Michael F. Shaughnessy
Senior Columnist EdNews.org
Eastern New Mexico University

1) You have recently co-authored a book with Karen Isaacson entitled "Intelligent Life in the Classroom."  What prompted you to write this book?

I have always wanted to write a book, so when the opportunity came along, I knew I had to go for it.  Karen and I wanted to create a fun and accessible way for classroom teachers to begin learning more about gifted students.  The frustrating reality is that most teachers enter the classroom for the first time with almost no background knowledge about the unique academic, social, and emotional needs of gifted students, let alone any strategies for reaching and challenging them in the classroom.  Of our thousands of higher education institutions in America, only 77 of them offer coursework in gifted education (such as programs for a minor, a Masters, or a PhD). 

It seems the standard amount of exposure that most pre-service teachers have to information about gifted students is one single hour in one class.  Thankfully there are exceptions to this less-than-bare-minimum standard, but it still remains the scope of coverage for most of our pre-service teachers. 

Yet inevitably, these same teachers will have gifted children in their classrooms, gifted children that they are now ill-prepared to adequately understand and challenge.  Some teachers, realizing they were short-changed, do take it upon themselves to learn much more about these unique students.  Karen and I wanted to craft a step in this process for them, one that was both informative and entertaining.  In our book, we cover common traits and characteristics of gifted students, such as asynchronous development, sensitivity, intensity, and creativity, and then illustrate them with real-life examples of gifted children, many of whom are my own students. 

Our hope is that the book will inspire teachers to pursue further and deeper knowledge about gifted students.  We received word a few months ago that the book had won a Legacy Book Award and a "Learning Magazine" Teacher's Choice Award, both signs that we have hopefully accomplished some of what we set out to do.

2) What other books have you written or co-authored?

Karen and I are currently in the process of writing another book together, although it's too early to estimate just when it will be out.  I also have ideas for two more books beyond that one, but I am still incubating those in my mind.

3) How do you go about teaching gifted kids thinking skills?  How do you go about teaching higher order thinking skills?  Do you see a difference between the two?

Well, first, the teaching of thinking skills is important for ALL students, not just for our gifted students.  There are times in all of our lives when we need to know how to analyze (which candidate is the best one for me to vote for?), logically solve a problem (why won't my lawnmower start?), and utilize creativity for a better final product (how can I improve my company's advertising campaign?).  Thinking skills appear in most states' standards because they are important for everyone to develop.

Thinking skills are a part of many gifted programs because gifted children tend to have natural talent in that area and we want to develop it to its fullest potential.  Here's an analogy that may help: We send all children to Physical Education classes because we want all children to learn about and develop their physical fitness.  It's important for all on some level. 

However, some children have greater levels of athletic talent, and they are selected for our athletic teams so that they can further develop their talent to its fullest potential.  We don't expect them to magically develop that talent further on their own or solely through P.E. classes.  We recognize that they need advanced training to polish what they begin with and to stretch them to where they are capable of going.  It is (or should be) the same for our gifted children who have greater levels of thinking ability and academic talent.  We can't expect them to magically develop those talents further solely through regular education classes.  We must recognize that they need advanced training to polish what they begin with and to stretch them to their fullest potential.

As for the teaching of thinking skills, there are a lot of great programs available, including Edward de Bono's Six Thinking Hats, HOTS, Talents Unlimited, SOI, PETS, and countless activities for utilizing Bloom's Taxonomy.  Another great resource is Arthur Costa's book, "Developing Minds: A Resource Book for Teaching Thinking."

When I teach thinking skills for my gifted students, I tend to create a lot of my own activities for them.  I take what I know about various thinking skills and create lessons that work on each skill but are tailored to their readiness level.  I have developed my own thinking taxonomy that I use with my students and I make sure that the kids are learning the language of thinking.  We discuss each thinking skill, what it looks like, and how it's used.  I want them to know the various skills and to be able to explain what they require of the mind and why they are important. 

For example, "Strategic thinking is where your brain looks ahead and makes a plan of action based on the best options.  Doctors use strategic thinking when they make a plan for treating a patient's disease.  Teachers use strategic thinking when they make a plan for the best way to teach a lesson."  As they get older, I also require that they explain how they are using each thinking skill for various aspects of their learning.

At the Kindergarten level, I do thinking-skills-based lessons in each of our Kindergarten classrooms multiple times throughout the school year.  This is one piece of our identification process.  Each lesson focuses on a different thinking skill, such as analytical thinking, logical thinking, or creative thinking, and I stress the word "think" each time.  It's not long before the Kindergartners are making the connection that "thinking" is what's happening up there in their brains.  They also begin to noticeably devote time to thinking when working on the activities, and this transfers to other aspects of classroom learning, too.

To answer the last part of your question, it often seems that the terms "thinking skills" and "higher order thinking skills" are used interchangeably, along with "critical thinking skills," "abstract thinking skills," and "complex thinking skills," although the "higher order" phrase generally refers more specifically to the top three levels of Bloom's Taxonomy.

4) Montana is a big state- how do you go about making sure that all gifted kids are serviced adequately?

Many would say that adequately servicing gifted students is a challenge just about anywhere!  Most of our challenges in adequately servicing gifted students here are not unique to Montana.  We face many of the same challenges that other states face.  But you are correct that Montana's gigantic size poses some unique additional challenges.  We have a K-12 population of around 150,000 students in about 900 schools and 449 school districts, the great majority of which are rural and a surprising number of which have only a handful of students. 

These relatively few students are spread across a geographic area that could overlay the full distance between Washington, DC and Chicago.  Our vastness means that access to resources and opportunities can be quite limited at times, although most Montanans won't let that stop them.  (We think nothing of driving ten hours in the snow to attend an event we want to be a part of!)

We are a local control state, and an array of advantages and disadvantages come with that.  An advantage is that each district can tailor a gifted program to the community's unique culture and to the needs of their specific population of students.  The disadvantage is that some districts choose to do nothing and get away with it.  In my opinion, this lack of consistent access to programming and services is our biggest challenge, not our size.  Montana does have a state mandate to identify and provide services for gifted students, but fewer than half of our schools report that they actually do so.  There is currently no consequence for schools that don't meet that portion of our state accreditation standards. 

The consequence falls onto the shoulders of our under-challenged gifted children who happen to attend one of those schools.  Of course, many of our schools ARE doing wonderful things for their gifted students, and the desire to reach these students spreads to new schools each year.  On the whole, gifted services in Montana are expanding, which means a lot of teachers and administrators here are focusing efforts in the right direction.  Helping in that process are a couple of key people at our state Office of Public Instruction who assist teachers and administrators in their efforts to expand gifted services for Montana students. 

Another boost to that process has been an increase from the state level in funding for Gifted Education.  While adequately providing services here still requires more funding than what's available, it has been a help in the right direction.  Another important piece of gifted education in Montana is AGATE, our state's gifted education association.  AGATE's conferences are a key source of professional development for Montana teachers who want to learn more about gifted students.  AGATE also does a lot of advocacy in the state on behalf of gifted students, such as helping to secure Gifted Education as an Area of Special Competency option for teachers to add to their teaching licenses. 

A few years ago, when our state Legislature was writing a definition of what a "quality education" means in Montana, AGATE helped to assure that gifted students and adequately meeting their needs became a part of that definition.  AGATE is also in the process of piloting a program for mentoring individual schools through the process of establishing services for gifted students and providing in-depth, long-term professional development for the school's teachers on classroom strategies for reaching these advanced students.  In spite of our remaining challenges, there are a lot of wonderful things happening in Montana for our gifted students.

5) Tell us a bit about yourself and how you got involved in gifted education.

My initial involvement in Gifted Education goes back to when I was a kid and participated in a gifted program at my elementary school.

  Then in high school I took a lot of Honors, advanced, and AP courses.  My involvement from "the other side of the desk" began when I was in college.  I was a member of my university's Honors Program and was, at the time, the only UHP member who was an Education major.  The Director of our Honors Program had children who were a part of the local school district's gifted program, but funding for that gifted program had been almost entirely eliminated.  Letters were sent home to the parents explaining to them how services would be changing or disappearing. 

I can still clearly remember the Director approaching me in the foyer with the letter in his hands.  He passed it on to me and said, "Tamara, here's a problem.  See what you can do about it."  He was such a believer in empowering us as students and although I didn't realize it at the time, I think he saw it as an opportunity for me do something significant beyond the scope of my current education.  It has turned out to be a powerful moment in my life, not only because it propelled me into Gifted Education, but also because it helped to shape some of the philosophy I follow with my own students now. 

Anyway, I took the letter and contacted the local district's Gifted Coordinator (who now had seventeen schools and no budget), and together she and I created a mentor program that matched up university Honors students with gifted children in the local schools.  For example, a college gifted student who was a Math major would be matched with a local 3rd grader who was doing Math on a 6th grade level.  That first semester of the program we had eleven volunteers, including me, and it only grew from there. 

I ended up writing a university course proposal so that the volunteers could earn credit for their service.  The number and variety of volunteers expanded, and now, fifteen years later, the program is still in existence, averaging thirty or forty volunteers a semester.  (The local district has also since re-established a gifted program.)  When it came time for me to look for a teaching job, I found myself most attracted to opportunities like the job I currently have as a K-12 Gifted Education Specialist.  It's a relatively small district and in rural locations we tend to wear a lot of hats, so I am both the GT teacher and program coordinator for all four of our district's schools. 

In most locations those roles are split between two or more people, but I enjoy the challenge of taking on both roles as well as the powerful consistency that comes from working with the same students for multiple consecutive years.  In a way, it's the ultimate form of looping.  Four years ago I earned a Masters degree in Gifted Education from the University of Connecticut, a process which has helped me connect with hundreds of people around the country who also work with gifted students.  Beyond my job, two other current activities have me involved in the field. 

For one, I am blogging for "Teacher Magazine" about gifted students and gifted education, an opportunity that I chose to accept because it was a chance to get teachers around the country thinking about the gifted kids in their classrooms.  I am also President-Elect of Montana AGATE, our state's Association of Gifted and Talented Education.  Through AGATE, I do a lot of state-level work and consulting for Gifted Education, as well as help with conferences, lobbying, and advocacy.

6) Perennial question- do teachers need to be gifted themselves to teach gifted kids?

No, of course not.  All teachers have the capacity to become great teachers for gifted kids, and the factors that make for such a teacher begin with understanding and accommodations.  This means that the teacher has developed or is developing an understanding of gifted learners, their academic needs, and their social and emotional needs.  That understanding is then followed by appropriate accommodations. 

Once the teacher understands where the gifted child is coming from, the teacher then validates that by making targeted, appropriate curricular accommodations for that child.  What these kids need most is for us to recognize and acknowledge their learning needs and then DO SOMETHING about it.  A very ineffective teacher for a gifted child would be one who said, "You have already mastered this year's multiplication curriculum, but I still want you to do the same worksheets as everyone else because it wouldn't be fair to the other kids if I let you do something different." 

It sounds absurd, I know, but sadly it happens in classrooms across our country every day.  Who it's really not fair for is the gifted child whose learning is being stunted in that sort of situation.  A great teacher for a gifted child is one who is knowledgeable about gifted learners, is able to assess the child's zone of proximal development, and is prepared to take the steps necessary to move the child on from that point.  As a nation, we need to make great improvements in preparing our teachers to do this.  It's not that teachers don't want to do this for the gifted children in their classrooms.  They very often do.  It's just that we haven't always given them the right tools with which do it.  Those tools are out there (things like curriculum compacting, acceleration, telescoping, etc.). 

We need to overcome the barriers that prevent our teachers from using them.  Those barriers can be things like an inflexible structure or schedule, misunderstandings and misinformation about gifted learners, a focus (rightly so) on raising the floor but forgetting at the same time to lift the ceiling, and the mistaken belief that gifted children will make it just fine on their own (few people know that 20% of drop-outs test in the gifted range).  Our gifted children have just as much right as any other child to LEARN in school.  A great teacher for a gifted learner is one who understands and acts upon this principle.

I would add that gifted children do seem to appreciate certain traits in their teachers beyond what I have said above.  If the teacher is curious, has outside interests, shares his or her talents with the students, and is honest when he or she doesn't know the answer to a question (but is willing to find out), the gifted students will have additional respect for that teacher because they so deeply relate to curiosity, passionate interests, and the humble desire to further one's knowledge.

7) You have a very novel web site- tell us its name and how you came up with that name.

My website is www.thethinkteacher.com, although before anyone clicks the link to visit I should probably mention that it is still under construction.  One of my 7th grade students created the template for me a while back, and it is beautiful, but I haven't yet followed through on my part of filling in the site's missing pieces.  The title for it, The Think Teacher, comes from another of my students who is currently an 8th grader. 

Back when he was a Kindergartner, his mother mentioned to me that he always referred to me as "the think teacher."  "Think" is a big focus of each activity that I do with the Kindergarten classes and he was associating that word with me.  I decided it would make for a fun and appropriate moniker.  My blog at "Teacher Magazine" is called "Unwrapping the Gifted."  My classmates from my Masters program helped me to brainstorm ideas for the name of that one.  I chose "Unwrapping the Gifted" because it spoke to my main goal in writing the blog, which is to help classroom teachers around the country begin to "unwrap" the knowledge about and strategies for gifted students that they previously may have had little or no familiarity with.

The Link for my blog:  http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/unwrapping_the_gifted/

The Link for my & Karen's book:  http://www.giftedbooks.com/productdetails.asp?id=42

8) What question have I neglected to ask?

None that comes to mind, but I would like to leave your readers with a little "food for thought" if that's okay:

 "Expecting all children the same age to learn from the same materials is like expecting all children the same age to wear the same size clothing."  Madeline Hunter

"Every child deserves an equal opportunity to struggle."  Mary Slade

"One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar!"  Helen Keller

"You can never hold a person down without staying down with him."  Booker T. Washington

"Excellence in education is when we do everything that we can to make sure they become everything that they can."  Carol Tomlinson

"There is nothing so unequal as the equal treatment of unequals."  Justice Felix Frankfurter

"When once the child has learned that 4 and 2 are 6, a thousand repetitions will give him no new information, and it is a waste of time to keep him in that manner."  J.M. Greenwood, 1888

"Give me rigor or give me mortis!"  Michael Clay Thompson

"If you don't make mistakes, you're not working on hard enough problems.  And that's a big mistake."  F. Wikzek

"The pupil who is never required to do what he cannot do, never does what he can do."  John Stuart Mill

"States and Provinces and curricula around the world track students by age. This practice is so common that we do not think of it as tracking. With few exceptions, a six year old must go into first grade even if that six year old is not ready or was ready for the grade one year earlier."  Zalman Usiskin

"Closing the achievement gap by pushing down the top is like fostering fitness by outlawing marathons."  Helen Schinske

"Keeping a child who can do sixth-grade work in a second-grade classroom is not saving that student's childhood but is instead robbing that child of the desire to learn."  Ellen Winner

"My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation."  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

"No paradox is more striking than the inconsistency between research findings on acceleration and the failure of our society to reduce the time spent by superior students in formal education."  M. J. Gold, 1965

"Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master."  Leonardo da Vinci

Published February 19, 2008