Episode 8: On Gifted Education

[MUSIC] You're listening to Community Crafted Education, where we explore alternatives to conventional K-12 education and their potential impacts on society and culture. I'm Eric Wairn, Director of the National Hybrid Schools Project. On this episode, we're joined by gifted and talented education evangelist Pamela Hobart from GT School in Austin. We'll talk about gifted students and their families, the nature of gifted programs, and massively accelerating school. [MUSIC] All right, hello, we're here with Pamela Hobart, a gifted and talented education evangelist with the GT School in Austin, Texas. Pamela, thanks for being here. >> Hey, Eric, glad to be here today. >> Yeah, thanks. So why don't we start by having you just tell us a little bit in general about your background and what sort of drew you to exploring gifted education. >> Sure, sure. So I, myself, am a washed up former gifted kid. I attended public schools outside Atlanta, Georgia in the '90s. And I had a similar experience to a lot of people, which is like, you're fairly young. They give you a test or something. You end up with a gifted and talented label. They put you in some kind of part time program for the smart kids that either continues or it doesn't. You learn something or you don't. And then you kind of just don't know what it means or where you should be going in life. I did ultimately end up as a philosophy major in college and I continued into doctoral work in the philosophy of education because I realized that education was really a neglected element of social and political philosophy. They kind of glossed over it, like, oh, education is how society is reproduced or something. And then, you know, Dr. Dot fill in your own details, it's just very neglected. So that took me all the way to teachers college at Columbia University in New York City, which is one of the nation's kind of premier schools of education. But when I got there, I was a little dismayed that the quality of thought and study was still not great. There was a lot of kind of wishful thinking around education and ignoring of certain questions, privileging of others. And so I ended up leaving academia. I said, goodbye. You know, the academia overalls kind of weird spot then. It's even weird now. And yeah, so I ended up getting married and having four kids fairly shortly thereafter. And I didn't come back around to education until my oldest started approaching school age. And as I thought about how to educate her, together with my husband, we really were just at a loss because we knew we didn't want for her. But we had had exactly, but we had no idea what was available or what was right. And so that sort of set us on our education journey as a family this time. Yeah, great. So how let's back up a little bit then. How do you, how do you even define gifted and talented education? So what, like be specific, what unique needs do these kids have that conventional schools might be struggling to meet? Sure. So there are many definitions or non definitions floating around out there. Some people take sort of the strict IQ approach, which is like you can give even very young children an IQ test, which is more about aptitude than what they've actually been taught or what they've learned in a classroom or elsewhere. Some people think that the cutoff should be super high, you know, like 98% to 90% to 90% that sort of like the genius view of giftedness or even the qualities like students who are just, you know, 10 or 15 years ahead of their peers sort of from the time they can speak. I don't think that that's the view that most of our culture has of what giftedness is instead in this public school setting, especially there's sort of this niche mash label, which is that when they go to identify you as gifted and talented or not. They are looking for much higher than average aptitude, but a lot of times they throw other things in the mix like creativity and divergent thinking or even leadership abilities, which is sort of a social intelligence, if you will. And it does kind of make it even more confusing for parents and the students themselves, because you will see some students who seem extremely bright and even advanced at math or whatever. Don't get the label for some reason and then sort of other students may get the label and then what actually happens in the gifted and talented services and downstream of who they're kicking, you know, so they can't do super advanced math. A lot of the students in there are not, not ready for it. So for me personally, I think of it and at DT school, we're really looking for students who are around 90th percentile and sort of IQ or cognitive test basis. They're far above average, not necessarily prodigies may not have received much advanced instruction so far, but clearly have the capacity to work ahead of most of their peers year after year, not just like they're interested in one small thing and they're going to go ahead at that. It's really long range advanced math and reading at a bare minimum ready for that and able to take it off. Yeah, so do you think it's domain specific or is it a bigger kind of a more global phenomenon? So like, for example, if a kid is just really naturally good at math, but, but they're not doing well, like the example you gave of it, you know, they're not as good at, you know, reading or those kinds of passages on tests. Could you take that kid and kind of push them or the other way around, right, if they're really good at taking the tests, but they're not naturally good at math, you would push them on that. If there is a very large disparity in areas like that, there's usually a reason. So a child who's very good at math and is weak at reading, they may have dyslexia is sometimes the explanation, but by the time they're especially middle elementary, it may reflect that something has gone wrong. So it's not a classroom because underlying all of that is basically a queue. It's not something that people talk about much because they don't want parents or students who have not then identified as gifted to feel bad about themselves, but it's just not expected that if you have broad based cognitive abilities that are high. And you can find things that most of your peers can do fairly readily that you would be like lagging behind in a huge way. It's to the classrooms discredit, I would say when that happens. And there's every reason to think that they could at least be brought up to speed with age mates rather than deficient. All right. What do you think people most misunderstand about these about these kids and their families? Yeah, I mean, I think that in the current environments in the way gifted and talented is handled, they really make gifted kids sound like they're sort of a different species. Like they have all these very particular like idiosyncratic socioemotional needs and like there's a theory from I think a Polish poet or something that's gotten popular called the five over excitabilities. Like you're kinesthetically over excitable and you're emotionally over excitable if you're gifted that's the idea. And I sort of think it does these students a disservice to to withhold actual advance math and reading, but then be focused on like all the ways in which you're assuming they're going to have emotional challenges that are greater than other students. The even worse fact is that sometimes those emotional difficulties are not preexisting, but they're function of being in school that's inappropriate for you. So like maybe you're kinesthetically over excitable because you're very, very bored and you've been very bored for many years. This is not a mystery. And so especially if you are going with sort of the the looser view of who's gifted and talented that may include 10 or more percent of children. There's no reason to assume that they're super weird and have all these very hard to decipher and hard to handle qualities. Instead, they just need different faster or not even different just mostly the bedrock is faster material. Teach things faster. Yeah, right. So I mean, we can all imagine the kid who who gets done with their work in three minutes instead of the 25 the teacher planned. And then they either they either you know act out or they sit there and hide a book under their desk, right. So you're kind of correcting for that right. Exactly. Yeah, that's what happened to me. I mean, I was in first grade classroom outside Atlanta and and it was boring. It was exactly same as kindergarten. I was going to do it and I started refusing to like color the art or whatever and I ended up skipping a grade. I skipped into second grade because there was no meaningful solution to that like they can send you to the counselor like talk about your feelings, whatever. The feeling is boredom. The feeling is that I already did this and it's accurate. That's a reality based feeling for a student like that. So the school the conventional schools can kind of do what they can right like they skip you ahead. Maybe they'll they'll move you up to harder classes in high school or maybe they'll start sending you to you know something like a dual enrollment classes more is more common now. But at some point you you run out of runway right so you you just described yourself as a washed up gifted kid right. I've seen you mentioned online this the ambiguous gifted label to disappointment pipeline right so what do you mean by all that. I don't think you're washed up. I think you're doing. You seem to be doing all right. Thank you. Thank you. Yes. I've, yeah, I'm in a new chapter. Things are, things are great. But I think if you wanted to be cartoonish about it, you could characterize gifted kids as sort of the ones who never stop, like just keep going straight A's, hardest classes available, you know, Ivy Leagues, difficult prestigious careers, right? That's like the burnout achievement track. And then there's kind of like the burnout, slacker confusion track. So like my husband and I, we were on the confusion track, which is that a lot of these interventions for gifted and talented students, they are kind of too little too late. So if they're not putting you ahead, except for one class by like seventh or eighth grade, you know, they move you towards algebra or something like that. You have many years of being both prevented from doing the things that are interesting and valuable to during most this school day, prevented from reading what you want, prevented from working ahead, and also bored, bored, bored. And at some point, that is your cognitive ability is now apart from like your actual skills. Like what do I do today? How do I learn things? If I get a bad grade on a test or on a paper, how do I handle that? And some students do become fairly brittle, which is like you hit that first class where you needed to study. And it's just like what the what what on earth? And sometimes it's college even before this happens. And that can that is an experience that we can tell from Twitter and memes and stuff is really relatable to people in the gifted and talented set. And that many of them sense that they've spent years trying to cope with and cope with hitting the wall and understanding what that means for their identity. What I thought I was smart now, I think I'm not smart. A lot of kind of black and white thinking. That's just completely avoidable. It's all completely avoidable. And it's much better to come up against some math you don't understand or really hard book. Like when you're six or eight or ten, then when you're 15 or 18 or 20, when you're really starting to become an adult and understand where you're headed in the world. So yeah, the question is like okay some people are always going to struggle with difficult material and transitioning to adulthood and stuff. But how could we at least have schools that don't make it way worse and sort of predictively have this blanket effect on, you know, a large chunk of some of the people who are poised to contribute most like economically and socially. Yeah, right. So your point, you're supposed to misunderstand things when you're in school or it's kind of more okay a lot of times to misunderstand in school. But when you're 18 or 20, I'm sure this happens to some people not until grad school somewhere, right, where you get to a point where you're finding like, man, I don't understand this. I need to go to the, I need to get help. What are you talking about? So that can be really hard on somebody. But you talked about it kind of in terms of personal struggles. But do you think there's also a disappointment that comes from outside like if you get tagged as a gifted kid and you're told you're you're either supposed to be one of these amazing high achievers and you kind of are until it gets difficult or you're told, man, you've got so much potential your whole life and you know it, but you kind of don't care because school's so boring. Like is there an outside disappointment factor too? I mean, there has to be, I think it's another situation where either your parents themselves can relate to this and so when they hear that you're gifted or whatever, it's now sort of just table stakes like you have to be in the hardest classes and do all the hardest stuff just like to sort of earn the right. Yeah, then approve of you. But there's also the opposite situation which is that some parents maybe who didn't have that experience themselves in school or were sort of a more average ability, they all the time end up with high ability students. This can very easily happen and so the school just tells them, oh, your kid tested into GTE and they're like, cool. And they may not really know what it means or how to support that. They may now have very inflated expectations or sort of just think whatever the school offers that student they know best because we have this like quote unquote smart kid who we have no idea how to support that and maybe they didn't go to college or something and now the student's going to go to college. So some of it does come from the outside I'm sure in all these different configurations, but I think there are many graceful ways to handle that middle space or like you're not you may not literally be top it anything ever again after your third grade class. But that's fine because there are still many many many possibilities available to you and some of them may not even involve college at this point. And to just be able to see that space and understand that success has many different phases is not a cop out. You know, it's not like just trying to keep you from feeling too bad after you disappointed everyone. Like no, that's the actual truth that there are many ways to be successful and many ways to live up to your potential. But if you've already given up on that when you're 14, it's going to be more painful. Yeah, I mean people will pay you to drop out of college now, right? Okay, so let's talk about some of these some of these school models, right? These community craft the schools tend to be either different either either on their their size or the way they use time or both, right? So maybe they're a micro school where you would notice a gifted kid and and be more able to do personalized things for them or they're a hybrid school where you're only going to school two days a week anyway. And this and you can get your work done really quickly. And so you've got three days to explore whatever you want to explore. Are there specific aspects of these schools that you think are more beneficial to to highly gifted students? Yes, yes. So I'm pretty bullish on the models where you compress academics into a small portion of the day. This characterizes alpha school here in Austin and also the GT school for whom I work and also many of the actins use a similar app based model. So the thought is like the worst case scenario is to take core academics that are not really that personalized and then just make it spread through three hours four hours six hours. And it's like sort of neither, neither efficient nor particularly good outcomes nor fun. Everyone hates it. Sort of worse than all world. So some people might have the intuition that like if you're going to be moving at a more accelerated pace for a high ability student, they might like need more time. But the truth is part of what high ability means is that the baseline expectation is that they should be learning more faster. Like that is the normal in this set of students. And as homeschooling parents have long known, you really only need about two hours a day give or take to get through one or more grade levels and even sort of a short academic year. It just doesn't take that long, especially if the instruction is appropriately individualized. So what that means is you get the rest of the time back to do all manner of things depending on what's important to the student and to the family. And you're still moving overall way faster than would have been expected in a conventional education environment. This is just win on win on win to my mind. Yep. So another aspect of these models is that they're often very do it yourself. So I don't know a lot about the origins of GT school. So you can talk about that if if you want to, but a lot of them come together by groups of parents deciding they need something different for their kids. So I wonder if if this kind of DIY or parent-led kind of ethos of micro schools and hybrid schools makes them more lined with gifted kids and their needs or are they is it kind of like asking too much from people who are already super stretched at kind of meeting their kids needs. It's a little bit awkward of a time to be so tech optimistic when all anyone's talking about online is how you know chat GPT written papers or destroying college and high school and also middle school. But I think what I have seen based on my own experiences even prior to going over for GT school is that tech heavy core academics allow any educational setting that wishes to use them the ability to individuate to any necessary degree. So you can have students in a class and like at Alpha School the students are sort of in rough age groups like maybe three years they do not graduate on a yearly basis they have to like do a certain objectives and they graduate staggered fashion. But no one has had to receive a binary label of gifted and talented or not because the apps are serving appropriately sequenced content depending on their levels. And so like my daughter has had the opposite experience of me in that she took her years and years to even figure out that she was kind of ahead of her peers because all she knows is I I open up the computer, it asks me to read this thing, it asks me to do this math. If there's a whole, it will send me back to get some more questions on certain things or whatever. So this means that there is no, it's not like a regular classroom where teachers are being asked to solve all manner of developmental issues through endless differentiation, but is not possible. It's actually the exact same level of logistical difficulty to give this to students at different levels than students at the same level. - Well, it's almost easier for the apps doing it, right? - Yeah, the apps doing it. And I mean, because it's only, this is the thing I think a lot of the tech critics miss, is that if it's only two hours of your day, there's plenty of time to do non-at-base educational activities. You're just kind of going as fast and hard as you can at this one small slice of academics at the exact right level. And then many types of social and educational activities don't have to be narrowly tailored to like the genuses in the class, you know, if they were, if they're building stuff with construction things or like reading longer books and talking about them, all of that is appropriate across a wide variety of levels. - Yeah, I wonder, too, this, so a lot of these schools originate, like I said, from small communities, tight knit communities, but usually that's based on some kind of cultural or a methodological affinity, not necessarily something like giftedness or high IQ, right? So you could imagine, you know, a small set of families of gifted kids in a town come together and say, "We want to start a gifted school." And one of them wants a classical school and one of them wants a STEM school, one of them wants a religious school, one of them wants a totally self-directed school and on and on and on. So do you think there's tension or potential tension within the, I'm struggling not to say the gifted community, but within the gifted here, right? 'Cause there, I mean, there are a lot of schools that their purpose is not to accelerate. - Well, maybe it is to accelerate, but to do more like slow learning, like read long books, right, things like this, or not be focused at all and just do self-directed what I have to do. So I don't know, is there a tension here, do you think, or does your, the your kind of like condensed model solve for that? - I mean, so the, our particular version of the apps heavy education, which is now called two hour learning, did actually form out of a small group of parents who are dissatisfied with the current micro schools in Austin. And what they had decided is that they decided that they wanted very clear, accountability isn't overused word, but like they wanted genuine standards for yearly progress for every student that were hard, like in quantifiable, like you open the platform and you see at the beginning of the year, the student couldn't do such and such a math problem at the end of the year, they can, you do that every year. But they were not all high-ability students. In fact, part of why some people were drawn to hard standards with quantitative evidence was because they had been badly served by other educational contexts and now their students were behind. So I think sometimes this is referred to as sort of like the value add of a teacher or as a platform. It's like we can even be sort of agnostic as to the starting point, like maybe you're behind, maybe you're sort of on grade level, maybe your head, but part of the problem with advanced learners is that most tests and climates are not actually measuring whether they're getting much value at each year because they're just sort of doing well each time, regardless of what happens during the year. And this school gets credit for that, even though they didn't add much. So I don't think that this kind of accelerated compressed academics is necessarily for people who don't have that, not everyone has that view of education that we really want to see math progress every year and higher reading levels every year. Some people have a much broader view and that's sort of their prerogative. But I do think it's a fairly large umbrella, especially by the time you're fed up with how little student learns in a conventional environment. One promise that the platform makes is to learn 2X twice as much each year, but it's measured against an average public school progress curve. So when you cash it out, in those terms, the 2X is very little, it's very minimal progress promise. So yeah, there are many people who can get behind that for many reasons. Yeah, so let's look at it the other way. So this is great for finding answers for kids who need to be accelerated and doing it at their own pace, or maybe not their own pace, but we'll sort of at their own pace, but just at their own whatever level they're needing to advance to and advance from. But how do you balance that with something like interaction with peers? Because if this was all or mostly like 90%, whatever percent you think is a big percent about individual development, you could just homeschool and then go to side quests all the time. So why do something like this instead? Why organize as a school community instead? I mean, part of another thing I think the critics of the apps based approach miss is they sort of think that you're just wire heading the kids. You're just plugging them into the apps. But it's actually pretty hard to get the kids to do that. I mean, if you try it at home, you're sort of controlling like would you like a hergykiss or like we'll go to the park if you do that. It's pretty hard. When they get into it, you can see good progress and part of the appropriate difficulty level. Part of the benefit of that is that you know it's OK to push because it is likely to be the right material for the kid. But it's better to do in a group environment. The kids will have a morning meeting and be like, OK, what are you working on today? Where did you start? How did this week go so far? What do you-- how many units do you have to do this week to like meet your goal or meet your stretch goal? And then they go off and do their stuff. And they come back together. I think people who work remotely have had adults have had much the same experience. Like they'd like not to be interrupted constantly. They have many individual tasks. But feeling part of a group that's sort of working together on some level is really valuable and almost essential for many, many human beings of any age. And there is so much time left over to do other things. I feel like we've seen in our kids, they do all have sort of their social and emotional quirks. They do need practice at doing things with other kids and exposure to a wide variety of tasks. The part of what makes that awkward for high-ability kids is what the school has done in the first place, which is slapped the ambiguous label on and pulled them out of class one day a week. That creates additional difficulties to them being sort of ordinary members of the group. I mean, when I was in Gifted Pullout program, they took us out one day a week. One time we dissected sharks. The whole school wreaked from maldehyde in the halls. And then they sent us-- and all the other kids are like, why do they get some text at sharks? What's going on? And then they sent us back to class and we had a make up, the stuff we missed. This is a recipe for exclusion and alienation that is completely avoidable, just not necessary. Yeah, no, I had similar experiences where they would pull me from one class to another and we'd be reading different books, but they'd forget to tell me what was going on. And I'd be confused and have to catch back up. But that's because I went to school in the '80s and '90s, too. So at that time, if a parent cared about this, their hope was, well, my kid is really smart. I hope I can get them into this program. Now things are different, right? So for parents of gifted kids, what advice would you give them based on your experience with alpha and GT if they're looking at hybrid or micro-school options or other things about navigating the landscape today? I mean, I would say if your student is not receiving, reading and math instruction that is moving briskly, such that it challenges them each day or each week, that is an emergency. It needs to start when they start school. And that is sort of the meat and potatoes of the educational experience. And if you're worrying about all sort of ancillary things or the GT program is, that's a much lower priority than just like are we moving ahead every year on math and reading? Everything about this climate is distracting from that very, very basic fact. But it's never been easier technologically to verify that this is happening. I mean, you can just put your kid on I Excel at home it costs like $10 a month. You can see because the habits that they form in those first grades, whether they're at home or at school, really matter and people spend years trying to change them down the line, change their orientation to doing hard tasks or to failure. That's what people are joking about when these gifted jokes like go viral on Twitter. So if you can avoid that, that's the most important thing. Gifted and talented placement in public schools is very dicey. Like there's a lot of sort of backfilling to budgetary things and they identify kids and then don't offer them anything. they may need your kid out, even if your kid doesn't. has had a genuinely pretty high ability. And you don't have to take their opinion on your child's abilities as a final word, or that the school must know best because your child's smarter than you are anything like that. You can very easily give them screening tests at home or just set them up on a harder book and see what happens. And that's the new floor, harder all the time. - Yeah, that's great. So last question then. What's the most interesting thing happening related to your work right now that people involved in these new school models would be interested to hear about? - Yes, so because of the apps focused kind of compressed day model, the two hour learning type of thing, we are getting huge amounts of data about how students who spend semesters and years doing apps that continually give them harder material about how fast and how well they can really learn. Because if there are any clothes in the material, holes in the math knowledge from skipping ahead, they are immediately apparent in the app space model. Like it's not like some teacher just checked a test and then they zoom ahead, like the apps don't lie. And especially when students are doing them with the teacher present, there is no cheating happening. I mean, these are six year olds sitting in a classroom with a teacher, like they can use, they've used chat with you, but that is not who's doing that. It's being technologically monitored. So at GT School, it's very new, so they're just concluding their first academic year now. But we're seeing that the students who tested it so they're like roughly 98% tile, a little bit above. They are moving at between three and seven times the pace of an ordinary public school students progress, which is a number that if you just sort of guessed it, no one would believe you. No one would say, "These students in my class should easily be going seven times faster in a few hours a day on a very like truncated academic year." That sounds extremely far fetched, but they are. They are, and we know it. Yeah, it's not a little bit faster. It's a whole lot faster, right? And it compounds. It compounds. So those students will basically all be done with through high school level material by the time they're done with eighth grade age. Yeah, amazing, amazing. Well, Pamela Hobart, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks, Eric. It was a real pleasure. Let me talk to you. Thanks a lot. You too. Bye. Thank you for listening to Community Crafted Education, a podcast hosted by the National Hybrid Schools Project and Kennesaw State University's Michael J. Cole's College of Business. If you have any questions about the topics we discussed on today's show or want to learn more about what we do, please look up the National Hybrid Schools Project or reach out to us directly at coalescollege.com/hybrid. (upbeat music)