| Body | By Lindsay Marean, InterCom Editor
All of your students will benefit from most of the strategies targeted at gifted learners, but your gifted learners will suffer if you employ few or none of the practices that best serve them. Unfortunately, all too often we generalize statements like the preceding one about exceptional learners to mean that as long as we employ generally good practices in our teaching, all of our students will be well-served. In reality, if we neglect specific strategies targeted at gifted learners, they will at best not be fully served in our classes and at worst suffer long-term emotional and academic harm. Here are some specific practices that benefit gifted learners; in today's Activity of the Week we will expand on each of them with specific examples of activities and structures that you can implement in a language classroom.
- Learner Choice: A gifted learner may already know much of the content you are presenting or rehearsing, or may learn it more quickly than other students. Respond by allowing for learner choice in your curriculum planning, both when presenting new material and rehearsing it. All students benefit from a sense of control over what, how, and how fast they learn; deprived of such control, gifted students may simply tune out.
- Extension Activities: Gifted learners often finish tasks before other students. Include extension activities that build on the existing task, that promote higher-order thinking, and that encourage depth as well as breadth. Extension activities may also have less scaffolding than the main task. Not only do gifted learners have an opportunity to continue learning for the duration of the activity, but you are modeling ways to extend activities in a meaningful way. All students finish at different times, so most students in your class will try an extension task at some point.
- Self-directed Exploration: Gifted learners may have special interests that they would like to explore in depth. Provide structure for all students to engage in self-directed learning, and consider curriculum compacting so that gifted learners can skip reviewing things they already know and spend more time on self-directed learning. All students need to develop skills for self-directed learning. Gifted students are often allowed to "learn on their own," but they need teacher guidance and support in their self-directed learning as other students do.
- Cross-curricular Connections and Multimodal Approaches: Gifted learners are diverse - some excel in one particular area or modality, some are not academically successful, minority groups and English language learners are underrepresented in programs for the gifted, and learners can be gifted and also have learning disabilities. Seek cross-curricular connections with the language you teach and provide students with multimodal demonstrations of what they are learning. Recognize that giftedness is dynamic, and use varied assessments over time to identify gifted learners. Gifted students are sometimes stereotyped as either linguistically or mathematically gifted, but individuals may be gifted in many other ways. Teaching and accepting multiple modalities will benefit all students and keep some gifted students from having their potential remain undetected and undeveloped.
- Strategic Grouping: Gifted learners may not want to appear different from their peers, and may hold back to “blend in.” Group students together in flexible ways that include ability grouping and performance-based grouping. Here are some guidelines on cluster grouping as well as when to use hetrogenous grouping.
- Assessment: Teachers may not realize when gifted learners have mastered material, and the learners themselves may not realize that they can be doing more. Pre-assessment allows for curriculum compacting. Frequent ongoing assessment allows the teacher to adjust the pace to students’ learning. Self-assessment helps learners to take learnership of their own learning and therefore take on more challenges.
- Giftedness Is Dynamic: Once labeled “gifted,” learners may avoid taking on challenges for fear of not living up to expectations of them. Remember that giftedness is dynamic, not static. Compliment students on what they accomplish rather than on who you perceive them to be. Encourage risk-taking over achievement. In a language classroom, praise risk-taking in the target language. Explicitly teach language learning strategies and recognize students’ use of them. You can learn more about language learning strategies here and here. LingroToGo, a mobile game-based app for Spanish learners, includes explicit instruction on language learning strategies.
The practices listed above enrich our teaching and all of our students' learning, and they are essential for our gifted students. For more information about gifted learners, visit the National Association for Gifted Children’s website.
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