Miriam Darnell is an educator who has worked with twice-exceptional students for over 30 years. During this time, she’s devised innovative and effective ways to tap into their differences, build on their strengths, and encourage their creative expression. Following is a lightly edited conversation that 2e Newsletter had with her about the insights she’s gained into this unique population of learners.
2e Newsletter: Can you briefly describe your past experiences and your current role in working with twice-exceptional kids?
Miriam Darnell: I’ve been working with 2e kids for over 30 years now. It started in 1986 when I was working as a teacher’s aide in a private school for gifted children in Denver. There were six eight- to nine-year-old boys in the class who were all gifted but had various learning disabilities that prevented them from writing. They had everything from dyslexia, dysgraphia, and auditory sequencing problems to fine motor delays, autism, perfectionism and ADHD, all of which can easily prevent a child from getting words onto paper. The teacher didn’t know what to do to motivate them to at least try writing, so she had me take them to a separate room and start a remedial tutoring group.
I‘d always gotten along well with these boys, even during recess and lunchtime when we had long conversations about superheroes, games, and fantasy novels. From what I knew about them, I realized that I somehow had to make writing a game if they were going to be motivated to move past their disabilities and change their thinking about the writing process. So, I took them on imaginary adventures through fantasy books that we read aloud together. Then we wrote down what happened during those adventures as a means of interacting with the books we were reading. From this original idea came the interactive role-playing game of Druidawn®. Now, years later, I’m still doing the same thing, but with a master’s degree in special education, six employees and a co-director, 200 to 300 students per year, and about to host our 18th year of summer fantasy camp in Lafayette, Colorado.
2e: What age group do you work with most?
MD: We work with a wide range of students from ages 7 to 16.
2e: In general, how is working with 2e kids different from working with other types of students?
MD: Low self-esteem tends to be a big issue among 2e children. They’re acutely, painfully aware of their inadequacies. The discrepancy between their high abstract reasoning and creative abilities versus their slow processing or output speed is agony to them. These children think like a young adult, but they have the fine motor coordination of a six-year-old. They read and comprehend at lightning speed, but their writing output is belabored, with spelling and grammar struggles, organizational difficulties, and motivational resistance.
While average students might push their way through difficult tasks such as writing with the knowledge that it’ll get better with practice, 2e students are far more likely to shut down completely. They become depressed or angry, and they can be overly judgmental of their work.
I’ve found that twice-exceptional students are also more prone to cheating in the Druidawn game so that they can win with every dice roll. They don’t know how to separate their personal self-esteem from the act of playing the game. If their character loses, they feel like they personally are a loser in real life; so because they feel so powerless in the real world, they try to become powerful in the game as quickly as possible. They’ll even choose to play the villain rather than the hero so that they can dominate.
2e: Do you find 2e children to be more creative or creative in different ways than other children you have worked with?
MD: Absolutely. 2e and creativity seem to go hand-in-hand. I have yet to meet a highly creative child who doesn’t struggle with at least one learning or social uniqueness. They tend to be visual-spatial learners who struggle with linear thinking. They process in 3D pictures rather than two-dimensional concepts. If they’re good at math, they probably can’t show their work and prove how they got the right answer because their minds don’t think in step-by-step methods.
Twice-exceptional children also tend to use a large vocabulary because, just like other highly gifted children, they crave better ways to express themselves than with ordinary words. But they are more likely to use their impressive vocabulary in the wrong context, mispronounce or misspell words, or use mixed-metaphors.
2e: Do 2e kids tend to have a different perspective on things — on themselves and how they relate to the world? For example, do they display a tendency perhaps to see themselves as outsiders or as not quite fitting in?
MD: By definition, 2e students don’t “fit in.” They’re different and they know it. Many are homeschooled because they’re highly sensitive and feel like they don’t belong in mainstream education. They can’t relate to most children their own age and there’s a common feeling of isolation.
The trick is to help them understand that different is a gift. Being different is better than being the same as everyone else. It takes a different mind to invent a new energy source. It takes a different mind to be the CEO of Google, to find a cure for cancer, or to write a novel that changes the way people think about the world.
2e: What kinds of special challenges are there in getting these kids to discover their creative side, and what are some strategies you use to overcome those challenges?
MD: 2e children don’t have to discover their creative side. They are creativity. It comes as naturally to them as flying comes to birds. If they’re not being creative in their school setting, they’re most likely shut down or their wings have been clipped, meaning they’re not being given the opportunities to learn in ways that suit their learning style.
In school, these students excel when given alternative ways to display their knowledge such as producing a video or a 3D diorama instead of a research paper.
They often absorb information best when it’s presented visually or kinesthetically. They tend to learn best when they see the end result before they see the steps that lead to the end (whole-to-part learning); and often times they’ll find a better, quicker way to get to the end result if left to their own devices.
2e kids love art and games and invention, and they don’t need encouragement to participate in what is a natural part of who they are. What’s hard is being unable to get their creativity to work for them in the real world. Creativity is a tremendous asset, especially when it’s focused and productive. They need people to help them learn how to channel their creative energies into academic and social success.
2e: Can you provide any particularly memorable examples of creativity you’ve seen from twice- exceptional kids?
MD: We gave our students a writing prompt: Write a story called Salt vs. Pepper. The assignment had no other specifics than that. We expected that most of our students would write a typical story about a salt shaker having a fight with a pepper shaker. What we Understanding the 2e Experience, continued got instead was an amazing array of original creative concepts like these:
• A horse race where two of the horses were named Salt and Pepper
• A girl named Pepper who fell in love with the sea (representing salt)
• A Star Wars parody done completely with kitchen spices
• A story titled A Tail of Two Kitties, about playful black and white kittens.
We had so many that we decided to publish them all in one book called Salt vs. Pepper: An Assaultment of Stories.
2e: Once they do discover their creative side (and produce creative work that they feel good about and that might elicit praise from others), what kinds of effects have you seen it have on them?
MD: In Druidawn, praise is a regular part of our vocabulary, from teachers to students and from students to other students; but all the praise in the world can’t compare to the natural rewards that come from doing something you love. Our students aren’t motivated to write because we praise their work. They’re motivated because we pair the act of writing with the act of game playing. They perform because they love the activity!
What Is Druidawn®?
Here’s a description from an article that first appeared in 2e Newsletter in August of 2005.
A small group of children huddle together, waiting for the roll of the dice. “Sixteen!” one young man exclaims. “That means the troll is vulnerable to low temperatures. Good! My character uses his ice powers to freeze the troll’s feet to the floor.”
Another dice roll. “Eighteen,” the game master announces. “Okay, the troll’s feet freeze to the floor, but he still has his club and he swings it at your character.”
What happens next? It depends on the next roll of the dice. “Six,” says the game master. “The troll misses completely.”
The game continues with players and game master rolling the dice to see what path the adventure will take. As some readers will recognize, what’s happening here is a fantasy role-playing game (RPG). Adventuring will continue, possibly for hours. Each of the participants will play out their character with the GM (game master) deciding what twists and turns the game’s storyline will take and enforcing the rules of the game.
The online encyclopedia Wikipedia describes fantasy role-playing games this way:
At their core, [role-playing games] are a form of interactive and collaborative storytelling. [They] engage the participants actively, allowing them to simultaneously be audience and author…[T]he players are writing the story together, as a team.
At the end of a role-playing game session the events that transpired could be written into a book that would tell a story written by all of its participants.
It’s this storytelling aspect of role-playing that captured the imagination of educator Miriam Darnell, herself a former gamer. She wondered if her childhood passion, role-playing, could be the key to getting both male and female non-writers to write.
Players document the details about their characters on a form called a character sheet that brings the player’s character to life. The character sheet typically lists information about the character, including strength and intelligence, how much charisma the character has, and — since this is fantasy — what paranormal traits the character possesses. These attributes influence the character’s actions and responses to situations during the course of the game. Druidawn players can go far beyond the scope of a typical character sheet, adding details about their character’s pets, their weapons, their homes, or other aspects of their lives.
According to Darnell, the character sheet is the key to getting players to write. They can start gradually, with minimal writing or none at all, dictating ideas about their character to someone who records the information. Then, as players become more and more involved in the game, they start to record their ideas and write stories about their characters themselves.
According to Darnell, the role playing activities of Druidawn give players a sense of belonging, a place where they can work with other asynchronous (2e) students and be appreciated for their unique insights.
“We tell our children every day how extraordinary their inventive ideas are,” she says. “And we tell them how they should always strive to put their uniqueness to good use.”
