To bed......... and now to sleep

I often hear from parents whose gifted children have trouble falling asleep at night. Even if they have happily gone to bed, they are still awake quite some time later.

Sometimes the child is anxious about something in particular or perhaps about life in general. Sometimes they just can’t seem to ‘turn off’ and fall asleep. A regular routine helps in the wind down towards bed, but sometimes the child needs something more to help them drift off and recharge before the next day.

One seven year old boy who had been regularly still trying to fall asleep at an unsociable hour told me about his ‘lub-lub’ machine which had been a great help in getting to sleep. This device could be set to one of a number of sounds but the one which worked for him was a heart beat. He told me that listening to that made him feel calm, his brain could let go and he could go to sleep.

I have met other children who set a radio just off station providing enough distraction for them to stop replaying the details of the day in their mind and drift off to sleep. Others use ear plugs, play white noise or listen to music or guided relaxation.

For the child who likes to write, keeping a private journal where they can record their worries means they have been handed over to somewhere safe and the child doesn’t need to continue thinking about them for the time being, but they have not been dismissed as ‘silly’ can be helpful. Some people find drawing works in the same way for them. This probably works on the same sort of principles as the Guatemalan Worry Dolls which were popular when my children were young in the mid 1990’s.

What ever the best strategy for you and your child might work out to be, it is likely to change or evolve over time. Stress and anxiety levels  change as do our coping skills. And what once works might lose its effectiveness if it is used for too long. The most important thing is that there is not one right way to go to sleep. Keep thinking outside the box and try a variety of things. Sometimes the novelty can be enough to break the pattern and relax the anxiety that tends to build up when they start to worry about not going to sleep.

The seven year old boy I mentioned is now 13 and we talked recently about sleeping. He still finds it hard to fall asleep early although it often easier now. He doesn’t use his ‘lub-lub’ machine nowadays but he is interested in polyphasic sleep patterns and wonders whether he might actually have a sleep cycle that isn’t compatible with the expected 8-10 hour night time sleep and waking in time for school.
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Photo credit David Castillo Dominici

"Only Proactive Parents Need Apply"

We would be unlikely to see such a sign, and yet it contains a good reminder for us. Nothing happens without effort. We can hope and wish all we like for change, but until we take action, it will only be hopes and wishes.

Our children's education is no different.

Why did I write a book for 'proactive parents'? Surely, as some people have suggested, it is the ones who aren't proactive who need the help. The reality is that only the proactive ones are willing to do what is necessary to bring about change.

Having worked with more than 300 children and their families, I have had the opportunity to talk with and observe many degrees of willingness. It is only the parents who are prepared to be proactive, to play a part in their children's education as needed, who make a difference to the outcomes.

Some families I have seen have wished for change, but shied away from taking any action. Sometimes they have convinced themselves that 'it will work out in the end'. Inevitably I hear from them again before long often with a request about what can be done, or a recount of the current woes.

It is a very rare situation where parents of gifted children can remain observers to their child's education and all goes smoothly. Teachers are busy. They have a whole class of children with a range of learning abilities and needs. They also only see your child for part of a day generally just for a year. The chances of them 'getting' your child and knowing what to do to keep them moving along the path towards thriving in the space of a whole school year is rare. In the first days, weeks or terms, far rarer.

And yet proactive parents can help teachers greatly. Identifying your child's needs and capacities take a load off the teacher. It is work you have done for them (actually you have done it for your child and it will be a lasting action, but for now let's just focus on the teacher). Building positive relationships with teachers also removes some strain - they know you do not come on the attack even if you do have something you need to discuss. You have a wealth of knowledge about your child that a teacher can only access if you share it with them. Only you know what your child's 'natural state' is. Working together as a team can bring much greater results. In fact it is really the only way to get results.

So what about the parents who aren't yet feeling proactive? There is actually something for them too- if they are willing to take the steps towards being proactive. The first part of my book Gifted and Thriving at School: How proactive parents can get the education that fits their child  talks about some of the things that make use hesitate and provides some ideas about how to move past it.

But in the end, you will need to decide to take action. This isn't a book to convince you you should, it is one to help you on your way once you have.

You can get your copy of Gifted and Thriving at School from Thinking Ahead for $25. And you can sign up for some support and advocacy updates as well. Bonus!

Gifted and Thriving at School: How proactive parents can get the education that fits their child

Things not going so smoothly for your child at school?

Feeling hesitant about talking to your child’s teachers or school?

Not sure what information to gather to help you work out what to do?

My new book Gifted and Thriving at School: How proactive parents can get the education that fits their child was released today and it will help you build your confidence as lay the groundwork for your child to thrive at school.

 

Copies now available for just $25.00

Like a signed copy of the book? If you purchase a copy between now and Friday 9th March 2012, I will make sure your copy arrives with a signed message.

You can find out more about this great book packed with practical, road tested advice along with how to order a copy by going to the Thinking Ahead website where you will also find details of a special bonus offer.  And to keep helping you along the way as you absorb it you can also sign up for free updates about Gifted and Thriving at School with information and advocacy news.

Also currently on offer is a Special Resource Bundle where you can get a copy of Gifted and Thriving at School plus a copy of Gifted Children: Resources for Parents and Teachers in WA for just $45 (that's a saving of $10).

If you are on Facebook, 'Like' the Thinking Ahead Facebook page and find out how you might be able to get a free copy of the book.


Will it help you?
Here is what some pre-release reviewers had to say about Gifted and Thriving at School

"Can I just say, as a parent with a child who I am sure has some degree of giftedness, I have found this to be such an educational book. I am meeting with Connor's teacher this coming week and you can be sure, I have taken lots of hints from here on how to handle the meeting. I thank you on behalf of every parent of a gifted child!"

Just read the book and I have to say "THANK YOU!" What a fabulous way of helping parents get through the first phase. I remember back when I first approached J's school I was so nervous and intimidated about approaching the teachers, but your book will give parents the confidence to stand up and be heard!  I love the organisational advice and I have already set up my 3 files and started photocopying articles and going through the giant box of papers, and I can now feel confident to take some reading to J's teacher and approach her without making her feel like she isn't doing her job properly!

"What a great road map - laid out so that you are guided from one step to the next. Truly empowering"

And of course, I would love to hear what you think too.

Get your copy now (a signed one if you order this week)

Don't have a Paypal account?

You can use a print and post order form (look for the link in the right column)

Confident parents make good advocates

What is the most important thing you need in order to advocate for your child?

Confidence.

How do you build that confidence?

By developing your knowledge base and the skills which will make it easier to effectively navigate your way.

You are an expert regarding your own child. You know them better than anyone else. You know their ‘natural state’, what they look like when they are engaged with learning and happy with their place in the world. No-one has their interests held as tightly in their heart as a child's parents. No teacher, no matter how wonderful they might be, can know them as well as you.

My new book Gifted and Thriving at School: how proactive parents can get the education that fits their child is about to be released and it will guide you through the process of gathering and organising the information you need, building positive relationships with your child’s school, preparing for and attending meetings plus show you ways to communicate effectively, leaving you feeling confident that you can guide the progress of seeking the education that fits your child.

Being well prepared also boosts your confidence, but it does more than that. A well prepared parent is also an asset to the teacher. Being able to bring the teacher information and ideas about the path forward gives them a head start, helping them as well as your child.

Copies of Gifted and Thriving at School will be available from 7th March, 2012. Throughout the book you will hear the voices and advice of parents, many of whom started out hesitantly, adding their perspective to each of the steps in the process. If you would like to be among the first parents to benefit from this new book, you can pre-order your copy now from Thinking Ahead.

What have parents said so far?

"We gained great confidence from the structure you gave us. We felt we could take an active role in the process, rather than just waiting to see what was offered. Writing that thank you letter after each meeting turned out to be really useful. And because we felt more confident we were prepared to ask to see research that backed up what the school wanted to do.” 

"Just read the book and I have to say "THANK YOU!" What a fabulous way of helping parents. I remember back to when I first approached my son’s school. I was so nervous and intimidated about approaching the teachers, but this book gives me confidence to stand up and be heard! I love the organisational advice and I have already set up my 3 files, started photocopying articles and going through the giant box of papers, and can now feel confident that I can take some reading to the teacher and approach her without making her feel like she isn’t doing her job properly!"

"What a great road map - laid out so that you are guided from one step to the next. Truly empowering" 

Order your copy from Thinking Ahead and begin your advocacy journey with confidence.

Do you need to test again?

Giftedness is a permanent "developmental lead," not a temporary one. Your IQ doesn’t change significantly over time, although if a child is very young when they were tested, re-testing a few years later may give you a more complete picture, particularly if the child was not fully engaged by the earlier testing or their scores were spread across a wide range. Only rarely do children who were tested at a young age score lower when retested. Ad if they do, then it is important to look at the other factors. Were they tested by the same person? Were they well on the day there were tested? Are they less engaged with learning than when tested earlier? Has anything happened in the meantime which might affect the child’s results?

Retesting with the same test is not advisable within about 18 months to 2 years due to the ‘practice effect’ which can potentially inflate scores. It is possible however to use a different test. If your child was assessed using the WISC IV for instance, you can test using the SB5 at any time.

If the first test highlighted other issues or difficulties which may have negatively impacted on your child’s scores you might decide to retest in the future after these issues have been addressed or treated. The results of the second test might then give you a more accurate picture of your child’s potential and pattern of strengths.

Although it varies a little from school to school, if you are seeking to accelerate your child, the school may request you have IQ test results that are less than two years old and that might be the catalyst for considering retesting.

What if the results of the first test are higher than the later one?Where a child has been retested with different results parents often ask ‘Which one is right?” and worry that lower scores on later testing means their child may have ‘lost’ his or her intelligence, or the results of the first test were a ‘mistake’. This is especially concerning where they feel the child’s school are likely to rely on the later results without regard for the reasons for the potential difference.

As the child has to provide their own answers to the questions on an individually administered IQ test, rather than choosing from a selection of answers as they would on a multi-choice test, it is virtually impossible to fluke an artificially high score on an individual IQ test.

Any score should be considered a minimum measure of potential. This means that the highest scores achieved provide you with the best picture of a person’s potential, regardless of whether it is an earlier or later test.

The variation between results may be due to any one of a number of factors. As different tests measure slightly different abilities, the child may have strengths which show on one test more clearly than another. If the child was assessed by a different person on each occasion, the degree of experience of the person or the rapport they developed with the child when administering the test may be reflected in the results. Scores will also differ if your child was previously assessed using a now-superseded test which was scored using a different method or scores calculated using a different method.

While an IQ test does not measure how much a person has learned in school, the school environment can have an influence on results. Psychologist Fiona Smith reported that preliminary findings from the analysis of 800 Stanford Binet 5^th assessment with mildly to exceptionally gifted individuals in Australia showed the Full Scale scores steadily declined as age and time in school increased. She hypothesised that the longer a child is in school, particularly where the learning opportunities do not meet their learning needs, the greater the likelihood that it will impact on their results and depress their scores, especially for highly gifted children. **

What if the school asks that you test again?
If your child’s school suggests you need to retest, ask more questions. Find out why they feel that it is necessary - this will tell you what sort of information you need to gather in preparation for when you next discuss it. Finding out what they intend to do once they have the results will help you gauge whether it is an exercise effectively to buy time before putting anything in place, or whether they are genuinely looking for patterns in the subtest results to help them plan more appropriately for your child. Asking more questions may also help you get a sense of whether the reason is that they disbelieve the earlier results because they were from an independent psych rather than a school based psychologist or because they don’t match what they believe about the child. Sometimes parents are told that ‘everyone who sees that psychologist is told their child is gifted’. If you think this one through logically, the parents of children who saw ‘that psychologist’ whose child was not identified as gifted are unlikely to be coming to tell the school so or to ask for interventions.

You can then make your own assessment of whether retesting is going to provide useful new information, and whether it warrants the expense which is not inconsiderable.

Image from Free Digital Photos

** Fiona Smith presented these findings at the Australian Association for the Education of the Gifted and Talented National Conference in Hobart in 2008. Her slides from this presentation titled Assessing Gifted Children: 10 Years experience using the Stanford Binet 5 can be downloaded from www.aaegt.net.au/Conference2008/PowerPoints/Smith.pdf

Lessons about identifying gifted students learned from making grape jam

Recently my grape vine was laden with fruit, far more than we could possibly eat. The family jam pot, the one used by my mother and grandmother, was dusted off and the fruit washed and weighed and jars cleaned and prepared. Making grape jam takes several hours and much stirring. There is plenty of time for thinking as you stir. Our grapes, although sweet and delicious, have seeds which need to be skimmed off the surface as the jam cooks.

As I watched over the bubbling mixture and the seeds rolling on the currents, it reminded me of the need for an ongoing process of identifying gifted children. Just like gifted children, some seeds are easy to see, they are evident right away and easy to skim off. Others don’t come to light until later. When the seeds do come to the surface they tend to cluster together, mostly at the edge. If you observe carefully you can work out the places they are most likely to gather. Some you see briefly and then wonder where they went as they become go back below the surface, invisible once again. Some you have to look more closely for as they are ‘hiding’ in with the froth on the surface. For some a spoon is the best way to catch then, for others it requires some extra tools as well.

Even after several hours of cooking, stirring and skimming and a collection of hundreds of seeds, there are still some that remain in the jam that have not been skimmed off. Perhaps they just haven’t come to the surface, or perhaps they did but went unnoticed.

Not all our gifted children are easy to spot. Not all of them want to be identified. Sometimes though, we just don’t look in the right places. Sometimes we stop looking too soon. Like the seeds in my jam, gifted children tend to gather together and if you know where to look you might find them, even if they aren’t making themselves obvious elsewhere or in other ways.

If we rely on a one off identification process we are likely to miss the ones who need more time to mature or develop their confidence before they are seen. If we use a single method or only look in one place, we will also miss some, perhaps many, of the gifted children who come by us.

There is no perfect method for identifying gifted students. We need to be continually vigilant, to use as many methods as we have available and remember that gifted children are perhaps the best identifiers of other gifted children that we have.

And if we use all the resources at our disposal and keep continually looking for gifted students, some may still slip through the net. Like the jam, the fewer seeds remaining hidden at the end of the process, the better the result.

(just in case you were worried that being skimmed off was not a good outcome, the seeds recovered from my jam are cleaned, washed and crushed for use in a body scrub. Their ‘talents’ are not wasted)

Effective teachers

I have just finished watching 4 Corners on the ABC. Unfortunately I missed the beginning of the program but it was interesting to see schools with such different circumstances focussing on the importance of one key thing - teacher effectiveness.

Of particular interest was the comment about the impact an effective teacher can make on achievement that indicated that the difference between the most effective teacher and the least effective teacher can be as much as a whole year of achievement for students.

In an earlier post I mentioned James Stronge who presented some research at a gifted conference in Singapore in 2008 looking at teacher quaity and effectiveness. He reported that the positive influence of an effective teacher can still be seen 3 - 5years down the track. Similarly the negative effects of an ineffective teacher are also still evident after 3 - 5 years.

What makes an effective teacher for gifted students may well be different to what is effective for students of average ability.  There have been a number of studies, both in Australia and overseas about what characterises an effective teacher for gifted students. Some studies have shown that gifted students value the personal and social characteristics of a teacher over the teacher's cognitive and classroom management abilities, other studies have produced lists of characteristics of effective teachers for the gifted. It is interesting to note however that many of these lists include a recognition of the importance of intellectual development, or having insight into the cognitive, social and emotional needs of gifted students. **

Given the scarcity of teachers with training in giftedness, the likelihood of a child coming across an effective teacher who has insight into characteristics of gifted children, a genuine interest in or liking of gifted students, or one who values intellectual development to the degree needed by a gifted child is perhaps rarer that we would hope.

And that is why it is critical for parents to be involved in their child's education. Establishing a positive relationship with your child's teacher will help you discover the degree that they may have the characterisitics outlined above. And it will also give you the chance to perhaps guide the teacher to new understandings. It is never too early to start building the relationship, the outcome of the year might depend upon it.


** You can read more about some of the studies looking at the characteristics of effective teachers for the gifted here.