Humanising Language Teaching
Year 6; Issue 3; September 04

Dealing with Highly Gifted Children

Henk van Oort
Netherlands

In the text below I use the phrase 'highly gifted children' to refer to children who have already developed reading and writing skills before they have even entered the classroom and who only need a short explanation when new features in, say, arithmetic are introduced. They have no problems whatsoever in the linguistic or orthographic fields. They have excellent and faithful memories that serve them well. There are no auditory, visual, or kinetic problems. I do not, though, include social skills or artistic talent in this definition. These may be either underdeveloped or well established, but in our present school system, unfortunately, these talents don't count for much. In short, in this article I will be dealing with children that only take a short time to accomplish a task in the usual school system and who will get bored if nothing extra is offered. Any teacher will recognise this type of child straightaway, whether it be in teaching general subjects or teaching a foreign language. Suffice it to say that I have in mind the type of school in which the pupils are classified according to age. In this type of school problems are likely to arise at the bottom end, the under-achievers, and at the top end, the highly gifted ones.

One of the characteristics of highly gifted children is that they get acquainted with the world of adults prematurely. This world is more transparent to these children than to less gifted ones. They know how to quickly and effectively assess a person, a problem or a new situation. This ability has many consequences. One of these is that they may become anxious, not necessarily, but this may happen. They understand aspects of adult life that it would be better for them not to be aware of. As we cannot teach these children how to dream again, thus protecting themselves from the often harsh adult world, as many of their less gifted class mates are still able to do, we can try to focus their awareness on subjects and personalities they are likely to be interested in. Thus they are enticed away from excessively deep waters. Here I mean personalities, from past or present times alike, who apparently had or have corresponding qualities. We can think of famous painters, inventors, discoverers, architects, poets, writers, composers, etc. The child's creative energy and alertness will be employed in assessing the real value of the biography that is the subject for a particular lesson. The child often strongly identifies with these remarkable adults, a feeling of kinship may occur. When the teacher offers such a biography, at a level appropriate to the age of the pupil, the child moves into a world in which great emotional and spiritual forces are active. These forces will not fail to help the child in their own coming of age.

Apart from the formative forces that emanate from these biographies something else comes into play. It is the teacher, their teacher, who is offering all these gems. Highly gifted children are extremely sensitive to the personality of the teacher. They, more or less unconsciously, want to know who their teacher really is. Does he merely play the educator or is he teaching from heart to heart? In offering these biographies the teacher shows the pupils something of his/her own field of interest. Such a biography links the famous person, the child and the teacher together. The child gets to know who the person at the front of the classroom is through the choice of life story. The teacher should feel in touch with the biography, of course. A wonderful atmosphere may fleetingly be present in the classroom when discussing such a life. Everybody present feels uplifted in a way. I have often experienced this enthusiasm with the children and seen it result in a search for more information in books or on the internet, the results of which are proudly shown in the next lesson. The children often ask their parents to travel to a particular spot related to one of the biographies, a birthplace, a museum or whatever. These lessons open up the world and that is precisely what these children need. From talks with parents it has become clear to me that the feeling of satisfaction experienced by a particular child in these biography lessons, has positively affected the whole basic mood of the child.

When we give these highly gifted children real food they will probably refrain from the understandable urge to be just an unobtrusive member of the group. More than once I have worked with children who on purpose made mistakes in tests to avoid being in the limelight of perfection. They level themselves down. This process may even take them deeper down the slope into a menacing abyss. Under-achievers may sometimes, in fact, be high-flyers. I know of a child who very cleverly hid her talents. Carefully and consistently she hid her light under the proverbial bushel. Subsequently this girl got the wrong type of secondary teaching. After a remarkable school career, too complicated to describe here, she went to university and is now a paediatrician.

At the other end of the scale we may come across a highly gifted child who is so difficult to handle, who behaves in such an unruly or passive way, that parents and educators take them for a person with very limited abilities indeed. Only the very observant parent or teacher can size up the real situation. As soon as the child's real talent is acknowledged and lessons are adapted accordingly, the behaviour problems tend to disappear.

It depends largely on the possibilities and limits of the school how these lessons meant for highly-gifted children are organised. One possibility would be to group some highly gifted children from different classes together in a special sub-group, just once or twice a week for one hour. If there are not enough staff available to do this swapping or whatever solution could be found, the class teacher could give such a lesson with a focus on the highly intelligent children in his/her own class. But the ideal thing would be to have these children in a separate room for one or two lessons a week.

Above I mentioned life stories as a subject for these lessons. In fact the number of suitable biographies is endless. One example: Leonardo da Vinci. In this lesson I not only told his life story and showed pictures, but I also talked about all those inventions of his. I showed the children Leonardo's drawings of machines. They were amazed. In a second lesson I invited them to think of their own inventions. They were invited to come up with ideas and they could make drawings during the lesson. A manual was written in English, then all the world could read it. There were surprising results e.g. an automatic school bag filler, a machine that could fry eggs, spectacles with electric wipers, etc. A third lesson was devoted to Leonardo's way of dealing with perspective. The pupils just couldn't stop drawing three dimensionally!

Many biographies will give rise to follow-ups as soon as the teacher starts thinking about this possibility.

Another endless source for these specific lessons are buildings that belong to the world's architectural heritage. These might include the Alhambra in southern Spain, the Parthenon in Greece, the pyramids in Egypt, etc. But local history, too, may suggest a good lesson. As long as the human factor is present, the lesson will be a success.

The creative spirit of mankind that shines through these lessons will do the trick. Working with gifted children in this way is highly rewarding for both the child and the teacher.

[Editorial note: In NLP terms, what Henk is proposing in this article is offering the gifted child the chance to " model" excellence, to borrow excellence , to become inspired by people like Leonardo. In this area NLP' recent thinking and Rudolf Steiner's much earlier precepts seem to me to be in close harmony. (Henk has worked for 40 years inspired by Steiner)]