Teacher Viewpoint: To Learn Something New

In the back of the 5th grade classroom sits a girl typing “dirt” into ClarisWorks on a giant Apple computer. Using the thesaurus feature, she settles on “detritus,” and now she has the beginning of her spelling list for the week. Rather than rehashing words she already knows, she is able to stretch her vocabulary and test her spelling ability, all because her teacher believed that she should learn something new and gave her structures to make that happen. Now the girl is a TAG teacher who strives to give her students that same opportunity.  

I’ve taught in general education classrooms, and I understand the struggle. One year in rural Iowa, I only had ten students in my 3rd grade class. One of them came in reading 120 words a minute. Another could read 6. Needless to say, the research I read once about eight grade levels of ability in one classroom was not shocking. Classroom teachers face this almost laughable situation daily, and it is not for lack of caring about high-ability students that they spend more time on the not-yet-proficient students. Until the structure of schools catches up with this reality, it is critical to have talented and gifted programs to support high-ability students as they come to school hoping for the same opportunity as everyone else: to learn something new.  

The curriculum I see in the classroom now is more rigorous than when I was in elementary school, and I’d even wager it’s more rigorous than when I started teaching in 2010. Just within the past few years, our school has adopted Wonders for ELA and Illustrative Mathematics. It has been wonderful to see students rise to these higher expectations, annotating text and using evidence to justify their thinking. In math, they are always asked to notice and wonder, and number talks have a high ceiling – in the same activity, one student can explain that they could get to 999 by taking 998 + 1, and another could say it’s 3 times 333.  

While it’s better than it used to be, student needs and curriculum do not always match up. The mandated focus on science of reading phonics instruction doesn’t fit the already fluent first grader. Some students have a deep interest in science or social studies, which exist only in the context of reading due to scheduling pressure. Gifted students may need information faster, whether through subject acceleration or compacting out of a certain unit. They may also need to go deeper or spend more time asking and researching their own questions that would only confuse their classmates. They may need time to pursue an area of passion. They may need a push to use skills they’ve learned in a broader context, applying their knowledge to solve problems. They need to confront failure early and often so they see it as a natural part of the learning process. They need to see other people who have made a difference in the world and how what they’re learning can help them do that, too.  

There is not one magical “gifted curriculum” because kids have different needs. Putting the student who has strengths in creative writing and the student who does complex mental math in the same weekly 20-minute pullout time with a TAG teacher is not as effective as working with the classroom teacher to personalize learning for those students. Enrichment work may or may not yield the growth on screening assessments that accelerating to the next grade level standard might, but it will develop the kind of mathematical or analytical thinking that will benefit students in the long term. The need for flexibility to meet students’ needs means that I create and recreate a lot of materials rather than reusing things from year to year. Another challenge as students get older is that much of the advanced coursework that is available to them is online rather than in person, removing the social aspect and the support and challenge provided by peers at a time in life when peers are so important.  

My role as a teacher of the gifted is to see those students who have needs beyond the standard curriculum, to advocate for them, to remind their teachers that it’s ok for them to be different, to work directly with them, to provide content that will stretch them, to make it easy for teachers to differentiate for them, to ensure that they experience struggle, and as Mark Twain urged, to “never let their schooling interfere with their education.”   

Allison Bartholmey is the K-12 teacher for the Talented and Gifted (TAG) Program in Baxter, Iowa.