CAG Dives Deep into 2e at 2019 Conference

PALM SPRINGS, Calif. — This year’s California Association of the Gifted conference featured a thread totally devoted to twice-exceptionality, with 16 sessions covering topics for twice-exceptional students and parents of twice-exceptional students. In addition, Dr. Sally Reis delivered a keynote address, which focused on the loss of talented girls and women across the globe, and the implications that can have on creativity, leadership, innovation, and creative production. “I believe that if there are more women leaders, we have less hunger, less poverty, and less war,” said Reis, who has published extensively on twice-exceptionality. “Women leaders at the top focus on different things; what is best for families and what is best for children.” Below is a summary of many of the sessions covering 2e issues. 

Strategy Development and Self-regulation: A Must for Twice-Exceptional Learners

Rose Blucher, director of the Blucher Educational Services for Boundless Potential, started her session with a story that might be familiar to those who raise and educate twice-exceptional children. It was a story about a bright fourth-grade boy. In an October meeting with the boy’s teacher, his mom heard how he was “so bright,” a good reader, and a good mathematician — but he couldn’t commit anything to paper. By the following February, the boy was very depressed and didn’t want to get on the school bus in the morning. The reason? A lack of strategies to enable the boy to self-regulate and to compensate for learning challenges by using his strengths. The boy’s mother was Blucher, who went on to serve twice-exceptional students in a large Maryland school district for more than 20 years. And her son? He went on to earn scholarships and awards, and to become a successful engineer. The strategies Blucher presented are intended to help educators support twice-exceptional students in ways that enable them to be successful. She illustrated the importance of those strategies through a variety of activities for session attendees. In one activity, attendees used materials from “kit bags” to write or draw about a recent achievement, as Blucher loudly and frequently announced the amount of time remaining for the task. In the activity debrief, Rose pointed out which aspects of the activity were detrimental to learning — for example, her time count-down — and which aspects helped learning — for example, having a choice of ways to express the output of the activity. She noted that twice-exceptional students often are asked to work in their deficit areas to receive or express learning, and that IEPs often focus on what students cannot do well. Another activity highlighted how working in one’s area of strength can lead to good learning outcomes. A third required attendees to organize and label the contents of a three-ring binder. “I’ve never seen a 2e child successfully use one,” Blucher observed. Instead, she suggested, allow the student to attack organizational problems using his or her own brain, not yours. What’s involved in developing strategies to help 2e students learn? According to Blucher, first focus on identifying strengths, perhaps from a multiple intelligence perspective. Is the student strong linguistically, logically, kinesthetically, spatially, etc? Then apply those strengths in real-life learning projects. For example, link a student’s interests to reading assignments. Blucher provided handout materials educators can use to work with students to develop, implement, and monitor strategies based on strengths and challenges. Included was a self-analysis tool in three versions — for elementary students, middle school students, and high school students — to help those students determine what they’re good at and where their strengths lie. See Blucher’s website, Blucher Educational Services, for more information about strength-based strategy development, including template forms and detailed instructions for developing strategies with a student.  

When Math Is a Problem: Creative and Humorous Ways to Teach Math Without Worksheets

Is Rachel McAnallen a mathematician? An educator? A stand-up comedian? Yes to all those questions. In this session, McAnallen (“Call me Ms. Math; no one can pronounce my last name.”) advocated for consistency and sense in the way teachers present the four basic mathematical operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Place value is the essential tool. The decimal point requires respect! Using an overhead projector and some currency, McAnallen demonstrated the power of the placeholder. First to go down: a hundred dollar bill. “I know you’re teachers,” she joked, “and you’ve never seen one of these before. I’m a consultant.” Using other bills, she illustrated the hundred’s place, the ten’s place, and the one’s place. McAnallen continued by taking issue with the way long division is often taught. Using this division problem as an example:

4⟌148

Addition, subtraction, and multiplication are all taught as right-to-left procedures, she noted. And long division? Left to right. “If you’ve got a kid on the spectrum, you’ve done him in” with this inconsistency, McAnallen contended. She then illustrated ways to do the problem from right to left and to respect the place values of the 1 (100), 4 (40), and 8. McAnallen also pointed out that the placeholder shifts in this type of long division. “We don’t move the decimal place in algebra,” she said, noting that this is another example of why younger kids can be confused by the concept of placeholder. McAnallen advocated mathetude — “No number’s going to push me around.” On the topic of numbers, she asked why we say Roman numerals and not Roman numbers. The answer? There was no Roman place value system, consequently no numbers. But the minute you use the term number, she claimed, the decimal point goes in to demarcate place values. Next, McAnallen scoffed at “carry the 1” in the procedure of addition, presumably because it doesn’t respect place values. McAnallen wants students to show their work. In fact, she wants them to show multiple ways of coming to an answer. She’ll give a problem, and the answer, and ask students to derive the answer as many ways as they can. McAnallen contended that the tool of place value and the concept of respecting the decimal point are essential for learning the four basic arithmetic operations. On a higher level, she pointed out that while arithmetic is answering the question, mathematics is questioning the answer. McAnallen has been a professional educator for over 60 years. “When I was 70,” she said, “my goal was to get my Ph.D. When I was 80, it was to write a book.” She has not only achieved those goals but has written three additional books, all in her “Awesum Alex” series. Of the four books, two are for students — one each on the topics of addition and subtraction — and two are instructor’s manuals. Find more information at https://zoidandcompany.com.

The Power of Strengths-Based, Talent-Focused Learning

Presenter Susan Baum asked participants in this session why they chose to attend. “2e students are our most frustrated learners,” replied an attendee from Vancouver, Canada. Another attendee, discovering the previous evening that “2e” was not some kind of state standard, had rearranged her conference schedule to focus on 2e-related sessions. Baum used clips from the documentary film 2e: Twice Exceptional to illustrate how twice- exceptionality manifested in four students who had attended Bridges Academy, a school for twice-exceptional learners. She called them students “of extraordinary abilities but with challenges that get in the way.” For one student with a complex profile, Baum presented a “solution” that involved combining a gifted class with a remedial social-skills program plus occupational therapy for handwriting. In Baum’s slide presentation, the “solution” was typed on a bandage laid across a list of the student’s strengths and challenges. Would the solution work? Probably not, because 2e kids are “green” — a combination of their strengths (yellow) and challenges (blue). And, as Baum often does, she paraphrased the Muppets line, “It’s not easy being green.” One problem with bandage solutions, explained Baum, is that they don’t account for whether a 2e student is truly “available to learn.” Making a 2e student available to learn means addressing basic needs such as safety, a sense of belonging, and self-esteem — some of the basic layers in the Maslow hierarchy of needs pyramid. The approach used by Baum and the Bridges faculty is two-fold:

• Strengths-based, where the instructional approach is differentiated to align with a student’s preferred cognitive style, learning profile, interests, and abilities
• Talent-focused, where a student is provided with explicit options to explore and express his or her abilities and interests within and outside the curriculum

Baum illustrated this approach with one of the students profiled, a young woman who is artistic, highly verbal, an avid reader, a metaphorical thinker, and insightful. When at Bridges, she was also argumentative, oppositional, inattentive, unproductive, and had poor social skills. The steps to success with this student were these:

• Identify her strengths
• Create a talent-development plan
• Integrate a strengths-based approach for skill development
• Use accommodations if necessary.

There’s much involved in these four steps, of course. But in her years at Bridges and the years since, the young woman has blossomed, as have the other students Baum profiled in this session. For more information on strengths-based, talent-focused learning, see the Bridges Academy site — and/or explore here at 2eNews.com.

Talent Development: The Badges Program

Laura Bahr and Caroline Maxwell, teachers at Bridges Academy, shared their experiences leading the “Young Expert Program,” a highly personalized learning model that invites students to deeply explore an area of interest, developing a wide body of knowledge and skills in that area over the three years of the program. “Successful talent development is about a journey and creating an environment where gifts and talents can flourish that may be hidden in plain sight,” Bahr said. In its fourth year of implementation, the program has seen students go onto higher education with fledgling expertise in artificial intelligence, music, computer programming, creative writing, and other areas. Students who are most successful in this program grow their executive functioning and project management skills as they pursue their field of interest, learning creative processes to confront and overcome challenges — what Bahr calls the “scrappy workaround.”

Using Alternate Assessment to Document Learning

Kristin Berman, head of school at Quad Preparatory School, discussed how the difficulties that many twice-exceptional students have with production often requires teachers to shift their assessment strategies toward interest- and strength-based assignments, as well as collaborative evaluation. Sharing hers and her teachers’ experiences with 2e students, she explored the challenges of pre-assessment for students who are incredibly bright, but often have knowledge gaps. “We have to become the best observers we can,” she said. “It’s almost an art.”

Supporting the Emotional Well-Being of Twice-Exceptional Students

Thomas Hébert, a professor at the University of South Carolina, explored the social and emotional issues that can emerge for twice-exceptional students and coping strategies that students, educators, and parents can pursue to support their well being. Hébert urged attendees to “Focus on the gift, focus on the strength. … The first thing you need to do is focus on what you’re good at … then do something with that.”

Writing and the 2e Learner: Why Is It So Hard & How to Help

“Writing is hard for everyone,” Mary McInerney stated at the start of her session, “But often it’s especially hard for twice-exceptional writers.” She should know, as someone who teaches English and history to fourth and fifth graders at Bridges Academy, a school for twice-exceptional students. Plus, McInerney shared with the audience that she herself has learning disabilities, something she was able to hide at school for years because she moved so often that teachers never had a chance to discover them.

Why Writing Is Hard

The presenter explained how early negative experiences 2e students often have with writing can turn them into “anxious non-writers.” These experiences frequently include criticism, a focus on making writing part of all subjects, and the challenge, common to many 2e students, of writing by hand. According to McInerney, among the factors that can make writing arduous for twice-exceptional students are perfectionism and underdeveloped skills in areas such as executive functioning, self-regulation, and social/emotional regulation. Some ways to take the anxiety out of writing that she has found are building trust with students, giving them the gift of time, and creating a “safe” environment, one conducive to taking risks.

What Teachers Can Do to Help

McInerney described one of the ways in which teachers can build trust. She explained the importance of recognizing that while a teacher can guide students in writing, the work is theirs and they get to express themselves in the way they feel is right. If teachers fail to build trust with their budding writers, she stated, “they will stop producing for us and, even more tragic, they will stop producing for themselves!” McInerney also noted that writing works best when students are:

• Writing for a purpose
• Given assignments that align with their strengths, interests, and learning preferences
• Comfortable they have choices in what they write about.

The goal after all, McInerney observed, is to get them writing. If they write more, she said, they’ll become better writers. The presenter called on teachers to make a paradigm shift. She explained that “our thinking about writing has to change so that our approach to teaching writing can change. Writing is an art process and we need to treat it as such.” [dropshadowbox align=”right” effect=”lifted-both” width=”40%” height=”” background_color=”#ffffff” border_width=”1″ border_color=”#dddddd” ]Why Writing Can Seem Daunting Presenter Mary McInerney gave some perspective on the challenges of writing by providing a list of the skills and abilities that writing demands: •Vision/goal setting •PlanningOrganization •Time Management •Perseverance •Ability to evaluate one’s own work and others’ work •Being receptive to feedback •Collaboration •Flexibility •Creative problem solving.[/dropshadowbox] To illustrate the concept of writing as an art process, McInerney plays her students video clips of artists at work: a dancer doing choreography, a composer going back over a musical piece to make changes, and an artist painting. The purpose is to show how artistic work is made up of starting, stopping, and reworking and to encourage students to expect to have to reread and rework when they write. “To students,” McInerney explained, “teachers seem to set the expectation that they should be able to write right from the start. (Instead) let your students know that it’s a process and that it takes time and effort to master it.” Just as artists in other areas of creative expression do, writers need opportunities to play with their medium — in this case, words. McInerney encouraged teachers to provide these opportunities for play prior to asking students to apply structure and conventions to their writing. She does this with her students through poetry, specifically with free verse. McInerney showed a video clip of what she described as a visualization exercise, a way that she and her students play with words in preparation for a poetry-writing assignment. In the video, each student receives an apple and the group is asked to describe how it appeals to their senses — how it feels, looks, smells, tastes, and so forth. McInerney urges the students to go beyond simple descriptions like good or nice. (As she explained elsewhere in the presentation, they have “little funerals” for words like these in her classes, complete with coffins and graves.) She lists the words and phrases the students provide, encouraging them to expand on their initial responses. The lists, she explained, provide a vocabulary for the topic and serve as writing prompts for the students, much better, she noted, than having the students start their assignment with just a blank sheet of paper. McInerney emphasized that she is not advocating doing away with teaching writing conventions. She just postpones focusing on them during the first half of the year, until her non-writers get past their anxiety and begin to feel comfortable getting their thoughts down on paper. She also urged the teachers in her audience, the majority of those in attendance, not to worry about how these kids will learn to write their five-paragraph essays. She assured them that once students gain confidence as writers, it will all fall into place.

Please Understand Me: Looking at 2e Through the Student’s Eyes

Sharon Duncan, an independent education consultant, opened her session by stating that twice-exceptional kids are “one of our most at-risk populations in the U.S. today. Nobody gets them.”

Understanding Giftedness

The first step in “getting” these kids, according to Duncan, is for people to gain a good understanding of giftedness. She began by discussing a major challenge in raising and teaching gifted children: asynchrony, the uneven development frequently seen in this population. “These children are many ages at once,” she said. “They’re complex for parents and teachers to deal with, and it’s even more so for the kids themselves.” Her advice is to “treat them at whatever age they’re presenting at the moment. Treat them with the respect they deserve if they’re acting older than their age. Provide support when they’re acting younger.” In discussing the support that gifted children need, Duncan showed the IQ score bell curve. This curve has a peak in the middle where nearly 70 percent of the population scores on intelligence testing. The scores in this middle portion of the curve are considered to be average. The curve tapers at each end where a small percentage of people score significantly above or below average. In discussing those who fall at the extremes of the curve, Duncan noted that “we don’t tell people with intellectual disability [those who score significantly below average] to act like everyone else because they can’t.” She said the same should be true of those who score at the opposite end of the curve. She emphasized that we need to understand that individuals who score significantly above average “experience the world differently and that permeates everything they do.” In support of that statement, she provided some statistics. According to Duncan, gifted individuals:

• Have triple risk of depression, anxiety, autoimmune disease, and allergies
• Make up two percent of the population, but 20 percent of high school dropouts

The speaker then addressed other issues that present challenges to gifted learners. One is the discomfort that Duncan feels we in the United States have with the concept of giftedness. She provided this example. If you say your child got a football scholarship, people think that’s great. If you talk about your child’s advanced intelligence, people think you’re bragging. According to Duncan, “We need to get over that discomfort.” Further complicating the situation for gifted individuals, according to Duncan, is the tendency to pathologize the innate traits of high intellectual ability. She observed that it takes a skilled clinician to tell the difference between giftedness and disability or disease. [perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Our thinking about writing has to change so that our approach to teaching writing can change. Writing is an art process and we need to treat it as such.[/perfectpullquote] Duncan expressed the belief that the social/emotional side of giftedness deserves even more attention than curriculum. She sees it as the key to working successfully with gifted students. For example, she asked participants if they ever noticed how gifted kids often show more interest in being friends with the teacher than with their classmates. She observed that only in the classroom do we expect people to relate exclusively to others their own age. “As adults,” she stated, “we like to be with those we share interests with. Our friends can be a range of ages. But in school, children are usually grouped by age.” She noted that “social skills classes aren’t going to work if gifted kids are with age mates that they have nothing in common with.”

Understanding Twice-Exceptionality

Duncan next turned her attention to twice-exceptionality. She pointed out that twice-exceptional learners have all of the gifted issues to deal with plus more, and “it can be soul crushing.” Not only are 2e children complex, she explained, but due to their combination of gifts and challenges, “they present in different ways at the same time.” Furthermore, many education, healthcare, and other professionals lack training about twice-exceptionality. According to Duncan, the consequences of simultaneously dealing with gifts and challenges are often some or all of the following:

• Low self-esteem
• Anxiety
• Depression
• Anger
• Acting out
• Withdrawing
• Giving up
• A lifetime of inaccurate self-identities.

Twice-exceptional kids, she observed, often sabotage themselves because they are unable to achieve the standards they set for themselves — standards that they see others around them achieving. Duncan noted that these students may have “a rage to learn and express themselves” but are frequently unable to share or show it in a way others value. The result, she said, can be “loneliness that comes from watching everyone doing things you can’t.” In working to help twice-exceptional students overcome their challenges, Duncan explained, “solutions that fail to recognize all aspects of the 2e child can exacerbate the problem.” Giving them intellectual outlets is essential; otherwise, she said, it can cause them harm. These outlets may be in school. Duncan pointed out that students will benefit even if teachers can only manage to find small ways to do provide such outlets. Alternatively, it may be necessary to meet these needs through activities outside of school. Duncan concluded with steps that teachers can take to help their 2e students be successful:

• Find them and have them assessed
• Address both the gifts and the challenges
• Separate understanding from demonstrating, and work on each separately
• Partner with parents to focus on the long-term goal of raising an adult with healthy self-identity who can reach his or her full potential

The Journey: Supporting Your 2e Child through School and Beyond and Parent Forum Q&A

Among the closing sessions of the conference were a parent panel followed by a Q&A session with parents of twice-exceptional children. The featured parents also went on to work in various capacities in the field of 2e education. The parents offered anecdotes and advice for the audience, which included educators and fellow parents of 2e kids. They covered topics ranging from advocating for your child to IEPs to handling criticism from other parents to life after schooling. Eileen Brennan, who now serves as director of development at Bridges Academy, addressed the “why don’t you just force your child to do their homework” question that parents of non-2e children might pose. “Someone that brings that attitude isn’t going to get it,” Brennan says. “You can explain it (to them) or not.” On the topic of advocacy, Quad Prep’s Berman and author/consultant/2e specialist Robin Schader emphasized the importance that parents play in the success of their twice-exceptional children. Said Schader, “Unfortunately, you may be the change agent. But fortunately, you may be the change agent.” And that change sometimes can be significant. “If the school doesn’t offer services for your 2e child, go somewhere that does,” Berman said. “Find a place that can serve them.” Finally, the panelists shared the importance of having patience and being optimistic, of having confidence in your child’s abilities — especially when it comes to the transition to adulthood and careers. “They all do find their way,” Brennan said. “Stay positive.” Even if it’s a winding path. “They are going to get there, but they might take the scenic route,” parent and educator Kim Vargas said. Added 2e Resource’s Linda Neumann, “But the scenic route is fascinating.” Other 2e session focuses included the question of whether 2e students are getting what they need; twice-exceptionality and culturally and linguistically diverse students; creating an inclusive classroom for gifted and 2e students; technology and productivity; understanding and supporting 2e learners; and what parents need to know to develop talent.