Vic Government Inquiry into Education of the Gifted

Many thanks to those 55 families who sent in their comments. So far we find that most parents suspected their child was smart but the schools did not mention anything . A few were surprised.  The WiseOnes free try-out was the first time they had evidence of such fast learning ability. Parents appreciate having the WiseOnes program, especially that it is in school time at the school.  For most, WiseOnes is the way the school provides for their child’s special needs but they feel it is not right that they should have to pay for everything, when the special slower needs of others, just as different, are paid for by the government.  Some parents also use other programs such as  sports and martial arts, performing arts and instrumental music to assist their child. Quite a few counted school sport, art and music as part of the schools provision for their child’s gifted needs. We know the fast learning children hate missing those lessons as well as IT. Although the children have all qualified as gifted with proper testing, parents did not seem to know what this meant. Qualifying for WiseOnes means that your child is in at least the top 10% intellectually compared to others the same age. Unless it is a very small school they are in the top 5% on a government approved test for scanning f0r gifted children. When you only have gifted children it is hard to compare their needs with the average child’s needs. The big need as far as the replies went was for emotional belonging and support through unusual and interesting  activities and learning.

One parent knew about government policy in Gifted and Talented education. Two families knew there was something for secondary students and another had read something online.

All the respondents’ children love WiseOnes for the following reasons:- it makes them happier, more interested in learning especially in a different way and they gain more new knowledge. Some mentioned that it allowed more creativity for their child in learning and the child talks to them about WiseOnes learning but not about class learning. One parent said it has broken the female  peer pressure to work at average level. We have had many who received their 24 terms in WiseOnes special framed certificate as a “WiseOne” so we know it matters to them.

It suited children who are introverted to have small groups and 70% of gifted people are introverts. It suited those who were lonely with no-one to talk to at their interest level and it suited those who were bullied in their own classroom. One school had no year Yr 5 & 6 children in WiseOnes due to teacher and peer group pressure calling them”nerds”. A couple of families were in the country where it was “DIY”  and another at a Melbourne Catholic school where there was no program and another had changed from a Catholic school, where there was no program. I know that parents at Catholic schools pay fees so maybe the schools are reluctant to add to their expenses. Also the word gifted has a different connotation in a religious school so the technical educational term is harder to accept. Then  the cost may be seen as unjust to those who can’t pay and the Catholic schools are very egalitarian. Government funding for WiseOnes may make a difference but it is very risky as political funding comes and goes, as I know very well. It would be unsafe to have full government funding for WiseOnes. A big corporate sponsor or several would make a difference or sponsorships or scholarships paid to the schools . I have tried all those but maybe a joint government & business sponsored scheme would work. Any parent want to volunteer to make it happen? Teachers are not usually good at that and we are all teachers.

This anti-gifted attitude in schools is not unusual and our teachers have even seen class teachers viciously abuse the WiseOnes children in the corridor. Sometimes it makes us very upset so we cry inside. The WiseOnes teachers ring up so upset, hardly able to believe what they saw and heard. That is where change needs to happen for the gifted child – higher entry requirements for teachers and education to help them disbelieve their myths that are already research dis-proven but too many teachers are (a)out of date and (b) resentful of the gifted children’s ability.  Having gifted school leaders helps but it would be good if they had more choice of teachers and more men to teach with fewer words and more action. Some gifted are not auditory processors and do not operate from listening. Only 20% of the population is auditory as a first preference .Those who are not auditory, the majority, are ones you are nagging with no result and they turn off  in class. They may not be good spellers due to the phonic approach which is good for many but does not suit their way of learning. They do really well in WiseOnes due to action and talk all the time. We teach them to spell visually or kinaestheticly as they need the words, so we  do ordinary curriculum as needed.

Some parents mentioned that they could not see any link with classroom curriculum. That is probably because all the children are thinking at least two years ahead as that is our assessed entry level. Some children have scored at mental ages of 17 and a couple at 25+ and all still in primary school. We can’t offer the ordinary curriculum to them or link to it. They don’t need that. Coaching colleges can do that but they can’t heal loneliness, mask wearing, boredom, loss  of integrity, lack of deep principled discussion, interlinking of all ideas and holistic growth of the individual as who they really are. Best of all for the children is that they match minds and can argue with a teacher who understands them and is gifted themselves. Imagine that in regular class!   I always tell the teachers , ” You are the curriculum. You are a model of a wise, happy gifted adult. You have gifts and experiences to share. You know how to do Socratic questioning and send the children home to talk to their parents about serious and eternal ideas such as life and death, time and space, human and alien, right and wrong, justice, ethics in society, belief systems and the consequences of them and you do it in physics, engineering, arts, maths, thinking and history sessions.”

OK, tell me when this can happen in the regular, even differentiated, classroom? Tell me how it can be done with teachers who are not gifted themselves? Tell me how it can be done without measuring, reporting, assessing, spoiling the pure joy and wonder of it.  Tell me how overloaded, stressed teachers can teach sensitive gifted children. Parents of children in the WiseOnes programs get a report that tells them,” Your child has improved in attempting tasks that he would not take risks on before”; or “your child has started to argue really well with intellectual peers after a year of being quiet while exploring the level of argument required;” or “Your child has made better judgments on how much work to do to gain the 100% result and is less stressed about perfection.”  These are the important things for the gifted because they matter just as much in the long run as having the brains. It is the person who is important and that is why we have such small groups and the program costs are serious for most families and impossible for some so our educators pay for them. The financial  scholarships are personally from our Education Managers and WiseOnes not from the fees paid by other parents. The price parents pay is the base cost as it is non profit, no margins built in, no fat, no salaries, no carry over of income from one term to the next to cover emergencies- just teacher contracts and curriculum costs.

It is a challenge and a labour of love. You can understand why so many of our leaders are “retirees”, still sharing our gifts and hoping we make a difference.

Survey results : Benefits- 50% said happier child, 30% said more interested child, 25% said more confidence, 10% said safer at WiseOnes and better understood, where there was no WiseOnes at school parents said they had to do it at home.  Interesting that only 30% went for the academic part or IQ part as the main benefit  but 60%  had the EQ or emotional quotient as the main benefit. That means the teacher:student and student:student relationship is the key to WiseOnes success. We tried 10 students per group but 8 was much better for the child and more expensive for the parents. However we chose to give a quality service so these relationships could blossom. A feeling of belonging is a key basic for human life and happiness after food and shelter. We hope that that we can find a big sponsor or several somewhere. I keep trying. Is your business ethical and interested?

We received four responses to the principal’s survey and a very well tho9ught out response from a Principal of a low socio-economic status school where too few parents of qualifying children could afford the program even when the school subsidized it . It is easy to think that government funding is the answer to everything but I know from long experience  that it comes and goes, that the gifted are a small proportion of the population and the general community does  not empathize with their needs which are the same as anyone else’ s, to belong to a like minded group, to learn at your own speed, to have intellectual fun while learning, to manage your time and effort appropriately, to have a suitable level of challenge and complexity so you learn in your proximal zone, to receive the opportunity for new learning at the right time – not years too late or too early, to cater for your range of interests , in our case a very wide range indeed. That is exactly what every child wants and needs.  Sometimes we  have to find the  funds ourselves. Bernie and I have done it as a retirement project for almost 14 years now but for long term security we must find a financial solution so that it is fair to our successors financially. They can’t be expected to do it on a non-profit basis. The curriculum is expensive to supply and WiseOnes with its Education Managers supplies everything- teacher, curriculum, whiteboard, stationary, copying, references, teaching aids, equipment, free testing, free staff meetings, scholarships, this website and another for WiseOnes  teachers, and we have to pay for $20m Public Liability Insurance as required by the government. That’s why the fees are what they are.

We had a meeting of all our teachers on 23rd May, and decided on the following as a recommendation to the Committee

1. Make Gifted Education compulsory in teacher training so teachers would be able to identify, understand and support these children better
2. Make it compulsory, and fund, the testing of all children in late Year Prep or early year 1 to pick up those with differences from average learning abilities and we will offer to train the teachers who do this.
3. Make it a requisite that any gifted children receive follow up and the best that research has proven for them- acceleration and programs such as WiseOnes in school time. Teachers said that Reading Recovery was disputed and ignored at first but once funds were constantly available it became accepted in schools as “normal”. We want the same for the gifted.
4. In this way it would give the gifted more equity in the system, change the attitudes of the significant number of teachers who resent, fear and are very negative towards the gifted. The Committee has asked us specifically to address this negativity in our submission. It is not just a state problem but country wide.
5. Fund WiseOnes in areas such as Dandenong and Cranbourne and western suburbs where the poverty is not just in money but in culture, nutrition and family life. WiseOnes can change the future for them.
6. Give WiseOnes access to the school’s internet so that we can show research online in lessons and provide for smaller numbers in rural areas.
7. Enable us to use a program such as Elluminate at no cost to us, so no cost in the fees. Then we can make a  real difference for a gifted child in any school in the state because we could make small groups of 8 for them, being able to see each other and talk to each other on screen while sharing the teacher’s screen with the appropriate lessons. Distance education, like enrichment,  is not gifted education. As has been said before,”If children of above average intellect want to do it or can do it , then it is not gifted education”.
9. Note:  When we did not test the school’s nominated child for the scholarship, in our early days, those children found it far too stressful due to the speed and complexity of the WiseOnes curriculum. We learned that we needed to test all children because so many are hard to identify by those untrained in Gifted Education and then research showed that only 50% were identified by specialists without testing. What we do now works well though we  still miss some who are not so logical but reason from prior information and memory. We have a test that suits them but it is longer and we can’t do it free. Government funding for fuller testing, not psychological testing, would soon sort that out. Psychological tests are not always the best for the gifted as the range of scores in the gifted is far wider than in average children and a  severe disability, such as Irlen syndrome,  would bring the average below the cut off point. .

We see this Inquiry as a  small start especially in changing the attitudes of many principals and teachers towards special provision for the gifted which is the greatest challenge for educators of the gifted. In some ways the previous policy of insisting that schools have to do it all themselves in class, mitigate against outside provision, but they still call a plumber for a special need. Dr Susan Nikakis found in her research that the teachers of the gifted need to be gifted themselves. We have found this to be true in WiseOnes too, but not all class teachers are gifted with the extra complexity of  brain to match the child’s thinking. There is no meeting of minds, so the child feels bad and sometimes the teacher too if the child acts up or opts out.

Thank you again. The submission has now been sent to the Committee. There have been a few late replies but the responses are included here although too late for the Inquiry.

At least our proposal to the Bendigo and Adelaide Bank for program funding is now receiving consideration at top levels thanks to our local bank manager. If any of you work for that bank would you put in a good word for the program please.