

These students are able to find like-minded peers and actually begin to develop a higher self-concept, both academically and socially. Lee, Olszewski-Kubilius, and Thomson (2012) studied a sample of students who had been whole-grade accelerated. They found that the students who were younger in age than their peers were not different in their perceived interpersonal competence. They were able to make friends just as easily as the typical students, perhaps more easily than if they had not been accelerated, because they were now with peer-mates.

Conclusion

The strategies shared in this chapter would be challenging for a teacher to implement alone. More than likely, you will want your building administrator, gifted services coordinator, or curriculum department to help figure out which model works best for your district. The benefits of putting gifted students with others like them have been studied at length. A study by Steenbergen-Hu, Makel, and Olszewski-Kubilius (2016) found that:

» In comparison to their peers who received traditional non-ability-grouped instruction, students benefited from within-class grouping, which often involves teachers assigning students to several small homogeneous groups for instruction based on prior achievement or learning capacities.

» The benefits were even greater when students were grouped across grade levels for specific subjects, especially reading, and when high-achieving and gifted students were grouped together for instruction.

» Students who accelerated their learning through various methods, such as skipping grades, taking Advanced Placement (AP) courses and exams, or entering school or college earlier, significantly outperformed their non-accelerated peers of the same age, and performed just as well as older students who were not accelerated. (para. 4)

Ultimately, having children in a gifted magnet program gives students the best chance to find age-mates who are also peer-mates. Cluster grouping will give children a few students they might be able to relate to, while acceleration will find them peer-mates but not necessarily age-mates. A gifted magnet program, especially one that services multiple grades, will create a larger pool of peers.

If you would like to read more in depth about one of these strategies or topics, a good resource is Total School Cluster Grouping and Differentiation: A Comprehensive, Research-Based Plan for Raising Student Achievement and Improving Teacher Practices by Marcia Gentry.