Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Success factors: Inclusion model / teacher skills

Kicking off a thread for friends interested in discussing success factors related to inclusion / integrated education models for gifted students, because this is a policy constraint many of us face in advocacy or school selection.

Core question: What success factors exist in the inclusion model, especially vis-a-vis the gifted population?

If you enjoy this thread and want to take a deep dive, these are some secondary questions that I'm noodling on, and figure our collective community has deep knowledge in:

- What teacher competencies or school policies are particularly successful (or flip side: unsuccessful) when teaching gifted students?

- How, if applicable, does the competency profile change for teaching 2e students?

- How, if applicable, do these qualities change for different ages of students?

Please feel free to take this conversation where you think it needs to go, and evolve it as necessary!

To save toggling back and forth, the original question and aeh's kind reply.

Original Q:

Original thread, for our archivists
http://giftedissues.davidsongifted.org/BB/ubbthreads.php/topics/248239/4.html

As a parent citing privilege allowing access to private school attendance for your DS, you may be unaware of the unfortunate realities of "inclusion" increasingly experienced by many parents/students attending public/government schools in the United States, which are largely controlled by extensive data collection and analysis of the grades or marks assigned by teachers, subsequently used by State Department of Education and others, to generate "teacher report cards," "school report cards," "district report cards," which MUST show equal outcomes among all pupils and demographic groups in the inclusive classroom (or the teacher may lose his/her/their teaching position, the school/district may lose funding).

The success factors related to inclusion / integrated education models for gifted students may be largely based on teacher skills for obtaining equal outcomes in the inclusive classroom, by means such as subjective grading practices, for example grading according to the teacher's expectations for each pupil, rather grading objectively against a uniform standard for all pupils at that grade level.

Not to risk veering off-topic by providing extensive detail, a new thread with roundups of lived experiences pertaining to achieving equal outcomes in the inclusive classroom is found here.

Following up on Wren's comment from the companion thread:
Most certainly. Consequently, the outcomes are mixed as well. For below-grade-level students, they have generally been better than not, I suspect because the philosophical underpinnings of raising their performance (academically and socially) to approach that of NT age-peers are much more in alignment with the values of decision-makers in education (possibly with some relevance to indigo's post above and it's companion thread). Which, in turn, might have some connection to the composition of decision-making organizations, which, like many of the private schools referenced in the prior thread, tends to be tilted toward relatively homogeneously bright-average products of the conventional educational system. Nothing wrong with their membership intrinsically, of course, but it's no surprise that people tend to understand best the needs of those most like themselves, and the GT population is not well-represented among educational planners. (The other end of the spectrum is not either, but does have better legal protections, and often advocates at the table.)

It's a whole lot easier to envision reaching down to bring someone up to one's own level, than to visualize supporting someone up beyond one's own level. Even with the best of intentions.

I will note, though, with regard to Wren's DC's school, that having the resources on-call as a consult is very different from having instructional specialists teaching in the classroom alongside the content specialists. The latter has less the aura of friendly experts, and more the feeling of collegiality. Not to mention day-to-day real-time modeling of a variety of instructional practices, which often ends up benefiting not only the students for whom they are a necessity, but the other students as well.

It's a challenging problem to tackle, for sure. From my experience, the teacher behaviours and and attributes that have been most beneficial for my DS have been:

1 / Genuine respect for the dignity of individual learners, and a belief that the behaviours and outputs the student presents are a best effort.

2 / A flexible, authoritative-but-not-authoritarian classroom management style. Divergent thinkers can present as hostile or argumentative at times, and the best match I've seen for my DS has been a teacher who fosters debate or discussion about instruction and assignments with respectful limits. Virtually any case can be made on any topic, within the apportioned times and in adherence to a given process. The procedural justice and voice has earned this teacher DS' respect, and they have a wonderful working relationship.

3 / Designing assignments with a wide range of choice of outputs, with a scope that is interdisciplinary and allows deep dives on self-directed research projects, and which provide a buffer to learning plans should students advance more quickly than expected.

4 / Not over-emphasizing group work. I've found DS learned to be a generous team player when he is in a group where ideas are shared Socratically, but individuals are responsible for their own work.

5 / Asking the student for input on topics of interest and mutual goal-setting for the course of study (choice within an appropriate menu, with scaffolding).

6 / A strong understanding of the student's baseline social dynamics, and a sensitivity to appreciate the difference between resistance because of willfulness vs inappropriate materials.

7 / A personal love of learning and a desire to inculcate curiosity in the students. Initiative to seek out research on the needs of different learning profiles, and the willingness to evangelize with other members of the team on behalf of the student.

8 / Strong partnership and collaboration with parents to map out individualized learning plans. This is, IMO, paramount.

I kid you not - DS' current teacher has been so intimately and supportively involved in his direction that it's not unusual for us to have a call after-hours, at her initiative, to plan ahead. When the pandemic first landed, she made a special effort to arrange 1-1 calls after-hours with DS every second week to catch up. She did this will all her students. She and DS would share music, discuss inventions he was designing, and she'd introduce him to her hobbies - gardening, playing the theremin, radio broadcast, etc. She is a marvel.

8 / Granting teachers autonomy to tailor curriculum to individual learners' needs, within reason, and allowances to depart from it entirely or test out.



On the other end of the spectrum, attributes in teachers or processes which were decidedly NOT supportive of including DS in a general classroom were...

1 / An age-focused mapping of activities to the student. If you hear any refrain of age-linked curriculum, run!

I'll share a memorable parent teacher conference. DS was in grade 3 at the time, and was becoming furious at being held back from accelerating in the curriculum because he refused to colour and draw on his assignments. I had spoken to the teacher about this three times previously, and she was aware that he is moderately colourblind. Unsurprisingly, children who can't see the colours well don't particularly care to colour.

When I met with the teacher, she presented me with a folder full of supposedly "incomplete" work. I flipped through the assignments, and all the substantive work was done, and done well. All that was missing was colouring, which was irrelevant to the work.

I walked over to the garbage can and dropped the folder in. The teacher froze. I told her, "I don't expect to see any more colouring assignments issued to DS. I'm not paying $X for him to become a crayon."

She didn't like me very much after that. There was no more colouring subsequently.

2 / A closed-minded view of giftedness, whether through lack of awareness of the needs of gifted, or dogged clinging to averages without tailoring the approach to the individual student.

3 / Assuming autodidacticism in the student.

4 / Doctrinaire classroom management or unwillingness to accept novel solutions to classwork that, while not the exact answer sought, are still defensible and/or technically correct.

5 / Not tracking data on student progress, and assuming that a quiet child is a satisfied one. In our case, a quiet child is often one who has created an exciting internal world and divorced himself from his (less than ideal) surroundings. Some children act out, mine explores within.

6 / Mapping work streams to the weakest skill on display. This has included misunderstanding the gap between cognitive output and physical output and/or not showing the initiative to disentangle the two to get to the root cause. Also, I've personally experienced a few teachers who failed to account for gaps between executive function and cognition, or provide appropriate scaffolding.

7 / Not having a workplan developed for the year in advance. DS has made several leaps in his learning that have often required a multi-month jump in curriculum in a week.

8 / Not having the necessary reach to teach beyond grade level.

I have long believed quite strongly that there is an incredible need for the very best teachers to be teaching the "weakest" students. It is very common here for the "best" teacher to teach only the senior years and if in lower grades, then only the top class in a lower grade, especially for math which is often the only "streamed" subject. There is such a need for struggling students to have a teacher who knows their content deeply and LOVES it. And gifted students equally deserve someone who can take them further. This should not be an either/or scenario where the best teacher teaches the strongest or the weakest students.

Twice exceptional students not only need the depth of knowledge and the passion for the subject, but also someone who can apply that and figure out what causes a gap between apparent understanding and outcomes.

Having had a child who was very able in math (though far from PG) but also significantly 2E I watched them fly when they had excellent math teachers, and literally go backwards with a ho-hum teacher. The last two years of primary school they had two years of being taught math by a secondary math specialist (I am not sure why this teacher was in a primary school, his only student facing time was yr 6&7 math). My child's yr7 nationally normed test scores indicated just how well they'd thrived on having a great teacher. Our national testing happens about 1/3 of the way through the year, every two years. Two years later (so after a 2.5 more terms with the great teacher and 5.5 terms at a new school having started highschool) their math scores had not just not progressed, they literally went backwards compared to their own previous scores. They were worse off than two years earlier by every possibly measure.

When presented with this direct evidence the school shrugged and said "Well we don't see that in class." But they also continued to keep our child in the most basic math group that was not extremely "remedial" and never addressed the on-going gap between class participation and test results. Class placement was of course dependent on test scores, so a child who loved math, but could not perform, remained in a class with disinterested and struggling students with a very average teacher.

I was the one who eventually realised it was dyslexic reading errors holding them back, and that they needed coaching and re-enforcement on reading the questions and using highlighters. Their school never seemed to appreciate the weight of this issue or encourage the accommodations from their end.

They moved schools in mid yr10, at the new school they had the head of math teaching them for the remainder of their schooling. They very nearly chose HL math (IB diploma). I am fairly sure that had they had experienced continuous high quality math teaching (AND commitment to debugging of gaps between understanding and performance) they probably would have proceeded with HL. Staying on the HL path until literally the last possible moment certainly was extremely beneficial to their outcomes in SL math. Fitting into, and succeeding, in the most rigorous math class in the school required a teacher that knew HOW to work with this child, and wanted to.

The first highschool did not offer HL math, arguing they did not have any students who "needed" the option. Contrast that with a teacher that argues that "I think everyone should do HL math because it's SO EXCITING. It really is such an exciting course, this is where we really KNOW that we are mathematicians!!!... But if you start HL math and realise that it's taking too much time, because it does take more time, and you need to prioritize other subjects for the path you've now chosen, then you can step back to SL. The bonus is that you'll do even better than you would have without all that HL experience."

There is no failure here. There is only "It's ok to have other priorities". This is the attitude, and the work, of a teacher who LOVES their subject, knows their subject, and who gets the very best out of every child, but with compassion and emotional intelligence. Not everyone did sign up for HL math and go through this decision making process, but many did. My child was the last to choose SL instead, regardless of whenever each child who changed made that choice, I don't think any regretted the path.

I should specify some more teacher qualities/skills that my own child has benefited from:

- targeted one-on-one instructional time during or outside classtime. One of DC's teachers offered to devote time every class period (while others were doing independent work) to support DC through an otherwise independent learning course. This teacher approached us at the beginning of the school year about layering on an advanced course for DC during regular classtime. (DC didn't end up using the offered time, because the help wasn't needed.) And of course, I've seen many teachers use afterschool time to additionally support struggling learners. Which leads to another beneficial teacher quality

- a teacher who advocates for every student's success and continued growth, and is willing to think creatively and beyond the institution's historical practices to do so.

This is just it.

I'm increasingly convinced that the generalist model of teacher subjects is not the best model, particularly if an inclusion model is used. Where there is a lot of learner heterogeneity, a passionate and well-versed teacher in the subject is needed, and an understanding of how to adjust that specific subject pedagogically.

The HL math teacher anecdote is really heartening, particularly as math phobias run so rampant, and so unnecessarily.

I wanted to quote all of your post... But I am too tired to respond to all of it. It's sad really that the second list is so much more relatable than the first. And this. So much this.



And this. I find schools do things to gifted children, especially 2E children, that they would not do to a more typically progressing child with a weakness. The attitude seems to be that typically performing children should be scaffolded in their weak areas and allowed (even pushed) to progress, while gifted children should be held back to the level of their weakest skill.

At the same school, with the same reading standards/policies, only a year apart, I watched those rules being applied radically differently to a dyslexic and severely delayed reader vs very advanced reader.

It’s insanity, right, re: cognitive dissonance with 2e?! I literally had his third grade teacher, French teacher, and acting principal advocate that we undo his telescope because he seemed unmotivated to do work and would socialize extensively in class. This was despite his hitting the ceiling on achievement testing four years above age level (three above grade) and getting 100% on all his coursework. (He was strategic enough to stonewall practice, but to ace evaluations. Pretty decent for a then-7yo.) I had never bothered to test for giftedness, as he is quite conspicuous, but I seriously contemplated it that year because I was sick of hearing, “But he’s a year ahead and soooo young...”

Surprise! DS is 2e and is polite enough to refuse work through passive but pleasant resistance. He knew it was pointless trying to argue with those people, so he charmed them and did whatever he pleased, politely.

I will add that DS is at the same school, there is a new principal well-versed in 2e, and his core teacher this year and next is superb. Same institution, same child, diametrically opposed experiences because of the teacher’s advocacy and ethos.