I've been thinking about your post and remembered in Misdiagnosis by James Webb et al there was a section in Chapter 9 called "Employment Relational Problems." Gifted creative types have little tolerance for office politics, want to dispense with the formalities and get right down to business. They have to learn the art of being "business friendly" and experience daily frustration with mind-numbing routines, banalities, and "administrivia." Some companies have developed "skunk works" to group the most creative workers and emphasize innovation over conformity. It may be harsh but true when Arthur Jensen said for each person there is a "zone of tolerance" of plus or minus 20 IQ points.

At the parent teacher conference the teacher said DD seemed to prefer working alone to group activities. I looked into cooperative learning and realized many of the problems gifted children run into with cooperative learning are related to adult problems with the work world (or even the PTA world in my current SAHM position). Maybe key components of collaborative learning would help gifted adults: perception of a sink or swim relationship and individual accountability.

From Harvard Education Letter http://www.edletter.org/past/issues/2000-mj/cooperative.shtml


Quote
The cooperative learning concept is a mature one with a solid research base accumulated over several decades. This body of work has led to agreement about two components that must be present for cooperative learning to lead to significant gains in achievement.

The first key component is promoting interdependence within groups-fostering the perception among group members that they must work together to accomplish the goal. "There has to be a recognition that you're in a sink-or-swim relationship," Johnson notes. "That you can't be successful unless your partners are as well, and they can't be successful without you. That's the essence of a cooperative relationship."

Cooperative learning is most likely to go wrong when one of the students does all the work while others watch. Each of the established models of cooperative learning recommends strategies for avoiding this problem. Some popular strategies for fostering interdependence within groups include assigning a single product for the group, asking students to take on different roles (recorder, facilitator, researcher, presenter, and so on), and assigning one student in each group to become an "expert" in one particular area and report back to the others.

The second key component is holding students individually accountable for demonstrating their understanding of the material. While students should be expected to teach one another and learn material as a group, proving their own understanding must be done individually. "Each person in the group should get up and walk away enriched and having learned something," Johnson says. "If you have 'hitchhiking' within the group, it's not yet a cooperative group."