Gifted and going places

Geoffrey Hoggins enjoys the extension offered in classes for gifted students. Picture / Greg Bowker

Geoffrey Hoggins, 12, is absorbed, ferociously focused on controlling the vehicle in front of him, but noticing what happens in a scientist-in-the-making sort of way - part detached observer, part kid at play.

"This is one of the things I love about tracks. It's actually got something stuck under the rear but it's still actually moving."

He's talking about the elaborate motorised Lego contraption he has built and programmed from his computer to drive around by remote control.

The "explorer" has just climbed a pile of Lego bricks and pieces and, despite the obstruction, continues to crawl on its tank-like treads.

Geoffrey is fascinated. He's been mucking around with gearing and getting the vehicle to climb various inclines. He shows us how he uses one track to keep climbing when it slips.

Geoffrey is gifted - something he realised in Year Three or Four. "My teacher helped me see that."

It wasn't a surprise to his mother Shona because she has three other gifted children. Not that it has been an easy process.

Despite Geoffrey being "globally gifted" - advanced in both language and maths - earlier teachers didn't see those attributes, possibly because of his problems with handwriting.

There were also some co-ordination difficulties and a period of stammering.

"He couldn't get his thoughts straight to talk," says Shona. "He was struggling to get his handwriting right and wasn't thinking about what he was doing."

Shona resolved the issues, first getting her son independently tested for giftedness and then remedying the co-ordination problem with a private therapist.

Some of the teachers at Ellerslie School were understanding about the handwriting, allowing Geoffrey to present assignments done on the computer. Shona also found music helped a lot with sorting out sequencing problems.

These days Geoffrey loves attending gifted kids' holiday programmes - particularly ones on matrices. His handwriting is now good and he's involved in sport - tennis, squash, sailing and judo. He plays the piano and flute and is looking forward to King's College this year, having won a scholarship there.

Being gifted, he says, is good and bad. "For a start everyone comes and asks you stuff. In class you end up finding yourself with a lot of free time on your hands. And you also end up, at times, getting rather bored because you've done everything and checked it and nobody else has finished and the teacher can't really do individual stuff at that stage. But I usually find stuff to do."

For Geoffrey, a good teacher is somebody"who knows that you're gifted" and who can give him "stuff that's not boring".

It can be annoying to keep on doing boring stuff over and over again. "Once I've learnt it, I've learnt it."

Shona agrees: "Teachers find it hard to see that gifted children can learn a concept rather than have to practise things from the ground up."

In the world of gifted children, Geoffrey's story is not unusual, as the anecdotes on the New Zealand Association for Gifted Children website attest.

Stories abound about gifted children not being recognised by their teachers, and about schools rejecting parents' pleas - even when they present evidence from educational psychologists.

Rosemary Cathcart of the privately funded George Parkyn National Centre for Gifted Education, noted in an article in 2003 that some researchers believe more than 50 per cent of gifted children are misdiagnosed and "given other labels and inappropriate and sometimes harmful treatments". She calls giftedness the "mystery condition".

But all that's about to change this year when new National Administration Guidelines (referred to as Nags in school administrator jargon) for gifted children come into effect.

From term 1, it is mandatory for all state and state-integrated schools to demonstrate how they are meeting the needs of their "gifted and talented learners", just as they are required to do for students who are not achieving, who are at risk of not achieving, or who have special needs.

As Steve Benson, senior manager of the Ministry of Education Curriculum Teaching and Learning group points out, the new Nags mean dissatisfied parents of gifted children now have a legitimate avenue to raise their concerns.

"You could go to the school's board of trustees and say, 'Under the new regulations you're now required to respond to the needs of gifted and talented children, and you're not'."

Some fear the perhaps unfortunately acronymed Nags will provide an open invitation for pushy parents to harangue schools about their children being gifted.

But Benson sees the new rules as a point of conversation between parent and school.

Roger Moltzen of the University of Waikato's Department of Human Development and Counselling, who was on the working party advising the Government about gifted education, says the idea that every parent thinks their child is gifted is a myth. Parents are more likely to underestimate their children's ability.

The Nags require all schools to identify gifted kids and to develop an education policy and a programme for them. Most welcome the change, but there are concerns the guidelines are too vaguely worded, and that, like NCEA, they're another example of overburdening teachers and that their real agenda is to "mainstream" gifted education - in the process sidelining it to mediocrity .

Stephen Thoms, of the Association of Gifted Children, is concerned that teachers do not have all the necessary skills to properly identify gifted children.

"It's a bit like asking a teacher to identify a kid with poor eyesight.

"The teacher may have their suspicions, but they send the child to a specialist to be sure."

He's concerned that the Nags don't have requirements for specialist testing.

Moltzen disagrees: "I don't think it is necessary for an external expert to come in to identify gifted and talented. No, I don't think that needs to be a specialist area that is limited to experts. With appropriate professional development schools are very capable of identifying gifted and talented students."

The Nags also avoid any prescriptive definition of giftedness - leaving it to each school to come up with its own definition.

"We emphasise the fact that this [giftedness] is largely a social construct," says Moltzen. So it's fluid and has to take into consideration different cultural perspectives. For example, the way many Maori have viewed exceptional abilities is different to the way Pakeha view them. The definitions we look at now are much more inclusive, much more liberal than existed 20 to 30 years ago where gifted and talented was considered a point on an IQ score."

Today, "gifted and talented" covers a wide range, taking in social and interpersonal abilities, as well as abilities in the visual-spatial and bodily kinesthetic areas, creativity and traditional intellectual academic pursuits.

"The notion that this group is 1 per cent of the school population is pretty dated. The percentage ranges on the definition you choose to use, but it's probably 10 to 15 per cent. Some researchers go as high as 25 per cent."

Does that mean streaming children according to their abilities? The Nags say no, emphasising that most teaching of gifted children is to happen within the regular classroom.

"Our commitment as a country philosophically to the notion of inclusion means the emphasis is on supporting teachers to be able to include in schools and regular classrooms those with special needs.

"The model is definitely not about separate and removed provision - in the way of experts coming in and working with these students," says Moltzen.

Sue Barriball, acting director of the George Parkyn Centre, sees the Nags as an expansion of the mainstreaming ideal - that all children will have their needs catered for in the regular class room.

"If they're going to mainstream special needs children, those at the other end of the spectrum - children with special abilities - will also be mainstreamed."

Possibly good in theory, but not in practice. Thoms agrees: "Because of this idea of one size fits all - that the teacher can handle every situation in a classroom, there's a lack of flexibility."

At the heart of the debate is whether gifted kids should be withdrawn from the regular classroom to attend special programmes such as the one-day-a-week schools run by George Parkyn and the Gifted Kids Programme. Opponents say withdrawal consigns the gifted to the ghetto and creates an unhealthy hothouse atmosphere.

Proponents say like minds thrive together. "There's clear research that when gifted kids can work with other gifted kids, there are benefits to them," says Benson. "The disadvantage is that what they're doing is out of sight of all the kids who are left behind who would also have benefited from the kind of experiences they're having - it's doing the trade-off between those two things."

The trade-off allows for a range of responses including schools using existing one-day-a-week external programmes in conjunction with regular classes, and various in-house accelerated and enrichment classes.

The downside is that the external programmes are not fully funded, which means parents have to pay.

George Parkyn has scaled weekly fees related to parents' income ranging from $25 to $55. It has also received some government funding for 30 scholarships.

The Gifted Kids Programme funding comes from contributing schools, the Ministry of Education and sponsorship by private individuals and corporates.

When children are accepted, parents and caregivers are asked to nominate an amount by way of a donation.

Teaching at one-day programmes is less focused on the school curriculum and gives considerable scope for kids to choose not only the topics they're working on, but also how they go about learning them.

The classrooms, often attached to existing schools, are also typically well resourced with internet access and computer software and hardware. Class numbers are smaller and lessons often involve visits to various locations or bringing in experts.

"Our curriculum focuses very much around thinking skills, teaching kids strategies for thinking - skills they can transfer to learning in and out of school," says Jo Young, a teacher in the Gifted Kids Programme.

"The teaching is very different. Kids have a chance to chase their passion. Behaviour issues are at a minimum. We're lucky we can get on with real teaching and learning."

With fewer resources, larger class sizes and the demands and of meeting curriculum requirements, it's hard to see how regular classroom teachers can compete with the gifted programmes.

Benson argues the external programmes are complementary and not in competition with existing schools.

Moltzen says with the right support, teachers in regular classrooms can provide much of what occurs in withdrawal programmes.

But if gifted teaching programmes are so good, why isn't all teaching that way? And, if as the research shows like minds together produces great results, why not have a full-time gifted students school?

A proposal to do just that - a state-funded school for gifted students of all backgrounds and especially those from low decile areas, to be called Gifted Kids Junior High, was rejected by Education Minister Trevor Mallard in late 2003.

Why? The office of Associate Education Minister David Benson-Pope says the ministry was concerned about the effect such a school would have on the rolls of other schools in the area, especially the balance of pupils in nearby schools.

In other words, segregating gifted students doesn't fit with egalitarian educational (and political) ideology that says mainstreaming allows for better social development.

There are problems, too, with how the selection process would occur.

"It's quite a contested process on how you segregate," says Benson.

Meanwhile, Geoffrey is working out how to make the sensor at the back of his vehicle measure the steepness of inclines.

If he could, he'd like to be in a class - such as the holiday programmes he attends - where everyone has similar abilities. At times he finds it hard to explain what he's talking about in simple language.

"I'd probably prefer a class where everybody was at least moderately gifted because then there will always be somebody who understands."