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Shelly Blake-Plock
Elkridge, MD
As an artist and teacher, Shelly is an everyday instigator for progressive art, organization, and education. In addition to his work teaching high school Latin and Art History, Shelly is a member of both the experimental Red Room Collective and Baltimore's High Zero Foundation; he also works daily as lead blogger at teachpaperless.com to promote fresh ways of thinking about new culture and new education for a new millennium.
An unapologetic advocate for free universal unrestricted Wi-Fi access for all students, for the last few years Shelly has been experimenting with the full integration of social and participatory media into his high school classes. Fully relishing the criticism of naysayers, Shelly has come to believe that he was definitely made for these times.
Recent Activity
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Shelly commented on the article |Just an interesting aside...
'Disability' is a relative (and not very useful term) especially with regards to numerous LDs; unfortunately, that's the language the folks writing the initial legislation decided to go with.
GT itself, at the time of the creation of IDEA, was only not included under its umbrella for a mixture of political reasons combined with the inability to come to a definition suitable for psych diagnosis.
The problem is the variability of presentations and manifestations of giftedness -- from radically high functions in specific areas of MI to intense hypersensitivity and debilitating perfectionism. In other words, in GT you don't have a continuum along which to diagnose severity, but rather a host of semi-related outliers which must be considered individually.
The mistake many schools and school districts get into is trying to use a 'standard' -- which usually amounts to testing and academic performance -- to identify GT students.
Not only is this a disservice to the actual kids who are gifted and regularly go unidentified for academic and behavior reasons, but it creates a false sense of understanding across the school community. It suggests that 'gifted' kids get their work done, do well in school, and behave in society.
The reality couldn't be further from that 'truth'.
Greg, you say that to follow Becky's thinking, "Kids with disabilities would face discrimination and their right to be educated with their peers in the least restrictive environment possible would probably deteriorate quickly." And I agree. This really isn't a matter of "giving each child the best we have to offer"; there has to be science and law backing it up. But, by-and-large, with regard to GT education, we already see the situation you are fretful of on a daily basis in innumerable schools: there is GT dicrimination and those kids do suffer the inability of teachers and admins lacking GT training to provide an adequate learning situation.
How do we go about changing that?
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Shelly commented on the article |
Unfortunately, the GT identification/service route has gone so neglected for so long (how many GT certified / GT specialist teachers are in any given building?) that it's easy to confuse what often passes for GT education and what GT education really needs to be.
It sounds like you are describing great opportunities that all kids deserve. But there's nothing necessarilly 'GT' about those opportunities. They're actually just the opportunities for learning that we SHOULD be offering on a regular basis to all our students.
Where schools often miss the boat with regards to gifted ed is that they treat GT as if it's just a bunch of smart kids who need enrichment activities.
That's not the case.
GT kids of every race, class, and background are regularly unidentified because folks are looking for numbers and grades when the research suggests that (especially by high school) many true GT kids have 'dropped out' (in the old sense of dropping out of the local society mentality).
GT kids don't necessarily get good grades. GT kids are often problem-behavior kids. They are often especially prone to perfectionism, obsessive behavior, self-abuse, isolation, etc.
Many GT kids have severe LDs, as well. Asperger's is common among GT circles. As are all sorts of social and physio-social problems likely related to hypersensitivity.
Forget the Stanford Tests, try visual batteries. The results some high-end GT kids attain there are nothing less than breath-taking. And it's not because they do so 'well'; rather it's because in reading the results of the tests, you can see that their minds are working in ways that are so far removed from what we consider 'ordinary'.
And that can be both a blessing and a curse.
A good GT program would understand this and treat its children on an individualized basis not unlike the best of any Special Ed program.
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Shelly commented on the article |
Ira, Good point about going and seeing stuff. And there are ways to accomplish this that are mind-numbingly easy to do; which makes it so frustrating when we see over and over again it's not happening.
One thing I think this conversation would improve from is a description of what folks are talking about when they are talking about a GT classroom.
I'm not just talking about 'really interesting stuff'. Nor am I talking about IB or AP or Honors programs. When I talk about GT classrooms, I tend to talk in rather clinical terms.
Yes, I think all kids deserve fully differentiated and engaged classrooms. But, no, I disagree with you Ira that any child would benefit from a GT classroom. Perhaps an accelerated or more connected and engaging class, absolutely.
But if done correctly, a GT classroom is serving a special needs community that may have rather particular needs related to sociability, somatic/physical reactions to sound, inability to process in traditionally measurable ways. I'm one of those folks who actually sees real GT education as a part of Special Education as a whole, and in the same way that many kids in Special Ed programs need both time integrated into the standard classrooms and some chill out time away from those classrooms, many GT kids need the same thing.
Understand, my definition of GT is not 'the rich doctor's smart kid'. Though of course the rich doctor's smart kid may be GT. But, just as well any kid may be GT -- it's a matter of determining how to identify what essentially is a very small subset of children.
What we should be doing is upping the ante across the board and vastly improving the structure of school life and learning. But give the GT kids a little room -- they aren't always the 'brightest'.
And, if we look at it from a service perspective, we need to get GT services into the lives of GT kids. I really don't think GT is an 'opportunity', it's a diagnosis.
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Shelly commented on the article |
@Michelle, et al.
The way we define GT is a bit screwed up to begin with, but it's safe to say that a truly gifted student and a high achieving student are not in fact in any way necessarily the same thing.
Giftedness itself is probably not so much about 'parenting' (their are plenty of classic examples of gifted children who have come out of broken family environments), but rather parental advocacy on behalf of a gifted child certainly helps the child get what they need educationally (sometimes) -- as in your case with early college admission.
And Ira, I don't think this is about the kids 'getting the gifts' at home so much as it is a disproportion on account of poor identification rules in most schools. IQ tests and academic achievement really don't cut it when you are talking about musically gifted students, for example. And -- and this is the weird thing -- you can be musically gifted and have never touched an instrument or piece of music. So identification becomes marred by lack of experimentation.
I think it's more a matter of what we push and 'value' in our curriculum that causes all kinds of forms of underrepresentation in GT programs by all sorts of kids with all sorts of backgrounds. And there are plenty of upper income families who don't support their children trying out music, just as their are lower income families who can't afford to rent instruments.
I guess what I'm getting at is that there is no cut and dry with GT. On the one hand you have labels that have little to do with the complexity of the myriad types of giftedness, and on the other hand you have a dearth of representation -- likely across the board with regards to race, class, etc on account of the lables and 'rules' for identification.
Maybe if we opened up our early schooling curriculum to more extensive and engaged experimental forms of art, music, dance, exploring, play, we'd have a better idea of what giftedness really looks like in its plentiful forms.
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Shelly commented on the article |I'm not up for scrapping schools. Good teachers and the strong connections between students are a vital part of education, that's why I'm leaning towards more of a homebase model.
I want the students to be able to go out into the world connected to each other via tech and then be able to return to the homebase to debrief and discuss face-to-face with everyone in the community what it was they learned out there.
And this would have to be some sort of ongoing cycle. Constantly supported by content learning -- of course the service of providing that content could take on myriad forms.
The important thing is getting kids out into the field.
And we don't have to send 'em far. There's plenty they can learn by simply walking into a different neighborhood or working with folks in their communities who have a different background than themselves.
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