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.
