Acceleration - pushing the child or taking the brakes off???

Late last year I had a phone call from the distressed parent of a highly gifted young girl. After meeting with the family about a month before, I had recommended a grade skip and mum had visited a school where she hoped to enrol her daughter for the following year.

The person who had taken her on the tour of the school had told her that ‘pushing’ children in that way could only lead to a bad outcome and that usually children who were accelerated had to return to year level because it didn’t work. The mum wanted to know if I knew of anyone who had been accelerated and where it had been successful.

While I was talking to her I was able to check off a mental list of more than 25 children I had worked with who had been accelerated. For every one of them it had been a success. A year later, the list has probably almost doubled.

The reality of grade skipping is actually quite the opposite of what this parent was told. While it may not be the most suitable option for every gifted child, acceleration is one of the most useful but most underutilized tools for meeting the learning needs of our gifted children.

Bad outcomes? For none of the children I know who have been accelerated could it be considered a bad outcome. In some cases it may not be an exaggeration to call it ‘life saving’, certainly for many of them it has given the child back some enjoyment in school and life and parents some peace of mind. For a few it has been less obvious academically, but they are happier and generally more relaxed. For some I doubt that a single acceleration is enough but it is a start. When parents email me telling me is wonderful ‘to have their child back’, I doubt that they would consider it a ‘bad outcome’. To date I have not come across a child who had to be de-accelerated again because it didn’t work.

Pushing? Well that implies pressure of some sort, in the same way that you might have your foot on the accelerator in a car. Many of these children complain about the pace at school being too slow, many spend time waiting while for others to finish or get more practice. Some have just lost the motivation to engage in learning at school. Research has shown that stress can result from work being too easy just as readily as it does from it being too hard. The child then is already under pressure before they are accelerated. Moving the child to curriculum that better matches their learning needs in many cases removes the pressure (and the stress and frustration) and allows them to recharge and re-engage. A better analogy might be to an electric car on a downhill slope, regenerating. Or taking your foot off the brakes.

While it was common in the days of the One Teacher School, acceleration has fallen out of favour for one reason or another since then. A review of acceleration options by Karen Rogers a few years ago found that the biggest complaint accelerants had had about the experience was that they weren’t accelerated more!

Acceleration in the form of a grade skip will not necessarily be the most suitable option for every gifted child, but it can make the world of difference. From amongst the many stories and emails from parents, one very gifted young boy comes to mind. He had become a 'behaviour problem' in the classroom and his teacher felt sure he had ADHD. I had an email from his mother a few months after he was accelerated to tell me he was a 'different boy', he completed his work, was not a problem at all in his new class, rather he was a model student! And, perhaps more importantly, he had finally found a friend.

Schools across all 3 education systems in WA have accelerated students in recent years, probably more in the last few years than in the decade or two before that. And as they have seen these accelerated kids blossoming, they have perhaps become a little less nervous about it and it has been an achievable option for more students. One school this year enrolled 8 new students all of whom were grade skipped and they joined a number of other accelerated students already in the school.

I keep hoping that the days of a child being denied a grade skip because the person making the decision knew someone years ago who was accelerated and it 'didn't end well' - the classic Case Study of One - are coming to an end. Hopefully I wont have other parents calling me with the same concerns of the mum I mentioned and that schools will increasingly be happier to take the brakes off their brightest young students.

If you are interested to read more about acceleration, you might like some of the following:
A Nation Deceived
Acceleration - What we do vs What we Know
A Best Evidence Synthesis on Research for Acceleration Options for Gifted Students
Guidelines for Acceleration