Teaching the Gifted Student (PILOT Reflections)
I was a little surprised to find “gifted students” on the list of subjects to discuss in an accessibility and inclusion workshop.
On the one hand, gifted students are a joy. They do the readings. They participate in class. They ask thoughtful questions.
On the other hand, gifted students can be a burden. They can monopolize class discussions. They might expect that simply being bright ought to be enough to earn them an A. They might send you multiple e-mails arguing over the half point they missed on a quiz. They demand that you justify the A- they got on a reflection paper, and insist that you list all the things they did “wrong”. They never had to work this hard in high school, so you’re obviously out to get them. Heaven help you if you should have to give them a B!
Gifted students aren’t necessarily more mature than their peers. Sometimes high-achieving students hold scholarships that require them to keep extremely high GPAs, so it’s not fair to dismiss hyper-awareness of grades as if it were motivated by pride and pettiness. It’s very likely that they really do have a lot of additional pressure, beyond a desire for perfectionism or a competitive streak, to maintain the high grades they see as a sign of success.
One of the first classes I took in my Ph.D program was on the history of the English language. I knew I was learning a lot, so I was shocked when I found myself getting grades like 83 and 85. I made an appointment with the professor, and while I hope I didn’t come off as belligerent or rude, I was eager to know what I was doing wrong. Little did I know that in the marking scheme at the University of Toronto, a grade from 80-89 is considered an “A”, and 90-100 is an A+.
I sure felt like a grade-grubbing dweeb.
In school, I know I hated being put into groups with deadbeats who didn’t carry their weight. Gifted students need additional challenges, but I think they rightly object to doing additional work simply because they are gifted. In a composition or literature class, I don’t think I need to provide extra assignments to challenge gifted students. Writing is never finished the way a mathematical equation is solved or a list of anatomical terms is memorized.
While grade compression has diluted the meaning of an “A” from “top-notch, outstanding work” to “You didn’t make any significant mistakes”, for short assignments and exercise, I will single out the exceptional work of gifted students, to let them know I am paying attention. I grade most exercises on a four-point scale, and tell students that a 4 counts as an A, but I return their grades on slips of paper that include numbers from zero to five. It is possible to get a grade higher than a 4, but I give out 4.5s and 4s only very rarely. A few students will end up with quiz averages higher than a 4.0, but if they do, they’ve worked for it, and their other work is probably top-notch, too.
In the spring semester I changed the way I enforced late penalties for papers. If a student hands me a completed, properly-formatted and stapled paper at the beginning of the class period, I add a “decorum bonus” of 1/3 of a letter grade. If the paper is crumpled, unstapled, or unpaginated; if the student bursts into class 10 minutes late, with the pages still warm from the printer; if I find the paper slipped under my door a few hours after class, then the student loses the 1/3 decorum bonus.
It’s kind of like doubling the price of your wall-to-wall carpet one week so that you can advertise a 50% price cut the next week, but this method permits me to grade a little more realistically. A student who is used to a 4.0 average might make some mistakes in an otherwise good paper. I can give it an A-, knowing that the true perfectionist will have turned it on time and in the proper format, and thus the grade will be bumped to an A. I don’t appear to be an overly harsh grader, and the student who feels the world owes him or her a 4.0 doesn’t burst into tears, yet the A- reinforces the message that the student could be doing better work.
After I’ve marked the first few freshman composition papers, it’s usually pretty clear who the gifted writers are. Last year, when my Seminar in Thinking and Writing class had settled into a pattern that involved the five or six most active students doing all the talking while the rest listened, I told the core group of active participants that they had already distinguished themselves as active students who would probably get great class participation grades, and pointed out that if they keep raising their hands or talking among themselves, the whole class will stagnate.
I tell students who have already distinguished themselves as active participants that I will henceforth evaluate them on their ability to get the other students in the class to participate. That strategy has worked to a point, but whenever the gifted student gets excited about something, the old pattern returns. When my dean visited my classroom last term, she approvingly noted the teacher-student dynamic, but indicated that she would like to see more peer-to-peer interaction. My colleague Terry Brino-Dean asks students to fill out a self-assessment form every few weeks, which gets the students to focus on their efforts to foster classroom discussion.
My “Writing for the Internet” course has to accommodate students who are experienced bloggers and HTML authors, as well as students who can barely e-mail. While a student who is experienced with HTML is not necessarily gifted, and while a student who is not comfortable with technology may still be gifted, the diversity of opinion makes me realize I’ll have to add more self-paced modules.
My last batch of student evaluations included complaints from students who thought the course moved too fast, as well as students who thought the course moved too slowly. I’ve asked a student who has already taken the course to serve as a mentor, which should help me give more specialized attention during labs.
In addition, I can ask the students who already know the material to help me teach it to those who don’t. They’ll have to cultivate a significant sense of ownership over the material if they are responsible for their peers’s learning. (Of course, I’ll help the student prepare, and I’ll be ready to step in if the student stumbles.)
10 minutes late , hot off the printer, and not neatly organized immediately earns you a C to a C- in my Mom’s classroom. She doesn’t feel sorry for anyone. Especially if it’s been a long term assignment. She simply smiles and tells the student that their paper goes into the orange file basket for grading. Never try to slip it by into a different basket, she remembers everything! When you live with a parent as a teacher sometimes life is a little more challenging
Neha, Yeah! I promise that working with Dennis is a blast. Learn from him because he taught me everything I know about web design. After the skills, the rest is learning how different programs make things happen. Enjoy!
Great! If you pick a blog-related project, we can find some way of incorporating the class-related blogs into your project work.
I don’t know if this helps, but I’d be more than happy to help out with the blogging in class this Fall.
Hah…I love this class already.
Bobby, that’s right — we kept your interest in online teaching in mind as we thought of projects for the tech writing and electronic text classes.
Eyejinx, the role of a student-mentor is different from that of a TA. Student mentors get course credit, but don’t get paid; they also don’t assign any grades. I do ask my mentors to read and comment on student drafts, but I usually ask them to keep their comments positive — that is, to emphasize what the student has done right (playing “good cop” while I, the prof, play “bad cop” and mark what the student has done wrong). I actually count on the mentors having a close peer relationship with the students in the class. Mentors in “Seminar in Thinking in Writing” aren’t necessarily experts in college writing — but since they are RAs in the dorms, and they do know what it was like to be a college freshman. They have ongoing training and personal experience that makes them a great asset.
Dennis, Nope–I only mentored for you in the fall. Our agreement was for me to take your 305 (Introduction to Technical Writing) and then 309 (Writing Electronic Texts) before I could mentor with you in 110.
Eyejinx, you must have posted that while I was typing the other comment. I’ll write more later (I have to go now), but it’s funny — Eyejinx’s postscript is exactly what my Dad said.
I’ve found a topic that’s attracted a lot of attention… my blog is usually pretty sleepy on Saturday afternoons!
Bobby was my mentor for “Intro to College Writing” at UWEC. While SHU’s equivalent course, “Seminar in Thinking and Writing,” meets 3 hours a week for two semesters, the UWEC course met five hours a week for one semester. That was definitely a course in which I put a premium on getting papers back quickly, since there was a lot of writing and a lot of revising. That course was half of my teaching load every semester, which meant constant pressure.
Bobby, did you mentor for me in the spring? If, so he had 30 students, rather than the 18 or so that was typical in the fall (and that is typical of the equivalent course at SHU).
At UWEC I had a weekly cycle, where I accepted papers only on Monday (or the first day the class met) and aimed to return them by the end of the week, so that the student could revise it over the weekend and resubmit on Monday. That let studetns work at their own pace — some students turned a first draft or a revision every week, others took a few weeks off.
I was much more strict at UWEC than I am at SHU.. perhaps I’m mellowing as I approach middle age.
For the “Intro to Literary Study” course at SHU, which I taught as an introduction to the literature, creative writing, and journalism tracks of the English major, we would spend a short unit on one of the tracks, then rotate through the other tracks. Sometimes I held off returning a paper from one track until we started up another unit in the same track. Thus, students did a short exercise on journalsim, I skimmed through them in order to see what was worth talking about in class, then we moved on to lit and creative writing, and I would turn those journalism papers back during the next journalism unit, which might be four or five weeks later.
Sometimes I enforce a submission deadline on a paper I don’t plan to return right away because I want students to stop working on a particular assignment, so that they can’t use obsessing over that assignment as an excuse to help them procrastinate and avoid the next assignment.
Still, I do end up with the “stack-o-papers” from time to time, but never, I hope, with papers that will require revision.
My Dad is sitting on the couch behind me. When I explained to him briefly what I’m writing. With a big responsibility-evading grin, he advised that I say, “Even Jesus couldn’t please everybody — so how am I going to do it?”
Greetings:
A few observations from an outsider; take with the relevant amounts of salt.
Asking students to shift modes from participating in class through voicing their insights and opinions to facilitating class discussion does translate into giving those gifted students extra work because they are gifted. For many students, this is an unfamiliar role, one they have had no training in, and I wonder if it falls into the fallacy of expecting those who are knowledgable to be good teachers naturally. In my experience, good teachers come from a mix of having the right personality, having developed skills and strategies through practice, and having (willingly or by necessity) looked analytically at the process of teaching and their own methods.
On an anecdotal level, when I was in grad school, students were often thrown into teaching without any real selection process or training. No one asked the question “is this student prepared to be a good teacher”; teaching was a form of financial support, offered indiscriminately to pretty much everyone in the program. The training that was offered was rudimentary, covering mostly issues of grading, syllabus construction, and diversity awareness. There was no real practical training in managing a classroom, presenting information effectively, or playing to the diversity of learning styles that students have.
Some of these grad students turned out to be great teachers; some had prepared themselves, some had a talent for it that they could build on, others floundered at first but found their way through it. Others, unfortunately, turned out to be poor teachers. For the undergraduates, signing up for these courses was pretty much a crap shoot.
I can see the same dynamics in turn when asking students officially or unofficially to suddenly metamorphose into mentors and guides for the rest of the class.
Another potential issue with this methodology is it may exacerbate existing divisions between “gifted” students and the rest of the population. Gifted students are often ostracized precisely because they fall outside the mainstream, and by pushing them into a “special” role within the classroom, you could make them even more separate; while it may have benefits as part of the learning process, it may create additional problems in peer to peer relationships.
Again, on an anecdotal level, one of my roommates in my undergraduate days was an exceptional student in organic chemistry, one of the most feared classes (because of its complexity) but also one of the most taken (because it was required for medical school admission). He took organic chemistry during his freshman year (itself noteworthy), and when my other roommates took it sophomore year, he ended up tutoring them informally. This was a positive experience because it gave them a rationale for spending more time together, and both sides benefited from the relationship.
During his junior year, the professor asked him to be a TA for the course (again, a prestigious honor), but this had the unfortunate impact of separating him from both his own social group (because he was teaching as well as learning) and from the sophomores (because they saw him as a teacher rather than a peer). While for most of us, the junior year was a great experience–having specialized in what we were interested in, knowing all the ins and outs of the campus, having lots of friends–it was actually the most stressful year for him.
Now, anecdotes are hardly proof, and different people will respond to being put in the teaching/mentoring position in different ways (just as different students react to the university setting in different ways), but the pressure point then becomes selecting the right people to play these roles.
It may be that Dennis has the skills and insights necessary to pick the right people, but there are dangers in promoting this approach to people generally who may not have those same abilities. I guess I just wanted to sound a note of caution about this approach.
Eyejinx.
P.S. My experience suggests that you will always get a mix of students who say that the class was too slow and those who say it was too fast. Education can never be a “one size fits all” endeavor. If you’re missing either end of that spectrum in your evaluations, you’re in a lot more trouble than if you’re getting critiqued from both ends.
Just wanted to say that it’s always nice when a professor is trying to keep things fair and balanced.
Amanda – good luck!
I’m guessing that Will meant for me to weigh in here…I remember that Dennis got papers back relatively fast, especially when compared to some of the other professors in the English department at Eau Claire, meaning weeks at the latest (not months or if at all).
However, I also remember student mentoring for him in his freshman English class. For the first few weeks, Dennis gave me entire class loads of papers to read AND comment on, which took me a solid six hours to accomplish in one night (Dennis wanted to give them back the day after getting them). Luckily, he agreed to a two-day turnaround, allowing me two nights of three solid hours to work through the papers *Whew*.
Here I thought being one of Dennis’s students was tough. Mentoring is a bigger challenge, but the experience is also rewarding, just like in class =)
I remember Dr. Jerz’s “stack o’ paper” that he would return sporadically throughout the semester. I think I received a first week paper on one of the last days of the semester. Ironic indeed, Will, but I have to be nice because I have classes with him in the fall and he is my advisor :-)
In the past I have had a problem with students coming to class late because they were printing and assembling their papers. If I have oral presentations scheduled that day, it’s very disruptive when those students arrive late. But if I tell students a paper should be in my office by 9am the next morning, and the student drops it off at 9:10, I won’t penalize them. It’s not the 10 minutes so much as the bursting into class.
I’m usually pretty good at turning drafts around quickly. that is, when a student needs to get a rough back back so they can revise it and resubmit it. Somewhere in this collection of PILOT observations I noted that time-management is an area where I could improve. I don’t mind admitting I’m not perfect! I hate marking vocabulary quizzes and “prove that you did the readings” exercises, since in my mind, the purpose of those exercises is really to try to make the class discussions more meaningful.
When it’s a stand-alone assignment that the student won’t need to revise, it tends to go towards the bottom of my stack.
As far as grade-grubbing, Will, there’s a big difference between asking an instructor to explain something you don’t understand and grade-grubbing. I don’t at all mind explaining, but it’s generally pretty easy to tell when the student is more interested in gettng the points than in mastering the material.
And one reason why it takes a long time to return papers is because I try to write detailed comments, so that the student will understand why a certain area does or does not work very well.
Whether or not you were a “grade-grubbing dweeb”, I bet it was worth it to find out what the grading system really was, wasn’t it?
I wouldn’t neccessarily call myself “gifted”, but I always argue points that I think I unfairly lost. I don’t want to lose points I should have gotten, and if I’m actually wrong I would like to find out why so I don’t keep making the same mistake.
I’m not saying it’s a bad system, but it’s a little ironic that you have penalties for something being 10 minutes late. Would anyone else like to comment on the amount of time it usually takes Dr Jerz to returns papers to his students? hmm? ;-)