Finding the best way to teach gifted children

In the late 1960s, there were seven “selective” secondary schools in New South Wales, Australia. For my last two years of teaching in N.S.W., 1968-9, before coming to Canada, I taught in one of them. The students, in Grades 8-12, had been selected on the basis of achievement, aptitude and evidence of “gifted” ability.

It was an interesting and challenging assignment for a young teacher. In much later years I came across the writings of Joseph Renzulli, professor of educational psychology at the University of Connecticut.

Renzulli proposes three criteria for the identification of genuine “giftedness”: intelligence, creativity and perseverance. Imagine teaching in a classroom full of kids like that. The kids to whom I taught senior literature in that “selective” high school during those two years had all that and more. It was no “stand and deliver” situation for a teacher.

Selective high schools in Australia always have been and still are both popular and controversial. Many more children seek enrolment in them than gain entry.

Originally, selective schools were to offer students a meritocratic “ladder of opportunity.” That is, they would be open to everyone, regardless of wealth or social class, so long as academic entry requirements were met. This, and the absence of religious criteria, set them apart from private schools.

In reality, things did not always work out quite that way.

According to opponents of the system, the existence of selective schools flies in the face of the egalitarian culture for which Australia, at least in public, prides itself.

Those who railed against “selectivity” claimed, not without some verifiable evidence, that, in an increasingly multicultural society, white Protestant middle-class cultures dominated both the entry tests and the curriculum inside the schools.

As a result, during the 1960s and 1970s, selective schools fell out of favour with policymakers and many parents. They were mostly replaced by comprehensive high schools, which enrolled all students within a given area, no matter what their test scores.

Selective high schools were disparaged as old-fashioned and elitist. It was also argued that selection at the age of 11 or 12 was too young to set children on a certain path. The number of selective schools in New South Wales dropped to seven.

The revival of selective schooling came in the late 1980s, accompanied a new commitment by the N.S.W. state government to providing specific opportunities during the education of the “talented child.” Academically gifted children, it was argued, were neglected in the one-size-fits-all classroom.

During the same period, according to Helen Proctor, professor in the Sydney School of Education and Social Work, many white, middle-class families had moved to private secondary schooling, responding to the introduction of state-government policies on “school choice.”

The 1980s renaissance of the selective system for public schools was an attempt to stem the tide of bright kids and committed parents who had been leaving public schools.

And as of 2017, there are 21 “fully selective” secondary schools.

Selective schools, according to the N.S.W. Department of Education, help students identified as “gifted and talented” by grouping them with other gifted and talented students and teaching and providing educational materials at the “appropriate level.”

There is still a state-wide “high performing students unit,” which administers Year 7 placement tests for students seeking entry into a selective high school.

The debate about creating schools to accommodate kids with special abilities is endless and circular. There are as many good arguments for grouping “gifted” kids in special classes or schools, as there are for distributing them throughout the normal student population.

I’ll admit to some bias because my experience teaching those kids in that selective high school was never fully duplicated until I taught a graduate seminar program in education administration at the University of Victoria a lifetime later. The students in that program were also bright, knowledgeable, ambitious and ready to learn and discuss, just like the Grade 11s and 12s in 1968-69.

And not to forget that there can be a dark side to all this. Studies confirm that our most brilliant children are among our most vulnerable.

“The challenge of teaching them is finding a way to ease the burden of their extraordinary minds,” writes distinguished writer and author Marcello Di Cintio.

Nor is giftedness necessarily a precursor to success. A future column will deal with a recently released 45-year study following “gifted” kids into their later lives. Some of the results are what you might expect, but some are surprising.