Tried and tested ideas from the classroom
CHALLENGING GIFTED AND TALENTED CHILDREN IN A MANAGEABLE WAY
by Colleen Wells, G&T Co-ordinator, Oxford Road Community School, Reading
It is a common misconception that challenging gifted and talented children means teaching them something harder or more complicated, something taught to older children perhaps, but this isn’t true! Gifted and talented children are not so called simply because they can remember more information. Truly gifted children have not only advanced knowledge and understanding for their age but also advanced thinking skills. Therefore a challenging lesson for gifted and talented children doesn’t necessarily have to include new knowledge and understanding but should stimulate their thinking skills.
All children have to use processing skills when they learn something new. However, a challenging lesson will get them using other thinking skills and involve reasoning, evaluating, enquiry or creativity. There are simple ways of achieving this without having to plan a separate activity for every lesson. For example, you can develop children’s enquiry skills by setting mini-research projects or problem-solving tasks. As gifted and talented children often need less input, owing to a higher level of knowledge, they can be given a larger proportion of the lesson in which to do their research or solve a problem. Reporting their findings back to the rest of the class during the plenary will improve their evaluating and reasoning skills, especially if you encourage the rest of the class to ask questions.
I recently used this approach with a group of gifted and talented children in my class. The group clearly understood long division but I wanted to observe how well they could apply their understanding. They were asked to find out which bookcase in our classroom would be best to store the dictionaries (the best being the one that stored the most). Not only did this task challenge their mathematical ability, it also challenged their thinking skills: they started to question whether the biggest bookcase really was the best one, as using it for the dictionaries would leave very little room for all our other books!
Another manageable way of challenging gifted and talented children is to develop their creativity. This doesn’t just mean being ‘arty’; it is to do with using their imagination. In many lessons there will be an opportunity to invite pupils to imagine themselves as another person or in a different place or time. For example, when teaching a history lesson about a Victorian school, you could set the task of writing a diary entry of a Victorian schoolchild. In carrying out this task, gifted children should not just state what ‘they’ have done in their day at school; they should consider the child’s thoughts and feelings as well as including other aspects of the school day that fit the historical context (incorporating details not specifically mentioned during the lesson). Most children can write diary entries but it is the extent to which they use their imagination that shows their level of thinking skills.
Challenging a child’s evaluation skills can be easily achieved in many lessons by using checklists. Even children who are not seen to be gifted and talented will benefit from this approach, checklists being something with which most children are familiar. To ensure the task of using a checklist is challenging enough, children should create the checklist themselves, either independently or as part of a small group. Using their own checklists helps children to understand everything that is expected of them and encourages them to work harder to meet expectations. I normally use checklists when doing writing tasks, asking small groups to create their own. We then discuss our lists and combine them to make a class checklist. I recently did this with a newspaper report about the Tour de France: the children found it much easier to locate the features of an article in their writing and share them in the plenary because they had been clear about expectations from the beginning of the task and felt more in control of their work. An extension of this idea is to share a child’s national curriculum level with them and discuss what is required of them to attain a higher level. Children are often motivated to work harder once they know what they are aiming for.
As a teacher, it is important not to feel pressured always to teach something new to gifted and talented children. Instead, stretch their thinking skills and take time to ensure they truly understand what they say they do.