EducationNews.org

An Interview with Deborah L. Ruf: About Gifted Children Being Left Behind

Thursday, July 21, 2005
Michael F. Shaughnessy
Senior Columnist EducationNews.org
Eastern New Mexico University
Portales, New Mexico

Brief Bio on Deborah L. Ruf, Ph.D.

Deborah L. Ruf, Ph.D., Educational Options, from the Minneapolis/St. Paul area of Minnesota, works professionally as a specialist in gifted assessment and individualized interpretations and guidance for gifted children and adults. Dr. Ruf is the author of numerous articles and papers on school issues and the social and emotional adjustment of gifted children, particularly children at the highest levels of giftedness.  Riverside Publishing selected her to write the High Ability Assessment Bulletin for the Stanford-Binet, Fifth Edition (2003). She is the author of the new book Losing Our Minds: Gifted Children Left Behind (2005, Great Potential Press) . In 2003, Dr. Ruf accepted a 2-year volunteer appointment with American Mensa as the National Gifted Children Program Coordinator. Reappointed in 2005, she works to coordinate the efforts of numerous gifted advocacy groups while making Mensa a more welcoming organization to young people. A national level conference presenter, researcher on Levels of Giftedness and how intellectual profile affects adjustment, Dr. Ruf also consults with adult groups on the social and emotional intelligence of their members.  Her particular expertise is in "levels of intelligence" as well as exceptionally to profoundly gifted individuals of all ages.  The parent of three gifted young adults, Dr. Ruf has taught, supervised, and administered in elementary through graduate school education.  Her Ph.D. is in Educational Psychology with emphases in Test & Measurement and Learning & Cognition.  For more information see http://web.archive.org/web/20061004001230/http://www.educationaloptions.com/. In this interview, she discusses her latest book and the concerns and challenges that face gifted students, their parents and their teachers.

1. In an age of No Child Left Behind, the title of your book Losing Our Minds: Gifted Children Left Behind (2005) is telling.  What prompted you to write this book?

Although I'd trained as an educator, and taught elementary school, it wasn't until I had children of my own that I started to realize how few people understand high intelligence or giftedness and how it affects the individual. As I studied this group, I started to see that high intelligence isn't just about how someone does in school-it is about the whole person-how they see the world and how they fit into the world.  I saw that a person's intellectual level and profile hugely affects how that individual will turn out in life.  I wrote this book because I wanted to help others understand the broader picture of high intelligence. 

As a teacher, I had parents who asked me to do "more" for their bright children.  I began to realize how unprepared I was as a teacher, and how unprepared today's teachers are, to deal with the huge range of learning abilities-from well below average to highly intelligent-- in today's typical mixed ability classrooms.

I went back for my doctoral degree and specialized in individual differences, test and measurement, and learning and cognition.  Because I began my professional career during a time when teachers were told that "all children are gifted," I wanted to learn for myself what all children of the same age were capable of learning and under what conditions they would thrive.  I wanted to know if different children actually needed different things in order to learn to their potentials. Then I wanted to share what I learned with other parents.

2. Briefly, what does it mean to be gifted in America at this time?

Many intellectually gifted children do not fit in and are seen by others as behavior problems or even by themselves as faulty.  When the work in school is below what gifted children are capable of doing, they can't show effort - so they often lose "points" in the eyes of their teachers.  For a child who is gifted in America, it means that school can be one confusing trial after another until high school or college - if they don't hate school so much by then that they drop out. Gifted children often wonder, "Why am I here?  What point am I missing?" "School is wasting my time." 

The way I see it, depending on how gifted, a gifted child these days will waste literally anywhere from two to six years waiting for new and interesting material to show up in school.  Sadly, it generally isn't until some of these children start to win scholarships and awards late in high school that their schools fully appreciate them.  Unless gifted children have very compliant personalities, they can be a real pain in the neck to their schools for the first six to eight years they are there.  We lose a lot of gifted children this way - the ones people later describe as, "He may have been a smart kid, but he sure didn't amount to anything!"

3. Intellectual level - why does this concept matter?

I think it is important to take away the idea that people are either gifted or not gifted. Intellectual abilities, and the complexity of each person's particular strengths and weaknesses, make it valuable to consider more than just a single score for a child. When it comes to a good education, one size - one approach - does not fit all.  The whole premise behind No Child Left Behind is that we can bring all children up to the same high standards and then everyone - and our society - will all be much better off.  But I think we need to realize and accept that people's abilities and interests, what they want to learn, and what they will be good at learning, depend to a great degree on their intellectual level and profile.  To hold everyone to the same intellectual and achievement standards, when people are naturally quite diverse and different from one another, is foolish and ultimately unfair to all of us.  We aren't capitalizing on anyone's strengths with a one-size-fits-all approach.

Classroom test scores and grades are being used these days as benchmarks for success - not only for who is gifted - and these markers have been confusing. I explain some of the confusion with testing and test scores in my book. Much of it has to do with inappropriate test ceilings being used with gifted children so that it isn't clear how high they are. But if we use appropriate tests, then it becomes clearer how very differently-and how much more-some children learn compared to others the same age. 

Once we have test scores, I am proposing that we talk about gifted children in terms of five levels of gifted. Then, no matter what the circumstances and opportunity, no matter what the grades or cooperation level in school, we can tell how intellectually capable a person is - and what they may need from their environments in order to take full advantage of that potential - both for themselves and for humankind in general.

4. What are the basic issues parents face nowadays in this age of inclusion?

The confusion and negativity that parents face from educators, and often from others, too, is fairly uniform no matter where they live or what kinds of schools their children attend.  Parents are often made to feel guilty and selfish when they try to make school a more purposeful and engaging place for their children.  Even when parents go to an expert for an evaluation and advice, most take another two years before they accept that the schools are not likely to make any significant adjustments for their children.  It is not a matter of getting the schools to see how smart their children are - and that their needs are different; it simply doesn't matter to most schools.

It is difficult to convince educators or the general public about the needs of gifted children because gifted children score high on achievement tests even when they learn little or nothing in school. Most gifted children educate themselves through their reading, powers of attention and observation, and the high information retention that goes along with high intelligence. Few people understand the emotional and attitudinal toll that the typical schooling takes on these children.  Finally, most gifted children are simply not an easily and demonstrably pitiable group.  They seem to be getting along without major problems. They often don't show how bored or dissatisfied they are.  It is hard to compete for educational attention under such circumstances.

5. What are the basic issues teachers have to face nowadays in this age of inclusion?

In my opinion, teachers are in a terrible position in these days of inclusion.  They are held accountable for all students' learning to the same high academic levels and yet they are given students with vastly different abilities for schoolwork. School is not real life, yet the current political climate responds as though everyone needs to learn algebra.  This is simply not true.  Our society needs to develop a much wider range of abilities in its youth - not only so we can compete in a global society, but also so all individuals can feel fulfilled and proud of the work they do.  Our present concentration on college as a universal goal is misguided and ultimately offensive to those who have other interests and skills.  It is a standard that automatically dismisses those who would work with their hands rather than their minds, for example. This being the case, grouping all learners together by age for instruction - and preparation for adulthood - is pedagogically unrealistic and doomed to failing the majority need, not just the needs of gifted students.

6. A chapter in your book spends a lot of time telling us "what gifted children are like." Why is this important?

Having lived through years as the parent of gifted children, I learned firsthand that mere mention of the word "gifted" makes many people angry. Most assume that you think you are better and smarter, that your children are better and smarter, and that you think you must also be a better parent to have made your children gifted. Basically, how dare you think so well of yourself? My goal in writing this book, and this chapter in particular, was to paint a more human picture of what children at different giftedness levels are like. First, we didn't make our children gifted; they came to us this way. Most of us realize fairly quickly that we are merely the stewards of these children.  The majority of children - children closer to average and typical in their intellect - fit the schools. Schools are not generally a painful or confusing place for them. Parents of gifted children are not asking for appropriate pace and instruction for their children so that they can win contests, beat others, and get into fancy colleges. They want their children to find friends, continue to be motivated to learn and do well, and to feel as though they belong here on this earth along with everyone else. Most of the parents who approach the schools about what their children need are looking for what their children need simply in order to feel good about learning and reasonably develop their potential.

Many people think that gifted children are good students. I want to make it very clear that many gifted children are not good students, misbehave in school, and have poor attitudes.  I want to show that high intelligence that is not nurtured and supported can result in several kinds of problems.  Right now, many schools refuse to make the adjustments that would help such children until or unless the children start to comply with school's inappropriate expectations. I try to show that there is no one typical profile for a gifted child, and that what works for one may not be appropriate for another. Parents, educators, politicians, policy makers, and people writing legislation such as No Child Left Behind all need to understand that the typical mixed-ability, same-age group setting for schooling can be very harmful, confusing, and misleading as to the person's true abilities and nature.

7. You divide children into five different "levels", with a possible sixth. How did this new conception come about? Tell us about it, please.

Most people have used test scores and demonstrable achievement to quantify and identify those who are gifted. But this approach missed what I call the "essence" of the person and what makes them "tick."  As I compiled data from approximately 200 families (I shared data from only 50 families in the book), I soon saw that I could not easily line the children up by their test scores.  Their early childhood behaviors, interests and attainments frequently lined up somewhat differently than their test scores. So, quite frankly, I resorted to a heavy dependence on my experience and intuition to develop the levels. Since my ultimate goal was to describe what each level needs, it was the combination of early milestones, test scores, personality, gender-relevant issues, and intellectual strengths and weaknesses within the levels that helped me determine the final levels. On top of that, I found that the levels are somewhat fluid.  For example, it is easier to see how the school environment - the appropriateness or the frustrations - can make a child "look" and act like a Level Four child for some period of time and then like a Level Five child when the environment supports what the child really needs. I have known adults who didn't find their passion until they reached their mid- thirties, or who found a new passion in a second or third career, and only then began to realize their full potential. These adults may have looked average for much of their life, but appeared uniquely gifted and talented later when they found their passion. My hope, through recognizing children with gifted potential sooner, is that they can explore interests and begin realizing their potential sooner rather than later. The problem I hoped to solve with describing the various levels of intelligence through behaviors is to help people see that it is not a failure of individuals to live up to their potential; it is a failure of their environment to nurture and support their real selves.  I hope my conception of levels will make it possible for fewer highly gifted children to be left behind.

8. Where can parents and teachers get more information about you and your book and your ideas?

There is information about my thoughts and work on my website, http://web.archive.org/web/20061004001230/http://www.educationaloptions.com/. I think it is more obvious that I am concerned about the whole person and the whole lifespan when you see that my first serious investigative study was with gifted adults, not children.

9. What questions have I neglected to ask?

A woman asked me recently, after hearing me speak briefly about my book, "What can we do?" I told her that I thought we have to take this message beyond the school level.  It is not teachers who need this training and information the most; it is administrators, school board members, and other stakeholders and policy-makers.

Children of the same age are different from each other - and they have different needs and interests as a result. We talk about celebrating diversity until it comes to learning and occupational differences. If we are truly going to value and celebrate diversity, we have to demonstrate that we value and appreciate different levels of ability and accomplishment. Instead of wishing and pretending that we are all the same, we must look at how to celebrate and value the fact that different people like different things, want to do different things, have different needs, and will enjoy and benefit from a variety of different educational methods and approaches. Grouping children by age for instruction makes about as much pedagogical sense as grouping them by height. Everything children need to learn is already provided in most school systems and most communities.  We have to set up a flexible structure that allows children to go to where they are ready and able to learn at their own levels and pace. This means that age, keeping safety and maturity issues in mind, will no longer be the primary factor.

"Best educational practices" is a jargon term that rules the day to a ridiculous extreme, and often describes educational practices that are not "best" for gifted children. How do children learn to read, for example? What is best educational practice?  Well, it depends on the child. Putting all five-year-olds together to learn to read simply doesn't make sense. By 1st grade, the typical mixed-ability-same-aged classroom already has twelve different grade levels of achievement among its students (from the low achieving students-children still struggling to learn to count and read-all the way up to the gifted students whose reading comprehension or quantitative reasoning abilities are already like average 17 and 18 year olds.  It is time to restructure our schools - not just so that gifted children will not be left behind, but so that no child will be left behind as regards his or her own unique potential.