Teachers 'fear' smart students

by Caroline Milburn , July 14, 2008 The Age, Melbourne

TOO many teachers fear having very bright students in class because they feel ill-equipped to deal with them, according to a visiting campaigner on gifted children. Rosemary Cathcart, one of New Zealand's leading educators in the field of gifted education, says their lack of confidence is caused by a weakness in the way teachers are trained. Most undergraduate courses do not include gifted education as a routine part of teacher training.

"The reality is that most gifted children are going to spend most of their time in regular classrooms, especially at primary school," says Mrs Cathcart, who is in Australia to speak at the Australian Association for the Education of Gifted and Talented national conference in Hobart. "But because teachers do not have gifted education built into their basic training they will have a limited understanding and recognition of gifted children. I've had a teacher say to me, 'That child must be gifted because her handwriting is so neat,' and another has said, 'We can't let that boy join the gifted program because he's too naughty'.

"We haven't prepared teachers well enough... we need to equip them with the skills to help these children." In Australia, a 2001 Senate inquiry into the education of gifted children found teachers were poorly trained to cater for highly able students, estimated to represent between 5% and 10% of all students. The inquiry found many gifted children were suffering from under-achievement, boredom and psychological distress because their needs were not being met at school. It recommended all state and territory education departments should require teaching degree courses to include at least one semester unit on gifted children, including how to identify them.

• Mrs Cathcart, a former teacher who now runs an education consultancy, led a successful campaign in New Zealand to get the government to acknowledge the special needs of gifted children. Education policy was changed to include a new regulation that simply says all schools are required to identify and provide for their gifted students. The initiative included extra funding for advisers to work with New Zealand schools and a handbook to be sent to all schools.

In Victoria, education department policy documents include the gifted under the umbrella of special needs students. But peak parent groups say the wording is so confusing few schools realise that gifted children fall into the special-needs category. The 2001 Senate report acknowledged the problem and recommended all state and territory education department policies make it clear when they refer to special needs that it includes giftedness. Rhonda Collins, a Victorian parent involved in gifted education lobby groups, says scant progress has been made since the 2001 inquiry and parents hope the newly created National Curriculum Board will introduce a coherent policy.

The 12-member board, established by the Federal Government, is devising a national curriculum, from kindergarten through to the end of high school, for English, maths, history and the sciences. "It's an opportune time for the board to formally recognise gifted as special needs," Ms Collins says. "If it does that it will make it clear that this group of children, through no fault of their own, through a genetic predisposition, require a differentiated curriculum in all schools. "Giftedness occurs across all socio-economic groups but schools are not finding these children in ethnic groups or in Koori groups. Schools tend to still think of gifted children as being white Anglo-Saxons from the eastern suburbs. The focus is on performance instead of the child."

Mrs Cathcart says Victoria's decision to expand the SEAL scheme, a program aimed at bright students in government secondary schools, was a welcome development because research showed it was crucial for gifted children to share regular activities with other talented children. "Otherwise they can feel alienated in the classroom and they can shut down from expressing their ideas, even with a good teacher who tries to differentiate material for them." She tells teachers that having a gifted child in the classroom is a bonus and strategies to engage them also enhance the learning of other students.

"A lot of teachers think that having gifted children in the class means an immense amount of extra work or they can feel threatened if they think the child might ask them a question they don't know the answer to," she says. "I tell teachers not to be afraid of working with these children... there are simple strategies, such as introducing unexpected elements into a lesson, that children will pick up on. We have the opportunity to engage with minds that bring a different kind of freshness and new ideas to our lessons."