EducationNews.org

Linda E. Collins is a Gifted Education Teacher at Blue Valley West High School in Overland Park, KS, with 20 years of teaching experience. She also works with at-risk youth who need to recover English credit for graduation. Linda is married to her high school sweetheart, a teacher, and has four children. She has recently been selected as the Blue Valley School District's Secondary Teacher of the Year for 2008-2009, and the Kansas Region 3 Semi-Finalist. In Salt Lake City, Linda presented a pre-conference workshop at SENG: Navigating the 2e Challenge: Strategies for Success in Secondary Schools. She will also be presenting at KGTC and NAGC, and is available for consultation. You can contact her at LCOLLINS@bluevalleyk12.org.   In this interview, she responds to questions about teaching gifted children and the challenges of education in the current climate

1) Linda, Congratulations on being named Teacher of the Year for 2008-2009 in your district. How did you feel when you first heard about this?

I felt surprised and thrilled to representthe teachers in our district, but a little embarrassed knowing how hard all teachers work and how they rarely are acknowledged for their work. Gifted education teachers, especially, seldom see opportunities where they are recognized or awarded for their work with students, so I was prepared to do the writing and the speech, required, and just be happy that I was nominated by my peers, whom I respect so much. After giving my speech to the committee, I was thankful to have gone through the Teacher of the Year process because it made me examine and evaluate my own teaching journey; I count myself as a representative for our teachers, not the winner.

2) How did you first get involved in teaching gifted?

When teaching high school English, I had to teach to the middle, at times, and I wanted to learn how to do a better job of differentiating curriculum so all my students would benefit. I had taught in a program for at-risk youth, and I worked with students who had failed English so I understood a little about teaching those students, so I wanted to understand how to better teach my high potential students. Also, I had a son who had been in a gifted program in Illinois, and Kansas, and my knowledge of what he needed was very limited. I had four children, and the extreme diversity of their learning styles, talents, and challenges made me question how I could better reach my own students.

3) What are some of the rewards of working with gifted children?

These are too numerous to name, but I will try to name a few. One of the questions I had to answer for Teacher of the Year was, "What are your greatest accomplishments?" and I answered that my greatest accomplishments are my students' accomplishments. These are my rewards. Within the classroom each day, I see students working on individual goals. If you were to walk into our classroom, a few of things you might see:

A twice-exceptional junior working to solve the Riemann Hypothesis

Four students organizing the first ever debate for school board candidates

A sophomore who missed twenty-five days of school last year, now attending regularly

A freshman swimmer, her hair still damp from her 5:00 am practice, striving to make the Olympic team.

Two students working on social skills while playing chess.

Our graduates who come back to their teachers' classrooms to share with other students what has worked for them in high school, and what continues to work for them in college, are needed to underscore the importance of academic preparation, the goal of becoming autonomous learners, and the life-long quest for learning.In the fall, several graduates visited our class and emphasized the importance of reading, writing, and study skills for all classes. The shared insight of these high school and college graduates is another example of the rewards of teaching.

Our district has a vision statement, Education Beyond Expectations, which especially speaks to me about what I want for our students. When I sit quietly and reflect on the individual lives of my students and the impact they will make on our future, I feel great hope, and I begin to get a minute taste of the rewards of teaching. These rewards multiply exponentially as the students continue their education and become contributing members of our communities. Our gifted students have the potential to be the key element for constructive change in our world.

4) What are some of the challenges?

One of the greatest challenges is trying to help other educators, and the community at-large to understand the needs of all students, which includes gifted students. This involves merging the scholarly researcher side of teaching with the pragmatic practitioner side of teaching.Many people do not even acknowledge that gifted students have any needs. They believe that if students are identified "gifted," then they must not need anything. That's like saying that if they are smart, they shouldn't need glasses. They should be able to teach themselves how to see without glasses. I had someone say a similar thing to me when I was talking about some accommodations for one of my 2-e students. She asked why the student could not teach himself to be more organized if he was so smart. She did not understand that gifted students can also have disabilities. We have many underachieving gifted students who have a variety of reasons for their underachievement.

Many people do not know that gifted students are an at-risk population. Because of their high potential, many do not realize that these students often drop out of school, never quite finding their "fit" with their class peers and their studies. Gifted students are just as varied in their strengths and needs as any other part of our student population, and most the time they receive less focused attention, individualized learning strategies and interventions, than their peers. Gifted students are becoming more and more diverse in their backgrounds and their abilities, from the political campaign volunteer to the student with Asperger syndrome yearning to be recognized for his gifts in math.

So, another challenge is to involve all students in learning. In order to do that, we must listen, and watch, and learn from them in order to match talents and instruction to individual growth.I call this Stretch-learning, but whatever term you want to use, we need to be doing this.

5) You have worked with some kids who are "twice exceptional". What is all that about?

Teaching a gifted education class in a high profile suburban high school, I have noticed an increase in students who are identified as twice-exceptional, especially those with Asperger Syndrome. In our district, I am hired as a Gifted Education Teacher at the high school level, and our students can take our Academic Enrichment class as an elective. We have 95 to 100 students in our classes each semester. In the past few years, students who were identified gifted, but who had a disability as their primary exceptionality, were usually assigned to the caseload of Special Education teachers who work with learning or behavior/emotional disabilities.

During the time that I did graduate work on Autism/Asperger Syndrome at the University of Kansas, and when I worked on the Asperger Research team, I began to include the twice-exceptional students in our self-contained gifted education classroom, and I was assigned as their caseload manager. Our challenge is to educate and train staff to work with these uniquely gifted individuals, who may approach learning in different or creative ways. Some of these different approaches are appreciated and understood by some teachers more than others.

Twice-exceptional students, which are students who are identified gifted and who also have a learning disability, often have co-morbidity of diagnoses, including Attention Deficit Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Tourettes Syndrome, and Sensory Integration Dysfunction. This can impact their learning (loud noises like fire alarms, strong odors from science labs, and the chaos of school assemblies) in a negative way. If teachers are unaware of these challenges, they cannot help out. Educators want to do what is right for students, but they need direction in areas that are not part of their experiences.

For example, one of my twice-exceptional students decided to bring a math and science encyclopedia to his Honors Geometry class each day. As his teacher was lecturing, he opened the book to check to make sure that she was correct in what she was saying.Making sure that the world around him is right and that everyone follows the rules is very important and natural to him, but was not expected by his teacher, and she felt it was distracting to the class. She and I talked about it, and we were able to put some guidelines in place for the student for how often to use his book, but we allowed him to continue to bring it to class and to use it at certain times.

Another twice-exceptional student struggled to organize her Advanced Placement notebook in the way the teacher had asked them to do it. She told me that the ordering of the papers did not "make sense" to her, and she lost points on her notebook check. After talking to her teacher, we decided to let her organize the notebook in the way it made sense to her while she was studying and doing homework, and then our para-educator assisted her in reorganizing the papers when it was time to turn the notebook in to be checked for grading. Both of these teachers were happy to work this out once they understood why, and where, there was a challenge for these students.

We need to get the word out that 2-e students learn and live differently; they are not broken.

6) What do YOU see as some of the most important emotional needs of gifted students?

One of the greatest challenges is trying to help other educators, and the community at-large to understand the affective needs of all students, which includes gifted students. Gifted students need to feel valued and appreciated as individuals. They should not be "teacher helpers" in the classroom, unless it is their choice to do this as community service, or to shadow a teacher. The glaring importance of the affective needs of students, and how those experiences are often overlooked, has permeated my teaching experiences from the start.

My first job was in an inner-city high school in Bayonne, New Jersey. I had replaced a teacher who the students told me "had a nervous breakdown. We made her cry every day," they told me tauntingly," and we will make you cry, too!"I vowed not to cry on the outside even if I was crying on the inside. Most of my students had never read an entire book or written a paper. I introduced them to the Writer's Workshop Approach, and began to see solid results.

In Illinois, I taught in a program for "Disruptive Youth" (the district's name, not mine), with students from three rival gangs, Hispanic, Black, White, who had probation mandated attendance. (I saw brass knuckles for the first time in my life.) They called themselves the "Dumpster Kids," because they believed the district had thrown them away. When I interviewed for the job, I was asked if I could teach without materials. Smiling, I said "yes," even as I questioned it, and I began the school year with an armload of newspapers.One of my quiet students, had "I HATE U" carved into his arm, scarred about three inches high. "Who do you hate?" I asked him. "Myself," he said without looking up, "I hate myself."

It occurred to me that materials were not my biggest issue, and that a large part of my job was helping those students to accept themselves and to begin to feel that someone valued them.In order to be closer to my family, we returned to the Land of Oz. I went to work for Blue Valley, using mastery learning, vowing that failure would not show its face in my class. Near the end of one year, I asked a student, "What will you remember about this class?" I thought she might tell me how well I had taught The Crucible, or how to use semi-colons, but she replied, "I'll remember that you listened to us...really listened to us." When I started teaching identified gifted students, I came full circle, and learned to better recognize the gifts and talents in ALL children, which solidly anchored my passion for teaching.

At an IEP for a gifted student, a mom told me that my class was the reason her son still came to school every day.I appreciated that, but it made me sad because I want students to have lots of reasons to come to school every day. We need to support them wherever they need it.

7) Who has mentored you or influenced you?

All of my family, has influenced and supported me, but especially my husband, Bill, who is a teacher, my sister, Kathryn who is a teacher, and my dad, Dr. C.D. Lawhorn, who was a teacher and was my high school principal. I remember my dad sitting at the kitchen table, grading papers for his 7th grade math and mechanical drawing classes. He had worked for Boeing, in Wichita, and had been offered a very lucrative job, but had chosen to be a teacher instead. Coming from abject poverty, selling newspapers when he was age four to have something to eat, he believed that education enabled him to overcome the adversity he had lived through as a child. His two brothers and two sisters all graduated from college and went on to graduate school. My dad continued his own education to receive his doctorate in education from University of Kansas. My parents taught us that we could do anything in life, if we have the education needed. I embraced this philosophy, knowing that my teachers, my education, and my teaching might come together to initiate some changes the world. I was idealistic then, and I'm idealistic now.

At University of Pittsburgh, Dr. Anthony Petrosky mentored and encouraged me to embrace and to teach the writing process. While I was teaching English, I decided to get my gifted education certification at University of Kansas where I met Dr. Reva Freidmann-Nimz who continues to give me encouragement. In teaching gifted, Dr. Sheri Stewart, Pam Fellingham, and Dr. George Betts have mentored me, and continue to mentor me in the gifted education field. In my post masters work, Dr. Brenda Myles, an expert on Autism, inspired me to pursue work in the area of twice-exceptionality. I have also been influenced by the work of Dr. Elizabeth Nielson and Dr. Dennis Higgins, Dr. Mary Ruth Coleman, Dr. Sally Reis, Dr. Jim Webb, and Dr. Karen Rogers.

8) What books do you recommend to gifted kids and why?

I am a voracious reader, and so I see reading as an extremely important part of being an autonomous learner. All career areas need literate workers who appreciate the arts. I recommend the classics of literature as a no-fail guide for reading selections, but there are so many more. Biographies are excellent for demonstrating the successes and failures of prominent people, including their risk-taking, and creative problem-solving that they used in their lives. I show students what I am reading, which is usually a combination of fiction, non-fiction, and research articles, but the books I actually recommend for students are based on their interests. A good resource is the book, Some of My Best Friends Are Books: Guiding Gifted Readers from Pre-School to High School, by Judith Wynn Halsted.

9) What question or questions have I neglected to ask?

How will I involve all students in stretch-learning, as I call it? This may sound somewhat Pollyannaish, but here's what I endeavor to do...Iask myself this question, and tweak, revise,update, and out-and-out change activities to match the needs ofall learners, ensuringthat all students are making gains in their learning.This is difficult to do, but I have one day, and as one teacher, with one school day ahead of me, I can remind myself about what I believe to be the essence of education:

All students deserve to learn something new every day.
So, today my students will learn something new.
All students deserve to learn how to learn.
So, today my students will learn how to learn.
All students deserve to feel valued.
So, today my students will feel valued.
All students deserve to have their gifts known and appreciated.
So, today my students will have their gifts known and appreciated.
All students deserve to believe that they can make a difference in our world.
So, today my students will believe that they can make a difference in our world.
This is what it's all about.

Linda E. Collins
Gifted Education Specialist
Blue Valley West High School

Published October 20, 2008