Did you know that according to research about half of the gifted students in this country go unidentified and unserved?

That is a lot of talent we are missing out on as a culture.

Gifted children represent a broad and diverse group of abilities which is not limited to the arbitrary “upper 3%” definition that is prevalent in most school districts today. There are often students who don’t perform spectacularly academically as children but who, as adults, are obviously gifted. Why are we failing to identify and serve these students? It must be that intellectual excellence is not the only component of giftedness.

The work of psychologist Elizabeth Drews in identifying 4 faces of adolescents is well suited to describing gifted children as well. A gifted student may be a

  • High Achiever: Popular with staff though perhaps not their peers because of their hard work, precision and adherence to rules.

  • Social Leader: bright but not necessarily of brilliant intellect though very popular with nearly everyone.

  • Creative Intellectual: Independent and wildly imaginative, often not interested in high achievement, these students don’t follow the herd, preferring to strike their own path.

  • Non-Conformist Rebel: often brilliant and enormously talented, these students are usually often slip through the cracks due to their low performance in school settings.

Characteristics of Giftedness

There are many characteristics of giftedness that you might be familiar with but may not have enjoyed much practical exposure.

These include: a high verbal ability, longer attention span and persistence, intensity, wide range of interests, strong curiosity, good memory, unusual sense of humor, tendency to organize peers into complicated games, and imaginary friends.

Now those are the characteristics that you will find in any text which apply to most gifted children most of the time.

Getting Overlooked in School

But when we identify them in the schools we don’t look at these very often. We don’t measure sense of humor.

We don’t try to get an estimate of intensity. We look at attention span only in the areas that we think are relevant. The four factors that influence these characteristics the most include: level of giftedness, asynchronous development, overexcitabilities, and learning styles.

NAGC Definition

The National Association for Gifted Children created a new definition for giftedness which may be more accurate and applicable than ones you may be using currently.

“Gifted individuals demonstrate outstanding levels of aptitude, that’s exceptional ability to reason and learn or competence in the top 10% and in one or more domains…as individuals progress through childhood and adolescent achievement and high levels of motivation in the domain become the primary characteristics of giftedness.”

Major Factors That Foster or Dampen Giftedness

Some major factors that enhance or facilitate abilities in gifted individuals include breastfeeding, peer relations, self efficacy,  resilience, ability to delay gratification, educational programs, and deliberate practice. Some barriers to attainment for gifted people include environmental toxins, toxic and complicated families, fear and depression,  and toxic classrooms that kill motivation.

Current gifted educational practices fail gifted students by treating them all as though they were the same and attempt to box them into-one-size-fits-all programs which are insufficient for the asynchronous development, wide range of abilities, different thinking and learning styles, and various types of giftedness.

What gifted students really need is a menu of educational options that take their individual characteristics into account.

(This article is but a slice of the information Mr. Webb has to offer. To learn more about how to identify and best serve all of your gifted students the entire course has been made available in the TAGT Learning On Demand Course Library.)