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Imagine Teaching Robin Williams -- Twice-Exceptional Children in Your School

We're learning more and more about children who don't fit the mold," says Mary Ruth Coleman of the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina. However, even so, she observes, the education system is "not designed to address the needs of the child who is gifted and has disabilities." Coleman is a professor of special education at the university and serves on CEC's board of directors.

Cindy Little, managing editor of Gifted Child Today and a PhD candidate at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, agrees. Little, a teacher who has more than 10 years experience in primary level classrooms, notes that schools "want to serve gifted children, but they don't know how to do it. A lot of kids aren't being identified."

"Imagine being Robin Williams' fourth grade teacher!" she exclaims.

Gifted children who are "difficult," who act out, the clowns and troublemakers, and the gifted with disabilities, Little notes, may have their problems diagnosed and may not be considered gifted at all. And students who have a wide spread of skills can have their high test scores canceled out by deficits.

Similar concerns haunt Coleman, who emphasizes the ways gifted children can compensate for disabilities - and mask them- on their own.

Or, these student may not be aware the deficits exist.

"If a child is working at grade level, there will not be services or supports. If such a child is making 'C's,' that child will be left out in the cold," she observes.

Identifying the Gifted Child
Because challenged gifted children, particularly those with learning disabilities (LD), will have uneven skills and intermittent or asynchronous development, it's critical to separate out their test scores on IQ tests, experts advise.

The Weschler Intelligence Scales for Children "offer you a series of sub- tests," Coleman observes. "Look at the subtests, particularly with LD," she says, noting that "if you see a wide scatter," that can indicate you are dealing with a gifted student.

At the elementary level, Little says, the COGAT test of cognitive abilities will also let you "look at separate scores."

Testing itself can worry gifted children with disabilities, the "twice exceptional," along with students from diverse backgrounds, low-income students, and immigrants, Little notes. "None of these populations do as well on the standardized tests, and each group has different testing needs."

Because of such concerns, Coleman says, "there's a movement, particularly with LD, to do away with IQ testing altogether," a trend that concerns her. "It looks like we're moving away from use of IQ testing, and if we do we're likely to miss more and more of the gifted," she warns. In such situations, where scores may be misleading, the educator's acumen and "keen observation" are the critical elements in spotting and helping a gifted and twice exceptional child. "Uneven development is a red flag," Little emphasizes. "If you have a child who can't spell but is a whiz at math, look a little closer."

Other characteristics of the gifted to look for include perfectionism and extreme sensitivity. "And they may be very shy or very creative. Is a child verbally adept with a large vocabulary? An avid reader? Producing incredible artwork?"

In addition, "it's worthwhile to look at the ones who act out," she notes. They may be frustrated by their disabilities, or they may be extremely bored. Applying the Wrong Label

"A welcome new trend," Coleman says, is this: "We're now recognizing links between childhood depression and twice exceptional issues and beginning to study what's happening there. We've discovered that some children who may be identified as having attention deficit disorders (ADD and ADHD), may be, in fact, depressed. We may be over diagnosing ADD."

While gifted children "are not more prone to emotional disorders" in general than other children, the gifted are more sensitive. They may have, in addition, "an advanced knowledge of the world they're not emotionally prepared to handle," she observes.

Coleman cites the case of a very young child who suddenly refused to go to a school he had loved. He began screaming when they started setting out in the morning for his school. The mother discovered her precocious two-year-old had seen a television show on car crashes and seat belts.

"Mama," he said, "cars kill people." He didn't want to be in the car.

"That's the kind of thing really bright kids do," Coleman explains.

"They worry about the universe."

Writes Stephanie Tolan in Roeper Review (August 1994), an older gifted child who possesses "unusual clarity of thought...strong empathy, and moral concern" may find "the state of civilization and the condition of the planet ...overwhelming" - and may become depressed. How can you tell if it's depression? First, Coleman advises, ask "when did it start?" If it's an attention deficit difficulty, the child was likely born with it. Was there, instead, a trigger, such as a divorce or a death? Does it appear on a particular day of the week and then recede? If so, you may want to explore the depression dimension in more detail.

Similarly look at supposedly "hyperactive" kids through the gifted lens, she says. A highly creative, high-energy child, if gifted, may simply be bored or frustrated - or could be imaginatively daydreaming while appearing to be spaced out.

Creating a Team
"The first thing to realize is that no single person can meet the needs of the twice-exceptional child by themselves," Coleman says. "You need a team. Get your colleagues together: the special education teachers, the gifted educators, the general education teachers, and parents - listen to them.

"And I believe at the heart of the team is the student. Many of these children are so very bright they can play a major role."

"Schools need to become learning communities," agrees Little. "With gifted education, it's important that all the educators be in touch with each other. And I would like to see more in-service sessions on the gifted for all teachers to alert them to what to look for." With twice-exceptional students, keep an eye on the IEP, Coleman warns. "Make sure you don't sabotage the high-level expectations these children need in an IEP. Recognize the need for a challenging curriculum and build it in. That's where the team approach helps."

Working in the Classroom
There are a number of helpful classroom strategies you can use with gifted children who have disabilities, our educators advise:

• Activate appropriate technologies. Intensive use of appropriate technologies can work wonders with this population, Coleman observes. Computers with spell check, audio tapes, books on tapes, calculators, and other technological tools can all provide excellent support and compensate for deficits, allowing children to work from their strengths.
• Include tutorial support and mentors as well as remediation. "It's critical to teach gifted children with disabilities study skills, teach them learning strategies, and tutor them in time management," Coleman says.
• "Find a mentor," Little suggests. "If you call your local Chamber of Commerce, they'll give you a list of members in the community willing to help," many with a particular area of expertise that you can match to a child's interests.
• Provide counseling support. "All twice-exceptional children experience themselves as different and have a slightly different take on the world," Coleman observes. "Help them cope with their differences and their frustrations."
• Honor their strengths. "Find some way to honor the child's strengths, because it's their disabilities that are likely to get the most attention - indeed, that's legally mandated," Coleman says. "The disabilities side is like a magnet. It pulls everything in."
• Use flexible groupings, curriculum compacting, and tiered assignments. For elementary level children and up through middle school, don't be afraid of ability grouping - just keep it flexible, Little says. If you group children by strengths according to the subject matter, gifted children with disabilities can be in, say, an advance science group and remedial reading at the same time.

• With curriculum compacting, pretesting allows a gifted child who's mastered content to accelerate out of it and move to more challenging work, Little notes. Similarly, while more work for the educator, tiered assignments, where children address the same work at different difficulty levels, can help. For example, if you're reading Charlotte's Web in a class, tier one might be working on basic plot facts while tier two might write a story about one of the characters. A gifted child in tier three might be asked to "write your own chapter from one of the character's point of view."
• Teach meta-skills and self management. Help gifted children help themselves, Coleman advises. Teach them how to cope with the difficulties they may face, lead them through problem solving sessions. "They can draw on their cognitive strengths to help themselves, but the skills need to be taught," she emphasizes.