Having Insight on the Gifted

Karen Stepanski was explaining a new lesson to her first-grade class when a small hand shot up.

“I disagree with you for three reasons,” a boy said. “No. 1. . . .”

The veteran teacher listened to the 6-year-old’s argument, amused and impressed. “I’ve never had a child quite like him,” she recalled of her former student. “He was not afraid to question authority.”

Stepanski recommended to school officials that the boy be tested by Santa Ana Unified’s Gifted and Talented Education office.

In California, GATE programs--designed for children with extraordinary potential--are created and run by local school districts, with the approval of the state Department of Education. All of Orange County’s 28 school districts offer some form of gifted education.

But identifying the children who can benefit from these programs is not always easy, educators say. And once a child is identified, teachers face new challenges. Gifted children are tremendously diverse in ability and personality. They can be highly emotional and self-critical. Failure to meet a gifted child’s educational and emotional needs can lead to a cycle of poor achievement and even self-destructive behavior.

A Variety of Guises

What qualifies a child as “gifted”?

“Sometimes we look for the child who people say, ‘Uh-oh, this kid’s driving us crazy,’ ” said Judith Roseberry, a retired Garden Grove teacher and GATE administrator, and current treasurer of the California Assn. for the Gifted. “He always wants to do everything in a different way, or he doesn’t always get his work in but his ideas are different. Sometimes those are the very kids we need to serve.”

Gifted students come in a variety of guises. They might be intellectually, creatively or artistically gifted, or they may show specific academic or leadership abilities. The state Education Code lays out the categories for identification and the methods districts may use to test students.

At the elementary level, which is when gifted children are usually identified, most programs concentrate on general academics rather than specialized areas such as performing arts.

“We’re looking to see if students can demonstrate that they understand complicated concepts or relationships,” said Shelley Overstreet, elementary resource teacher for the Accelerated Academic Achievement Program of the Capistrano Unified School District.

Other traits include creativity, an advanced vocabulary in the child’s dominant language, critical thinking skills, grasp of an unusual amount of information, unusual ways of approaching assignments and unique insight into the world around them.

“They crave learning, they crave knowledge,” Roseberry said. “That’s not just at school but it’s at home too. They long to be like others. It isn’t that they set out to be different. They want to be part of the group. And yet something inside them says ask, find out, question.”

Although they might have special talents, “They’re kids first,” she stressed. “They might be able to do some quantum physics, but if they’re only 10 years old, they’re 10 years old.”

Educators use such phrases as “intense,” “empathetic” and “sophisticated sense of humor” to describe children with whom they work. They are not necessarily “A” students or teacher-pleasers.

“They might resist rules, routine and drill, may be very critical,” Overstreet said. “If they don’t stay on task, if they can’t sit still and they wander the room--those are negative kinds of things that are disruptive to a classroom and a teacher but are very characteristic of gifted students.”

Teachers or other adults unfamiliar with these behavior patterns often misinterpret them. Gifted children are sometimes mistakenly thought to have attention deficit disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder--although children can be gifted and have ADD/ADHD. If their 7-year-old social skills are out of kilter with their advanced intellectual abilities, a phenomenon known as asynchronous development, they might be perceived as immature.

Raenele Cote, founder and president of GATE Parent Advocates of Orange County, understands the potential for confusion. In the fourth grade, one of her children was a frequent visitor to the principal’s office.

On the advice of his teacher and the administrators at his private school, Cote had her son evaluated for ADD through the Orange Unified School District. The district psychologist told her there was nothing wrong with the boy--he was just in the wrong school.

A few days after transferring to an Orange magnet school for the gifted, “he had a smile on his face again,” Cote said. “The kids here get my jokes,” her son told her.

Cote disputes the notion gifted education is “undemocratic.” Gifted children, like those with learning disabilities, have special needs, she said.

“That’s the biggest stumbling block in gifted education--the recognition that yes, there are differences among learners, and each learner must have an appropriate education.”

The job of educators is to meet the needs of all students, echoes Overstreet. “An athlete, artist or singer--in that arena the word ‘gifted’ is not a problem. . . . This is just another group of special-needs children.”

GATE programs take several forms. Districts may run magnet schools, which accept children from throughout the district, or programs within individual schools.

Depending on the resources and philosophy of the staff, schools might offer special day classes, composed entirely of GATE or high-achieving students; cluster gifted students within a regular classroom; or run enrichment or “pull-out” programs in which GATE students leave their regular classrooms periodically for shared activities.

More Complex Classes

Santiago Elementary School in Santa Ana has special day classes, cluster classrooms for recently identified GATE students and English immersion classes for gifted students learning English.

The aim in each class is to adapt the pacing, complexity and depth of the subject area to challenge the students while still covering the basics.

Teacher Rageanna Davey has worked with gifted students for 10 years, the last five at Santiago. Her work has changed a lot in that time, she said.

“Back in the beginning of teaching ‘giftedness,’ it was more just an enrichment program, where you pulled kids out and did a special project,” she said. “Now it’s a thematic, interdisciplinary study way of teaching. . . . Helping them to become more critical and creative thinkers, to think more globally.”

Without such programs, gifted students “may become underachievers and lose the desire to learn,” said Pat Thurman, elementary GATE project coordinator for Santa Ana Unified.

Muir Fundamental, where Karen Stepanski works, began its gifted and talented program this year. Now teaching a third-grade class with a gifted cluster, Stepanski said she has changed the way she approaches subjects such as math.

“You really present a problem and let them come up with the solution,” she said. “They come up with many ways to solve a problem.”