Another SENG-related article is in the mainstream media. Huffington Post. This article is about misdiagnosis and dual diagnosis and the need for increased awareness. I am giving free and full permission to repost or reprint in any gifted-related newsletter or website. The more attention this receives, the more the media will take notice of the complex needs of gifted individuals and the parallels with special needs. Thank you for all you do for gifted!

The article is “The Misunderstood Face of Giftedness”.

I believe it’s important that parents and educators not pathologize gifted children’s actions and feelings when it may just be typical giftedness. The better we can learn to understand the child, the better we will be able to determine which of their behaviors require interventions and which behaviors simply require understanding and acceptance.  We need to normalize giftedness whenever we can, and label children with a medical diagnosis only when it is warranted.

I recommend you listen to this 18-minute CNN Profiles interview. If you don’t know his unique, inspiring story, you’ll hear it. If you’ve read about him or heard Khan before, like I have, you’ll still get some insight and thought provoking ideas from listening.

Here’s some of what crossed my mind as I was listening to this particular interview with Sal Khan:

• Sometimes, success takes a while, and success comes out of serendipitous circumstances. That’s his story.
• Are live lectures the best form of information delivery? This frequently creates an environment where students are passive, lost and/or bored.  Learning no longer has to happen in a brick and mortar school building. Now that students can access their own information on the internet, and in on-line classes, are live lectures the best use of class time? Should they, instead, have the opportunity to interact during class time, not merely listening passively to lecture? Shouldn’t students get together, ask questions of the teacher and each other, and work on projects during class? When people are together, they should be encouraged to interact and process information with each other, not be held captive in a lecture setting.
• Ask students “What do you like to do?” “What are you good at?” “What interests you?” Let’s start there. This is how teachers can inspire students.
• Our factory model of education has everyone moving together in age-based cohorts. That’s outdated! We need more self-paced, mastery based instruction. When teachers take on the full responsibility of this, of differentiating for all students in their classroom, the teachers have to plan differently and work much harder. By using technology, teachers are more free to guide students at their own individual pace of learning, and at whatever level the student’s entry point is.
• Everybody struggles at something. The word “slow” is not the same as “dumb” but has become to mean that. Use the struggles to improve on your weaknesses. If you can build a strong foundation, you can surge ahead. Hard work = Success.

I’m going to play this interview for my high school students. Afterward, I’m going to ask them these questions to facilitate thinking and discussion. You might want to answer your students these question, too, after you listen to the interview.

Questions for students

1. What do you think of Khan’s ideas for revamping the education system? Why would they, or would they not, work?

2. What do you think about self-directed learning in classrooms, using the vast array of technology as the teacher, and classroom instructors as the guides and encouragers? Could it work at our high school? Why or why not?

3. Sal asks “Are live lectures the best form of information delivery?” What do you think?

4. How does it make you feel that you might end up in a career as a result of being derailed by new information you gather along the way, and/or serendipitous circumstances that change your focus?  Is that a scary thought?  Or intriguing?

5. If you have already figured out what you want to study in college, did you arrive at that decision because it is something that you love to do, or something that you think will bring you career success? Something you’ve been told you should do?  How important is it to love what you do? Discuss.

BONUS: Sal Khan talks about how his gifted classroom experience affected his thinking and learning. Listen to the 90-second clip here.

Our conference theme this year is “Mind The Gifted Gap – With Heart.” Experts from the state of Colorado (and there are many!), along with others from outside of Colorado, will join together to share information about latest research and best teaching practices for gifted students. We are proud that we already have three amazing keynote speakers lined up: Jim Delisle, a long-time friend of gifted, Deb Delisle, the Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education, U.S. Department of Education, and Susan Jackson, researcher and expert in highly and profoundly gifted (HG/PG) from Vancouver.

The CAGT Conference will be at the same location it’s been the past few years, the Denver Marriott Tech Center. For the 2014 conference, we’re looking into moving it to The Westin in Westminster so our friends up north can have easier access to the conference.

At this time of year, one of my main focuses is getting the Call for Proposals ready to post on the CAGT website so dozens of presenters can start to submit proposals for sessions. We will need many speakers to lead breakout sessions throughout the two day conference. There will also be a separate Parent Institute and Leadership Event. My programming committee will be reviewing each of those proposals as they come in.

Meetings to keep everyone updated are another focus of mine during the winter, spring, and summer. The CAGT board and volunteers are gathering often to discuss their various areas of responsibility. Considering we’ll have about 500 guests attending the CAGT Conference, there are a lot of areas that need attending to.

We are definitely coming off the high that the NAGC conference created in Denver in 2012 — we’re psyched to keep up the momentum this year.

I know it feels like a long away until October, but to me it seems to be right around the corner! I hope to see you there. Stay tuned.

I’ve been to Louisville before; a few years ago for the annual SENG national gifted convention.  SENG – Supporting Emotional Needs of the Gifted. Louisville is a beautiful area and a great city (but I haven’t yet experienced the summer heat and humidity). I also have friends to see in Louisville, KY. I’m looking forward to the trip and the World Gifted Conference with attendees from so many different countries.

Here’s part of the acceptance email I received from WCGTC:

Dear Colleague,

I am writing you in my capacity as the President of the World Council for Gifted and Talented Children (WCGTC), and the Chair of the World Conference 2013 to inform you that your abstract entitled: “Supporting Emotional Needs of the Gifted” has been accepted as an oral presentation. The exact time and date of your presentation will be published in the conference final program. The time allocated for oral presentations is 25 minutes including time for discussion.

By joining this conference, you will help ensure a strong development in gifted education. As in our previous conferences, you can expect to meet with a diversity of colleagues from different parts of the world. It is an excellent opportunity to exchange ideas and thoughts with international experts and to learn about the latest developments in this field of knowledge.

Taisir Subhi Yamin
President, WCGTC
Chair, World Conference

Gifted kids not only think differently, they feel differently, too. Supporting the unique affective components of gifted students is what I love to educate people about. Local, state, national and now World, here I come! More on this later in the year.

CAEGTC membership is made up of all the top leaders in the gifted education field in Colorado, including:

• President and past presidents of CAGT (Colorado Association for Gifted and Talented) and SAC (State Advisory Committee for GT Education)
• present and past school administrators
• present and past teachers
• GT coordinators
• the current and past state directors for gifted education
• members of Boulder Valley Gifted and Talented (BVGT) and other affiliates from around the state
• people who work for the coalition, and interface with the state legislature

My CAEGT friends from the Boulder area (L-R) Becky Whittenburg,
Jenn Barr, Holly Hultgren

We connect with each other at CAEGTC because we share a similar vision: we are all trying to do our part to be directly involved in gifted education and raise the awareness of the need for more support and more funding for gifted education in Colorado. We do this by working in our own groups and organizations throughout the year. Our efforts overlap and intersect to make us all stronger.  I have been making connections as a CAEGTC Member since 2005.

One of the things I learned at this year’s CAEGTC annual meeting is the new mantra for gifted education in Colorado. It’s “Mind The Gap, With Heart.” The “gap” refers to the gap in funding and recognition for what gifted students need and what they’re getting. The “heart” is focusing on the social/emotional aspects of the gifted. This theme links gifted education with state initiatives. We’ll be hearing more about this theme throughout 2013.

Finally, new members are inducted at the annual meeting and I want to salute two ladies from the Boulder area who joined CAEGTC membership this year. Julie Marquez (L) and Jenn Barr (R) have shown substantial service to gifted education. Jenn is a BVGT Board Member and Boulder Valley School District Coordinator for Advanced Academic Services. Julie is a BVGT member and Boulder Valley School District TAG Teacher Leader. Both were nominated by and introduced at the CAEGTC luncheon by BVGT Board Member Becky Whittenburg. I was proud to be there as Jenn and Julie were being recognized for all they do for gifted in my community.

Find out more about what CAEGTC does and how to become a member if you’re in the gifted education community. I look forward to next year’s CAEGTC meeting, luncheon, and connections.

I started using Jean Peterson’s book The Essential Guide To Talking With Teens 10 years ago in my student discussion groups in middle high school and high school. The newest version of the book is titled Talk With Teens About What Matters To Them (Free Spirit Publishing).

George Betts, co-author of the Autonomous Learner Model (ALM), was my professor when I got my masters degree in gifted education from the University of Northern Colorado in 2002.

The three of us previously co-authored a chapter on discussion groups as a best practice in gifted education in the book Social-Emotional Curriculum With Gifted and Talented Students (Prufrock Press).

Here’s how Jean described our NAGC session: “The growing emphasis on social, emotional and career development reflects a sense that gifted individuals’ experience of development is qualitatively different. Discussion groups can be effective development-oriented, affective curriculum. More facilitative than didatic, these open-ended experiences moved gifted students out of a competitive, evaluative environment to a place where they can be “human”, make social connections, challenge achiever and underachiever stereotypes, develop strategies for coping with stress, find peer support, and consider the fit of personality and needs with career.”

I’ve been doing student discussion groups for over 10 years and have found these groups to be a very successful way to get students to talk together about social and emotional issues that they may, or often may not, be talking about with anyone else. Although it’s not therapy, it’s very therapeutic for students.

Adults don’t have to have a counseling degree to conduct student discussion groups in school because it’s affective education, not counseling.  The most valuable qualities an adult leader can have are to be knowledgeable about giftedness, and to be approachable and understanding.  Discussion groups are a highly effective and beneficial way for students to become more aware of themselves, and of others.

My goal at this NAGC Convention session was to help teachers and educators understand the purpose of these groups and perhaps get a few of them interested in starting a discussion group for gifted students in their school.

The convention went extraordinarily well.  From one event to the next, it all was amazing! This was the 59th annual NAGC conference, and Denver broke the record for biggest attendance ever. The exact numbers haven’t been tallied yet, but we know it was over 3,100. The previous highest attendance was 3,000 in Minneapolis. Every state was represented at this year’s NAGC Convention, along with people from 10 countries. The home state always has the biggest contingent but it was surprising to all organizers that about 1,200 people were from Colorado. That’s massive!

I’ve been on the state planning committee this year as we prepared to host the NAGC Convention in Colorado. I’ve been at frequent planning committee meetings, and was on monthly calls with the NAGC folks in Washington D.C. to get many details organized.

Since I’m the co-chair of the state affiliate outreach for the Colorado Association of Gifted and Talented (CAGT), I was in frequent communication with all the state affiliates informing them of updates and information about the upcoming convention so they could spread news throughout their local communities about the many opportunities offered at the NAGC Convention for teachers, administrations, parents – everyone interested in gifted.

In addition to the 3,100 at the 4-day NAGC Convention, 270 parents came to the single day Parent Day (put on by CAGT) and a Leadership Event drew 140 administrators, superintendents and school leaders.

I was excited when I was told that Boulder had more parents attend Parent Day than any other district. Plus, the principal from the high school where I work, Don Stensrud at Fairview, and the Superintendent from Boulder Valley School District, Dr. Bruce Messinger, were both at the Leadership event. Strong attendance by Boulderites at these events and sessions show again that the Boulder community has a keen interest in, and values, gifted education.

I contacted the Education Specialist at the Boulder Daily Camera newspaper, Amy Bounds, to share information about the conference.  Amy wrote a nice article – maybe that helped boost Parent Day attendance. Read it here.

We also publicized the NAGC Convention and Parent Day often in the local gifted advocacy group where I’m president – Boulder Valley Gifted and Talented. It was all over our BVGT web site, in our emails, and talked about at our local events for months.

One NAGC Convention week highlight for me came at the end. For months I pushed NAGC to consider getting Jonathan Mooney to be a keynote speaker. I had gotten Mooney to speak at a BVGT event in Boulder last spring (where he wowed the crowd with his ideas of rethinking education) and knew he’d be tremendous for the national event.

Mooney was booked as the closing keynote. He spoke passionately about celebrating cognitive diversity, and reframing education. He was amazing! He got a rousing standing ovation. People stood in line for 90 minutes afterward to buy his books, meet him and get his autograph. The only downside was that since it was the keynote on the final morning, many people had already left the convention to catch flights and missed Mooney speak. But those who stayed left inspired! Bonus: Mooney gave “his Boulder friends” a shout-out at the end of his presentation!

It’s been 10 years since Denver hosted the NAGC Convention. Second time around was even better than the first (no snow storm this year!) It was in New Orleans in 2011 and will be in Indianapolis in 2013. Thank you to everyone who attended, worked or performed at the NAGC Convention and Parent Day. See you in Indiana next year!

I clicked the link and saw it was an article from 2007 that I’ve not only read but have distributed to parents of gifted children to read.  How Not to Talk to Your Kids – The Inverse Power Of Praise.

The important theme of the article is based on Carol Dweck’s research that we need to praise efforts and not just praise success.  Work ethic is important!  Many people expect accomplishment to come easily for gifted children. And, too often, gifted children give up easily and quickly when they don’t get something immediately.

Gifted kids need the opportunity to struggle and not always have things come easily to them.

According to the article, if you have experience with persistence, it can become an unconscious response, governed by a circuit in the brain. If we don’t ever give kids the opportunity to struggle with something hard, they won’t develop pathways in their brain that help them learn how to create a work ethic to work harder to succeed. Instead, they’ll back away from a task that’s challenging. That’s what so many gifted kids do. If they can’t get it immediately they give up.

This philosophy of praising effort develops persistence and a stronger work ethic. If you fail, try again. 

Thomas Edison reportedly made a thousand unsuccessful attempts at creating an electric light bulb. What if he had given up after one or two tries?  Sometimes, many times, gifted people still have to work hard at things. Being gifted might give you a leg up on a task, but it doesn’t ensure a perfect result.  Not everything is easy and comes naturally… even for gifted individuals.

Nick said one of the paragraphs in the article How Not to Talk to Your Kids – The Inverse Power Of Praise that he related most strongly was this:

“Dweck discovered that those who think that innate intelligence is the key to success begin to discount the importance of effort. I am smart, the kids’ reasoning goes; I don’t need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized—it’s public proof that you can’t cut it on your natural gifts.”

Here’s Nick’s comment:

“I relate to the line because I still have those subconscious feelings that if I were really that smart, I would be able to just ‘get’ something.  Like yesterday, I was having a conversation with someone in Spanish.  I could understand most of what he said, but in the pieces that I didn’t get, I didn’t want to ask him what he said because I should be able to understand him – probably with the subconscious reasoning that “I’m smart.”  But it takes practice and studying and listening to be able to understand Spanish correctly.”

“I think math is a great example of this for me.  Math has never been difficult, and I honestly don’t remember math being hard for me, or really having to work at it ever.  So when I really have to work to understand a problem or work at a solution, it’s more effort than I’m used to, and I have a difficult time applying myself to it for an extended period of time.  It becomes boring or discouraging and I want to move on to something else.”

Thanks for reminding me of this article, Nick. I’m glad I can share it again here. We need to instill in all children that hard work is important.  Teach them that no matter how smart they are, they’re still going to have to work hard at times.  Smart does not always mean things are going to be easy.

This is what I love about this one-page article and this teacher: it’s a very good example of how one teacher successfully practiced differentiation in her classroom.  She was executing differentiation before the term “differentiation” was used by educators. She realized she had an advanced writer in her regular writing class.  She accommodated for his needs. She focused on what the student needed, not on what the class curriculum dictated.

What the teacher didn’t say:

• “Oh well, the review will be good for you.”
• “Maybe you can help me tutor some other children who need more help.”
• “If this is going too slow for you, I can give you MORE work in addition to what the other students are doing.”
• “This is a regular level class and this is how I teach this class. I can’t change for one student.”
• “Well, this will be an easy A for you. You won’t have to work hard.”
• “Why don’t you read a book or do some other homework during class?”
• “I don’t have the time to help you.  But you already know it, so you’re lucky. You’ll be fine.”

The BIG difference is that this teacher gave her student DIFFERENT work, not MORE work.  She met him where he was in his writing skills and took him forward from there.  She was looking for talent and she knew that even advanced students need support and challenge. She encouraged this student to push himself, not to bide his time in her class.

And she did all this because it was the right thing to do!

The student is Brad Meltzer, today a prolific, well-known author. The teacher is the now-retired Shelia Spicer. If you like the article Views: World’s Greatest Teacher, please circulate it to other teachers and administrators so they, too, can do the right thing.

The article is written by Chester E. Finn Jr., the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Finn is the co-author of Exam Schools: Inside America’s Most Selective Public High Schools.

I agree with all of the points Finn makes in his article. Among them:

• Public education’s neglect of high-ability students…imperils the country’s future supply of scientists, inventors and entrepreneurs.
• We’re weak at identifying “gifted and talented” children early in their educational experience.
• We don’t have enough gifted education classrooms with trained teachers and appropriate curriculums.
• High schools have just a smattering of honors or Advanced Placement classes.

I hope this article, appearing in such a prominent, widely-read publication, will not only continue to raise awareness of the needs of gifted education, but will spur more administrators, educators and parents to action to reform our school systems and curriculums.

If you resonate with what you read here, I highly recommend that you seek out a gifted advocacy group in your local community, or join your state gifted organization and raise your voice. Check the state-by-state listing on the National Association of Gifted Children web site here.

Finn will be receiving the NAGC President’s Award at the annual NAGC National Convention in Denver. He’ll also be the keynote speaker at the opening session of the Convention on November 15. I look forward to hearing Finn speak and hope to be able to thank him for writing this article for the New York Times.