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I think that giftedness comes in all shapes and sizes. I know that some of my friends are 'gifted-level' in their ability to empathise and care even though as far as I can tell or guess, they would be designated as 'bright' in an academic setting.

They get my kid, and understand his special educational needs and his alternate developmental path.

That said, I think it's as rare to find those 'heart-gifted' folks as it is to find 'IQ-gifted' folks, and my guess is that a 'mere-mortal' style gifted coordinator who didn't grow up with a whole bunch of advanced siblings and cousins and Aunts and Uncles will have a hard time faking seeing things from the perspective of an unusually gifted kid, unless she is in a school system where there are unusually gifted kids all over the place and she has learned well.

The big difference is that as adults, we specialize in our area of interest and do our jobs for years, giving us a change to learn in depth with whatever aptitude we started off with.

I often see people applying rules to situations in ways that make it clear that they are working off of a simplification of someone else's good and deep thought. For me it's much easier to make a decision if I'm working with principles of some kind, if I understand the thinking behind the rules and there reasons the rules were created. This is one of the areas of life that if I project and assume that everyone is 'like me' in this particular way, that I will make blunder after blunder.

The key is this: When I hear schools saying: "We don't do X" or "X isn't in the best interest of the student." I have to translate that in my mind into: "In my experience so far, I've never seen X happen. Please give me some tangible reasons that I can use with other people to help them understand why X needs to happen in this particular situation."

See?
Grinity

I would think it would depend on the level of giftedness. My guess is that it might matter a lot more for profoundly gifted children because their trajectory is so unique. At other levels of giftedness, I suspect that as long as the teacher is bright, knowledgeable and (perhaps giftedly) intuitive, it is not necessary that they are themselves gifted. If we take it to the other extreme, a teacher does not have to have a disability in order to effectively instruct someone with a disability--although they do have to be bright, knowledgeable and intuitive to do that well too. Teaching students who are gifted and/or have disabilities requires an ability to tune in and identify learning and emotional needs at a different level than is needed for more typically developing children. Of course we want all teachers to be bright and knowledgeable--but working with students who are gifted or who have disabilities takes a particularly high level of intuition, because these students are more likely to be at the margins of what is considered mainstream where there needs can easily be missed/overlooked.

I wonder though even at the PG level whether it matters across the board for academic learning. Perhaps it depends on how the needs are being met. If the instruction is being delivered specifically to a cluster of PG kids, I think it would be very important. If the child's needs are being met through radical acceleration, maybe it's important to have a gifted counselor to recognize and provide for social emotional needs, but not for content instruction since content instructors at upper middle/high school should be experts at the subject and level they are teaching regardless of giftedness. Thoughts?

"The other said her favorite part of the job was to take the dominating (not nec GT) kids out of the classroom and prove to them that they are not always right."

I wish they would leave that to the parents and stick to teaching. Just IMO
Eta: i apologize, that was mean.

"My thoughts are in evolution about this."
Mon that's a pretty powerful phrase you just said.
! Like !

Thanks Iucounu for your post, as it helped me think more deeply about the question.

I would add that I called the publisher of CoGat and looked at their 'test prep' booklet, asking if a parent or individual teacher could by this booklet. They explained that they only sold this to school districts.

I asked what was in the test prep booklet, and the fellow I spoke to seemed very sure that it was an introduction that would familiarize the children with the type of questions, to be sure that they understood the instructions without a lot of fuss.

I realized that 'test prep' could mean different things to different people. In some instances, checking to make sure that the child understands the directions. In other instances test prep means extensive practicing of the material that is similar (or the same) as the test questions. From my conversation with the publisher, it seemed that their idea of 'allowable test prep' was the introduction of how the questions were worded, not the material of the questions themselves. This leads me to conclude that the test materials are 'secret' although the instructions are open.

I agree that books which practice 'thinking skills' can be useful to families, as can practice of general test-taking skills depending on the circumstance.

And I do find myself very frustrated to hear reports of school districts that give more weight to group IQ tests like CoGat than to individual tests like WISC-IV.

Love and More Love,
Grinity

The site seems to be having issues, and to have lost my last reply, so this one will be shorter. Thanks for following up! I think that obviously clinches it for the CogAT, OLSAT, and NNAT-- not okay!

Are you getting at an assumption that a non-gifted adult might become highly proficient at understanding giftedness through years of teaching gifted kids? The only fear I have here is that, if GT identification in the rest of the country looks like it does in Colorado where the state now mandates that it include everything from leadership qualities to high achievement in any one academic area, a GT coordinator who is not him/herself gifted might not easily learn to distinguish btwn the large majority of kids s/he is teaching who are not gifted in the sense we use here (high IQ) and those who are.

All three of my kids took CoGat and received the same prep booklet each time from the school district -- I think that it was the K/1st grade level booklet. It gave one sample page with about 5 sample questions per subtest. It just offered an opportunity to make sure that they knew how to "fill in the bubble" and explain how the questions worked, i.e. how to finish a block matrix. All of the kids who took the test received it so it was not intended to offer an advantage. It was just to make sure they could show what they knew.

FWIW, all three of my kids missed the same sample question and it highlighted one of the weaknesses of this type of test. It asked which one of the following items would be made of leather. The desired answer was a belt. None of my kids had ever seen a leather belt. My husband doesn't wear belts and the only ones they had seen were in their dress up clothes. To them, belts had sequins and or were made of braid. (LOL) Only shoes were made of leather and that wasn't one of the options. It gave me an opportunity to discuss making educated guesses.

Knute - my DD had the exact life experience/question mismatch you describe with one of the WPPSI questions. She reasoned an answer that was true and matched her life experience and still believes herself to have answered the question correctly. But she did not get the points for it because it was not the intended answer. I actually pointed the problem out to the tester, who agreed that more and more children now would have the same problem my DD did with that question and the WPPSI was well due for re-working...