I have been so busy offline, lately, I’ve missed you all so much! Of course, now that I’m back again, I want to share something that I found quite interesting.
I am pasting part of it here (too long to paste all), but it comes from: http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/Articles_id_10124.aspx. Enjoy.
Small poppies: Highly gifted children in the early years
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Gross, M.
Roeper Review
Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 207-214
1999
This article by Miraca Gross is a classic on the development and needs of profoundly gifted children in infancy, toddlerhood and the preschool years. It discusses some of the hallmarks of extreme precocity in the very young. Other topics include identification and accommodation of these children.
Summary: Highly gifted children are frequently placed at risk in the early years of school through misidentification, inappropriate grade-placement and a seriously inadequate curriculum. Additional factors are their own early awareness, that they differ from their age-peers, and their consequent attempts to conceal their ability for peer acceptance. Teachers who have had no training or inservice in gifted education, and who are reluctant to use standardized tests of ability and achievement, may rely only on gifted behaviors to identify extremely high abilities in young children. This may compound the problem by ignoring early indicators of demotivation and underachievement. The very early development of speech, movement and reading in many highly gifted young children serves as a powerful predictor of unusually high intellectual ability. Parents of the highly gifted become aware of their children’s developmental differences at an early age; yet parent nomination is under-utilized by primary and elementary schools, and information provided by parents regarding early literacy and numeracy in their children is often disregarded or actively disbelieved.
Let me share with you one of my earliest memories. The place is Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, where I was born and grew up. I am three, perhaps four, years old. It is a morning in early summer, and my mother and I are walking, as we often do, in Princes Street Gardens, set in a valley between the austere beauty of Edinburgh Castle, high on its rock, and the Georgian elegance of Princes Street itself. There is so much to see and to experience. The sea winds setting the flags streaming, the soaring plumes of the Ross Fountain, and the almost overpowering perfume of the flowers; roses, carnations, pansies, anemones and lupins in serried ranks, bank upon bank of them, terrace upon terrace, leading the eyes upward to the broad street with its trees and hedges fringing the pavement.
A man is working in the gardens and I am intrigued by what he is doing. There is a bed of tulips, golden like sunlight, lifting their heads to the high Edinburgh sky and the man is tidying the bed, weeding between the plants, removing leaves that have blight. I feel a sense of pride that I understand this; my mother has explained it. But he is doing something else that I can’t understand. Some of the tulips have grown faster than their peers so that they are taller their golden heads stand higher than the others and the man is cutting off these heads so that the stalks stand bare, denuded, but now the same size as the other plants in the bed. I ask my mother, in puzzlement, why he is cutting down the tall tulips, and when she answers there is a trace of sadness in her voice. “He wants to make them all the same size, darling, so that they’ll look tidier. But I don’t think that’s what gardening is all about, do you?”
Well, I agreed with my mother. I certainly didn’t think that is what gardening was all about! But it made me take more notice of the flowers in the public gardens, and over the next few weeks I noticed something strange. The gardener couldn’t do much to impose uniformity on bushes, or on flowers that grew in clumps; the roses and the crocuses were all different sizes. But flowers that grew on single stalks - flowers that stood alone - had been lopped if they threatened to disturb the symmetry of the bed they grew in.
As a teacher and academic working in gifted education, I have become sadly familiar with the cutting down to size of children who develop at a faster pace or attain higher levels of achievement than their age-peers. Perhaps these children offend our egalitarian principles and our sense of what is fit. Perhaps they threaten us as teachers; few of us encounter, with perfect equanimity, a young child whose capacity to learn is considerably greater than our own. Perhaps they are what we would wish to be, and are not. Perhaps they merely irritate us; gardening would be so much easier if all children progressed at the same rate. For whatever reason, intellectually gifted children are, more often than not, held back in their learning to conform to the pace of other children in their class. In Australia the practice is so explicitly recognized that It even has a special name: “cutting down the tall poppies”.
How did the term originate? One story tells of a general who had conquered a new territory, and was unsure of how he should deal with the leaders of the vanquished tribes. Should he make use of their knowledge of the land, and their wealth of experience, or should he imprison them for fear that, if allowed to remain free, they would lead their peoples in an uprising? He asked the advice of his father, a veteran of many campaigns. The old man led him into a field of poppies, and then wordlessly walked through the field, expertly lopping, with his cane, the heads of the poppies which stood tallest. The young man returned home and put the vanquished leaders to the sword.
Our gifted children - our small poppies - are at risk in our schools, and the group at greatest risk are the highly gifted. This article explores two issues: first, that teachers’ lack of awareness of the characteristics and needs of the highly gifted, coupled with the children’s own attempts to conceal their ability for peer acceptance, can result in significant underachievement among this group; secondly, that an effective combination of nomination by trained or inserviced teachers, parent nomination, and standardized tests of ability and achievement, can form an effective matrix of identification procedures for young, highly gifted children.
Levels of Giftedness
Two major causes of the difficulties experienced in school by highly gifted students are the virtual absence of coursework in gifted education from most teacher training programs, and the lack of awareness, even among teachers with a genuine interest in gifted children, of the different levels of giftedness within the gifted population. Many teachers work on the assumption that gifted children comprise a relatively homogeneous group - and this misconception places the highly gifted at risk through misidentification, seriously inadequate curriculum provision, and inappropriate grade placement (Gross, 1992a, 1993).
Gifted pre-school children are at particular risk. Few gifted programs exist for children in this age-group; consequently pre-school teachers are likely to have had neither training on how to recognize these children, nor the opportunity of seeing the level they can work at when they are presented with appropriate learning experiences.
Steven, aged 4, marched into trouble with his pre-school teacher when she asked him to assist in picking up the plastic cups which the children had used for fruit juice. “Steven,” she called, “can you pass that cup, please?” Steven paused a moment. Then he placed the cup deliberately in the center of the floor, clasped his hands behind his back, and, with an expression of solemn concentration, proceeded to pace back and forward in front of it. When his busy teacher rebuked him for not assisting in the clean-up, he explained with mock seriousness that he was not able to; she herself had given him a different task which, indeed, he had performed: he had now passed the cup from several different directions! For Steven’s teacher, this was the last straw - or latest eccentricity - from a child who seemed quite incapable of conforming to four-year-old behavioral norms. She told him he was a rude and disobedient boy, and sent him to stand in a corner.
Cathy, meanwhile, was moving quietly around the room, collecting the other children’s cups. For several days this had been her self-appointed role and she took keen pleasure in it. She stacked the cups carefully inside each other and carried the stack over to the teacher. “Look, Ms Marks,” she said proudly, “I have 14 today. Yesterday I had 12. That’s two more than yesterday.” And she smiled with pleasure as Ms Marks gave her a grateful hug and told her what a clever, thoughtful class member she was.
Gifted girls learn teacher-pleasing behaviors far more quickly than boys (Silverman, 1989a). However, the differences in Cathy and Steven’s behaviors, and Ms Marks’ reactions to them, did not arise only from issues of gender and personality. They also arose from significant differences in the two children’s levels of cognitive ability.
Cathy is a moderately gifted 4-year old with a visible talent for math. She has an IQ of 135 and although this has the potential to set her apart from the other children - children of this level of ability appear in the population at a ratio of only 1 in 100 - she is not so very different as to have noticeable social difficulties. Hollingworth (1926) defined the IQ range 125-155 “socially optimal intelligence” and observed that, in general, children scoring within this range were well-balanced, self-confident and out-going individuals who were able to win the confidence and friendship of age-peers. Cathy is quick witted, responsive, and eager to help. She is a delight to teach and Ms Marks enjoys her membership in the class.
Steven, however, is highly gifted with an IQ of 158 (approximately I in 10,000). This falls outside Hollingworth’s range of socially optimal intelligence. He taught himself to read before his 3rd birthday and now has the reading skills of a 7-year-old. This is frustrating for him as there are no books challenging enough in Ms Marks’ classroom. Indeed, very little that happens at pre-school provides him with either intellectual stimulation or social companionship. He adores puns and wordplay, and he has already found, to his regret, that the other children don’t seem to understand the things he says; they just look at him in bewilderment. But what he can’t understand is why Ms Marks herself doesn’t appreciate his jokes. He really tries to please her. At home his plays on words are greeted with laughter and affectionate approval. He had genuinely meant to hand in his cup but he had suddenly been struck by the two meanings of the word “pass” - and, besides, everyone knew that collecting cups was Cathy’s self-appointed task, in which she took great pleasure. He was going to give his cup to her when he was finished. Why had Ms Marks called him rude and disobedient?
If Ms Marks had been trained or even had inserviced on the characteristics of gifted preschoolers, she might have known that highly gifted students often enter school already reading (Gross, 1993), and she might have had a few more challenging books ready - just in case! She might also have recognized, in Steven’s delight in wordplay, the unusually mature sense of humor that is characteristic of these children (Silverman, 1989b). But she had no training, no inservice and no previous experience with a child such as Steven.
Silverman (1989b, p. 71) defines the highly gifted as “those whose advancement is significantly beyond the norm of the gifted”, and suggests that any child who scores three standard deviations above the mean on a test of cognitive ability should be termed highly gifted: that is, children of IQ 145 or above. Such children appear in the population at a ratio of approximately 1 in 1000. It is important to note, however, that by “advancement” Silverman is referring to intellectual ability or potential, rather than in-class performance; over the last 70 years, research on the school performance of highly gifted children reveals that, like Steven, the majority of these children are required to work at levels several years below their tested achievement (Hollingworth, 1942; Silverman, 1989b; Gross, 1993).
As can be seen, highly gifted children appear only rarely in the school population. This rarity is yet another factor in teachers’ lack of awareness of the cognitive and affective characteristics of this group. If they are to fulfil their remarkable intellectual potential, these children require an educational program which differs significantly in structure, pace and content from that which might be offered to the moderately gifted. Yet highly gifted young children are often at risk from teachers who are unaware of the extent of their difference or who wrongly attribute their academic advancement to parental hothousing.
Developmental Differences in Highly Gifted Children
Research on intellectually gifted children, and particularly the highly gifted, reveals that even in early childhood they display significant differences from the developmental patterns observable in age-peers of average ability. The precocious development of speech, movement and reading are powerful indicators of possible giftedness. Of course, not every child who speaks, walks or reads early is even moderately gifted (Jackson, 1992), but when these skills appear at extremely early ages, and particularly when they appear in tandem, they are generally linked to unusually advanced intellectual development.
Early Development of Speech
Numerous researchers have noted the early development of speech and movement which is typical of moderately gifted children. Whereas the average age at which a child can be expected to utter her first meaningful word is around 12 months (Staines and Mitchell, 1982), the gifted child begins to speak, on average, some two months earlier. Furthermore, the stages of speech acquisition are passed through earlier and with greater rapidity than in the child of average ability. By 18 months the average child has a vocabulary of 3-50 words, but little attempt is made to link them into short phrases until the age of 2; however, in gifted children, linking words into phrases can commence as early as 12 months. Jersild (1960) noted that, at the age of 18 months, children of average ability were uttering a mean number of 1.2 words per “remark”, whereas their gifted age-peers were uttering 3.7 words per “remark”. By the age of 4-1/2 the difference was even more remarkable; the mean number of words per “remark” for average children was 4.6 words, while for the gifted it was 9.5.
Studies of highly gifted children record instances of linguistic precocity far beyond even that of the moderately gifted. The mean age at which 52 children of IQ 160+, studied by Gross (see Gross, 1993) uttered their first word was 9.1 months, with a standard deviation of 3.48. If two outliers are removed from this statistic (two brothers who spoke at 18 and 21 months respectively) the mean drops to 8.63 months with a much narrower standard deviation of 2.64. Eleven of these children spoke their first meaningful word (other than “mamma-dadda” babble) by the age of 6 months. Barbe (1964) studying children of IQ 148+, noted that the average age by which these children were speaking in sentences was 16 months.
The speech of some highly gifted children demonstrates quite remarkable fluency and complexity. Adam, one of Gross’s subjects of IQ 160+, uttered his first word at 5 months and by two months later was talking in 3 and 4 word sentences. His mother recalls the astonishment of supermarket assistants as Adam, aged 7 months, gave a running commentary on the grocery items as she wheeled him past the shelves in the shopping cart. Peter, whose first word, spoken at 8 months, was “pussycat”, surprised his parents at 18 months by announcing, “I think I’ll have a quick shower.” Roedell and her colleagues reported a 2-year-old who regularly used such complex sentences as “I want to take a look at this story to see what kinds of boys and girls it has in it” (Roedell, Jackson and Robinson, 1980).
It is this early and fluent command of language, linked to the cognitive precocity of the highly gifted, that gives rise to the love of wordplay which characterizes many highly gifted children - such as Steven’s juggling with the alternate meanings of “pass”.
Occasionally the speech of highly gifted children may be delayed, as in the case of the two brothers in Gross’s study who did not speak until 18 months and 21 months respectively and whose mother was warned by their pediatrician that this might be indicative of intellectual disability. (Jonathan later tested at IQ 170 and Christopher at IQ 200!) In these situations, however, when speech does appear, it often arrives in the form of phrases or short sentences, rather than words in isolation. Robinson (1987) reports a young boy whose first utterance, at 20 months, was “Look! Squirrel eating birds’ food!” It is important, therefore, to note that while unusually early speech is a powerful indicator of possible giftedness, delayed speech should not be taken as an indicator that the child is not gifted!
However, as will be discussed later, young gifted children who are verbally articulate may quickly learn to moderate their vocabulary at pre-school or in kindergarten if they sense disapproval from their classmates. Some even develop two vocabularies - one for home, the other for school (Gross, 1989) - and may even appear relatively inarticulate in the classroom.
Early Development of Mobility
Just as highly gifted children generally demonstrate an unusually rapid progression through the stages of speech development, the development of mobility may also arrive early and progress with unusual speed.
Even moderately gifted children tend to crawl, walk and run earlier than their age-peers (Terman, 1926; Witty, 1940) but highly gifted children may display even greater precocity. Silverman (1989b) describes a girl of 7 months who stood alone, climbed into chairs unassisted and navigated stairs by herself. Gross (1993) describes Rick, of IQ 162, who sat up by himself at 4-1/2 months, ran at 11 months and rode a two-wheeled bicycle unaided at age 3. The mean age at which Gross’s subjects of IQ 160+ sat up unsupported was 6.1 months, as opposed to 7-8 months in the general population. The mean age at which they walked while supported was 10.1 months - 1-1/2 months earlier than the population mean - and the mean age at which they were walking independently was 12.1 months - fully 3 months earlier than is usual. Not only did these children become physically mobile at remarkably early ages, but the stages of skill development were traversed with exceptional speed.
Early Development of Reading
The research literature on intellectual giftedness suggests that one of the most powerful indicators of exceptional giftedness is early reading. Both Terman (1926) and Hollingworth (1926, 1942) reported that it was early reading that most clearly differentiated between the moderately and highly gifted children in their studies. Almost 43% of the children of IQ 170 in Terman’s gifted group read before the age of 5, compared with 18% in the sample as a whole, while 13% of the IQ 170 group read before the age of 4.
Over the last 30 years print has become more accessible to young children …
finish reading the article by going here ----> http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/Articles_id_10124.aspx
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had he demonstrated his cleverness for me, i absolutely would have rejoiced , as i do with my own kids, but then again, my mother and grandparents, and even my husband at times, feel that my kids should be conforming more to cultural standards of what is and isn’t acceptable behavior. my kids listen to respected authority, and when they don’t, they go to time out, and hear an explanation of what is expected of them and why, so that they can learn. so long as they are being safe and respectful, i give them creative license to discover our world, especially at such a young age. i side with the author when it comes to the kid in the article, though. i think he was trying to entertain with his play on words and i don’t think it’s good to dim one’s spirits, especially at that age. she could have respected his creativity and explained her preference, demonstrating a better approach to conflict resolution. i loved domanmom’s post about elmo’s creator and how he may have never become such a gifted puppeteer had his father dampened his initial creative attempt at puppet making (