Raising the Ceiling
Gifted and talented program brightens schooldays
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POLSON — A kindergartner in Peggy Norman’s class grips a board marker in her small hand and draws a pine tree facing up and a tree facing down to match an arrow pointing up and an arrow pointing down in an attached rectangle.
Her drawings are part of a lesson on analogies taught by Polson School District Gifted and Talented teacher Tamara Fisher.
An analogy is a tough concept, and Fisher said she’s always surprised at how well the kindergartners pick it up.
Montana law requires each district to have a comprehensive plan to identify and serve gifted (high ability/high potential) students, according to Barbara Luttrell, Polson Special Education Director. School District #23 has offered gifted and talented education for almost 30 years. Fisher took over the program from Carolyn Heinz 14 years ago.
For grades one through six, Fisher said GT class is part thinking-skill activities, such as logical thinking. In the middle school and high school, Fisher allows students to choose what they want to earn about, but they have to submit a plan, goals, and timeline with their proposed project.
In addition to academic subjects and thinking skills, Fisher teaches Polson’s gifted and talented students how to persevere when faced with difficult projects. Children need to learn how to persist on a hard task, she said. Usually, if the work doesn’t come easily, they goof off, cheat, quit or get mad, she added.
If a student has a toolbox of skills, Fisher explained, he or she can use these tools to attack all sorts of problems.
Fisher starts talking to students in kindergarten and first grade about perfectionism and how to keep it healthy. She reinforces the lesson throughout a student’s school career.
“Perfectionism is like cholesterol, there’s good and there’s bad,” she said. “If it’s bad, it takes over your life. Good (perfectionism) lets you go on to do great things.”
“Another big thing I work with kids on is self-advocacy,” Fisher added.
“It’s your education,” she tells her students.
There’s a way to politely and diplomatically approach a teacher and ask for harder spelling words or tougher math, and Fisher teaches her students how to do so.
She also stresses that being in GT is not about being better or smarter than other students.
“It’s the way you learn,” she said, “It’s a learning difference.”
All Polson students are screened in kindergarten. Essentially, teachers take a formal observation inventory noting analytical thinkers, curiosity, sensitivity, a sense of humor, perceptiveness and accelerated learning. A student’s star math and reading scores need to be far above average, too.
Another identifier for a child who might be gifted and talented is advanced language. Fisher had a kindergarten student a few years ago whose favorite word was hypotenuse.
“He kind of understood the concept, too,” Fisher added.
Fisher accepts referrals and then watches for additional evidence of a child’s giftedness.
Children are not always uniformly gifted and talented across the board — a student can be three or four grade levels ahead in reading or math or talented artistically or musically but remain in his or her standard grade level for other subjects.
“Thinking of an 11-year-old who functions like a seven-year-old is easy for us to understand, and it’s easy to be compassionate,” Fisher noted.
However, a 7-year-old who is accelerated and intelligently functions as an 11-year-old also will need help, she explained.
“Our society has a hard time dealing with this,” Fisher said.
Unfortunately, gifted children may have people in their lives who do not understand, are angry or feel threatened. It can be a problem in the classroom, too, and Fisher helps teachers find ways to challenge gifted kids.
The solution for gifted first graders as readers may be as simple as getting them books about interesting subjects at a third or fourth grade reading level.
Sometimes a GT student might know more about a given topic than the teacher, causing an awkward situation. This, Fisher explained, is where diplomacy comes in – another topic she addresses with her students.
GT students also learn much faster. They understand a concept after one or two repetitions. A math concept, for instance, may only take a gifted student one or two times to master, instead of 10 or 20, and they get bored if they have to do the same sort of problem over and over.
According to Fisher over the course of a K-12 education, students spend a cumulative total of three to six years going over information they already learned or can learn faster.
Fisher noted that the dropout rate for GT students is 15 to 20 percent nationwide, and that GT classes help to keep students in school. She’s said she’s had students tell her that GT class was the only thing that kept them from dropping out.
While Polson graduate and GT student Kate Tiskus wouldn’t have dropped out, she said GT helped her out, particularly when she was a “little kid,” because she was introduced to books at her reading level and activities that challenged her. There aren’t as many choices for elementary kids as high school students, Tiskus added. The GT classes were small, and she could be an individual.
Brianne Burrows, another Polson grad and GT student, agreed. “I always felt I could be more myself, ask more questions and really not be afraid to learn in that environment,” she said.
Most schools around the country don’t identify students for gifted and talented until third grade Fisher explained. Typically selection for gifted and talented classes is based on IQ testing, not valid until a child is about nine.
Fisher teaches thinking skills based activities to all kindergarten students while in grades one through 12, students go to a separate classroom or meeting place. Lessons are half an hour long, and she meets with each kindergarten class 14 times each year.
It’s only a table in the corner of Cherry Valley lunchroom/gym, but for the first grade students who come to work with Fisher, it’s a special place. Students receive a worksheet with printed lines. Instructions are to cut only the solid line and then fold on the dotted lines, making each paper shape into a letter.
Little hands have trouble with scissors, but brains are thinking hard.
“I knew it was a ‘z,’” Anna Schiele explained. “I just didn’t know how to make it.”
“I love the hard stuff,” first grader Ryan Dupuis said with his jack-o’-lantern grin. “It makes my brain hurt.”
“You have to be willing to let them get frustrated,” Fisher explained.
She said jumping in and helping is how bulletin boards end up with 17 ducks that look exactly alike.
“I just want to see what their thinking is and what they can do,” Fisher noted.
“These kids are here because their brains are going 100 miles an hours,” Fisher said, indicating the first graders and one kindergarten student.
It bothers Fisher when colleagues refer to GT as “a privilege.”
“GT is an academic intervention,” she explained.
A peek into the seventh grade gifted and talented class shows students arriving, greeting their teacher and getting ready to work.
Kastle Smout snaps her violin case open and takes violin, bow, stand and music to the hall outside Fisher’s classroom and begins playing. Authors grab their computers and start writing. A few students work at a table, talking about gold mining, multi-screen computers and dismantling an old computer. Student Johnny Umphrey is taking advantage of a “coupon” day, allowing him to repair Mr. Kelley’s electric pencil sharpener instead of work on his project for a day.
Middle school projects vary. Rylee Andrew and Alex Helgeson chose sushi for their GT project. Both boys enjoy sushi, but since it can’t be purchased in Polson they decided to learn to make it. The young men used the kitchens in the PMS Family and Consumer Sciences classroom.
Research and experience taught them to use Calrose rice since it’s stickier and adheres better to the black seaweed wrap called nori. They made several batches of California rolls, filled with rice, avocado, cucumber and crab.
Sandra Crossett, Kristin Dolezal, Jamie Eastham and Dominic Rosatti are all writing books. Brenna McGuinness is practicing CPR for infants, Malysa Lamphere plans a coffee table book featuring her own photos. Keely Clairmont and Grace Rehbein are producing four different styles of art. Laura Freeman is researching careers, and Sam Heutmaker studies C+++, a programming language. Tyler Ross is trying to create a home security system using the laser diode from a CD burner. Umphrey winnowed his list of 24 possible projects down to electroplating. Other PMS students learn 3-D animation, music theory, job shadow a teacher, make artwork out of old computer parts and learn PEARL, another programming language.
At the high school, Fisher meets with students each day. Some students are double enrolled, which means they have another class seventh period but still have a gifted and talented project. Projects include learning Navajo, facial action coding script, writing a book, applications for an iPhone, a cookbook with recipes developed by the author, and organizing a paintball tournament.
About two-thirds of Fisher’s students have gone into a college field of study that corresponds with their interests in GT.
“I do feel the GT program helped me get a jump start on my career path,” Burrows said in an email.
Burrows, now an editor of online magazines, chose to write and shoot photographs for her own magazine when she was in GT class. Another student who chose photo projects in junior high and high school is now a professional photographer, and two young men who pursued programming in GT now work for Google and Microsoft.
Parents are often accused of “pushing kids,” Fisher said, but 98 percent of the kids are dragging their parents.
“You can’t make someone gifted,” she said.
(The 7th through 12th grade Advance Studies classes (GT) will display their projects at the PHS Library on Thursday May 9 from 5:30 to 7 p.m.)
