Peer Support – Is it Time for a “Think Group” Phenomenon?

It’s an honour to be blogging for SENG’s US-based National Parenting Gifted Children Week. They’ve started with a conference, and I hear great news of how well it has been going. Congratulations to all those involved!

National Parenting Gifted Children Week is hosted by SENG (Supporting Emotional Needs of the Gifted). Please follow the Blog Tour! Download SENG’s free NPGC Week ebook, The Joy and the Challenge: Parenting Gifted Children.

Lists of the characteristics of gifted children often describe their social (or asocial) behaviour as well as describing their thinking. Here are some examples:

• ‘They can work independently at an earlier age’
  ‘They may prefer the company of older children and adults to that of their peers’
  ‘”I’d rather do it myself” is a common attitude.’
  http://www.ri.net/gifted_talented/character.html
• ‘retains own ideas in a discussion or collaboration’
  ‘doesn’t mind being different’
  http://austega.com/gifted/characteristics.htm
• ‘often prefers working alone’
  ‘has very definite ideas of his or her own.’
  http://www.giftededucation.org.nz/parentsnew.html#qu2

I have been selective, drawing out those characteristics of giftedness that illustrate the extent to which gifted children’s thinking and social behaviour can be unswayed by the social world around them. Often divergent thinkers, many of these kids resist peer trends and peer pressure. This may arise through active disagreement with agemates’ priorities, or through such a defined focus on personally compelling interests that the whims of the crowd are mere background matters.

Does this mean, then, that gifted kids don’t need peer support? There are people who seem to think so, and these people can include some of the gifted kids themselves. The feeling of belonging within a group outside the family can be so rare for gifted children that they do not even see it as a need until they join a gifted children’s association or a gifted class. However, once you bring a group of gifted children together with their true peers – other gifted children – first there is nervousness, then there is excitement, and then many of the children express a sense of relief. We all like to ‘fit in’ somewhere, and gifted children are no exception.

Gifted children’s peer relationships can be qualitatively different from those of agemates. Quite often, expectations of emotional loyalty seem higher while expectations of superficial conformity (such as a group dress code) seem lower. Peer pressure exists among the gifted but may manifest in unexpected ways. I remember an outdoor game developed by my students. It had complex rules, and play was interrupted often to refine those rules, even with written record-keeping, amended motions and points of order. A bunch of very active primary school children used their own form of peer pressure to make their rules as important as the running and chasing. Every child conformed to take part in this process!

They may not all need formal playground democracy, but I believe that all gifted kids need some time with other gifted kids – not just to do well in class, but also to feel good inside. It doesn’t need to happen every day, with pull-out programmes and gifted children’s organisations making a huge difference to many children’s lives, but it must happen.

I could stop there, but there is something else. I believe that the parents of gifted children need peer support as well. If little Johnny teaches himself a few sizable chunks of how to read at age three, but has sobbing fits that last thirty minutes each time he finds a word he cannot yet read (whether someone helps him or not) it’s a problem! When little Johnny’s tired and frazzled Mum tells a regular Mum, with the intention of asking for advice (as Mums often do), regular Mum is likely to see mental visions of little Johnny chained to a book, and is more likely to back away shaking her head than to offer meaningful support.

Those people you think are “volunteers” painting out graffiti may just be the parents of kids like little Johnny, painting over environmental print in a desperate bid for a moment’s peace.

There are many moments of the gifted parenting journey that are not only challenging and tiring (like all parenting at times) but socially isolating. Those who believe that pushy parents create giftedness logically believe any related parenting problems are self-induced. Those who believe giftedness is a cakewalk believe there are no problems. Those who believe the gifted should be brought down a peg or two will extend their helpfulness with this goal to the parents. It’s well worth taking time to find true parenting peers to help you through this!

Many of you will have heard about groupthink phenomena, when members of a cohesive group believe the way they think is the only way to think. Let’s switch that word around. I suggest we make National Parenting Gifted Children Week a “Think Group” phenomenon. Stop and think about how you, or parents of gifted children known to you, can access a supportive parenting group, whether face-to-face, online or both. In my experience, many parents of gifted children don’t expect to need the support of a group. When they find themselves engaging in one, first there is nervousness (“Will my kid be gifted enough?”), then there may be excitement (“I really can figure out how to tweet*!”) and then there is almost always relief (“I am no longer alone!”). If you can readily understand how being with gifted peers helps children, it is just one more step to see how peer support can help parents of the gifted as well.

Just one last point – If you should be parenting a twice exceptional child you’ll find that some of the criticisms meted out by regular parents lack internal consistency. In a nutshell, your child is too smart and not smart enough both at once. You’ll need two things. A true peer group and a blog. Why the blog? Because you’ll be too darned tired to think up the smart answers the daft criticisms deserve in the heat of the moment. But think them up you will. So please blog these wonderful thoughts to other parents of twice exceptional kids. We’ll be out there in cyberspace, appreciating every word!

*There are many places to network with the gifted community online, but #gtchat is where the support started to feel real for me.

Photo credit: Flickr member eltpics.

Social Media’s Newest Toy – Google+

I’m playing with Google+, but being me, thoughts of slightly less playful uses keep creeping in.

Free video chat will eventually be good for distance education in New Zealand. Exploring this possibility is one of the reasons I have found my way into Google+ promptly, even though our infrastructure won’t support its use just yet. Rural broadband is slow, and in some places it isn’t available at all – wasting any of the bandwidth on a picture renders the sound incomprehensible. So I’m toying with what might become possible in terms of education, and exploring what is possible now in terms of advocacy, while I play with the new toys.

Google+ has the look and feel of something that is going to be big. Those who use social media to advocate for any cause, including educational ones, can’t afford not to be there. The key question is how to make information available on all the major social networks simultaneously without drowning our followers in a sea of repetition.

On Twitter, almost everything you tweet goes in one basket – to the whole public. Hashtags enable selective viewing, but shared information is all in together. On Facebook, you have more choices – your wall, your groups, your pages, your events, and those created by others. Each page or group tends to develop a style or purpose that helps you to decide what to post where. However, almost all of us who have Facebook groups and pages, and who Tweet as well, have things that we’ve felt the need to post everywhere in case someone missed out. Now we have the opportunity to post into as many Google+ circles as we can create as well. Add a few retweets and repeats, and soon the posts we value the most risk becoming like “the song that never ends”! Our Google+ contacts can put virtual fingers into their ears by muting repetitive posts, but do we want to drive them to that?

Fortunately, Google have other tools – things I have only dabbled with until now which suddenly seem more important. Within Gmail is a tool called Buzz. Configure your buzz to show your tweets and they will be visible within Plus, but they won’t be cluttering the main stream or the stream of any of your circles, they’ll be on your Buzz page. Your contacts can take them or leave them, and your post stream will be free to share the best and forget the rest. Buzz can also show your blog updates and your Flickr uploads. Add them as “connected sites” by clicking the hyperlink in Gmail shown below.

Add websites and your Twitter feed to share in Plus via Buzz.

Things you share via Google Reader can also be shared in Plus via Buzz. Reader has a facility to create a personal bundle of blogs and newsfeeds. Find it under “Browse for stuff”. If you share a lot of blog posts related to specific fields, you can create one or more bundles of blogs which can then be available on your Buzz page without dominating post streams.

Clicking "Browse for stuff" lets you view existing bundles or make and share your own.

Just one warning – see “People you follow” at the bottom there? Follow someone in Reader, and you’ll be following them in Buzz as well. Follow someone on their Buzz page in Plus, and you’ll be following them in Buzz and Reader (if they use Reader). However, following circles in Plus are currently totally unrelated to who you follow in Buzz and Reader. But who knows? That may change.

Overall, I feel that Google Plus could be a good thing for advocacy, but that the way we advocate could make it too much of a good thing unless we get savvy about how we use it. We will probably need to craft different styles for different online milieu to keep key messages fresh and interesting while making them widely available.

Don't force your friends to mute your message as you spread it across new social media!

This image, by Flickr member enggul, has attribution and non-commercial licenses.

Bullying and Mathematics

Like anyone else a little bit different in any way, the gifted child is at risk of bullying, and at risk of becoming a bully. The more different the child, the greater the risk. If kids show hugely asynchronous development, with intellectual skills way ahead of chronological age, and social skills way behind, you can almost guarantee that bullying will be a regular occurrence. In New Zealand schools, the playground is where the risk of bullying is greatest.

When bullying occurs in the playground, what is really going on?

It usually boils down to conflicting goals that kids do not know how to handle. The child who is different wants to join in, suggest a game, or suggest a rule for a game. The other children don’t want that. Whoever is the most frustrated will behave badly first, and things will often escalate through retaliation. The child who lacks likability or skills of persuasion is particularly at risk of being excluded or thumped, and of resorting to foul tactics in wielding power when fair ones fail.

Teachers can all too easily assume that kids haven’t followed advice given:
“Did you ask nicely?” (Probably, the first time, but after that…).
“Did you say, ‘Stop it, I don’t like it.’ ?” (Yes, but they seemed to think that that was the whole point of being nasty to me, duh!).
“Did you walk away and play with someone else?” (Yes, but they followed me, calling me names, and there was nobody else who wanted to play with me anyway).
“Did you look for the duty teacher” (I tried to, but I couldn’t see through my tears).

Adults need to realise that most of the advice given only increases the odds, and mostly works for socially competent kids who seldom need it.

What is more, we need to admit this to kids. We need to tell them that any advice they follow only increases the odds of solving playground problems successfully. Talk mathematics and probability. Talk about saying please working better than not saying please in the same way that rolling a die twice gives you a better chance of scoring a six than rolling it once. It doesn’t guarantee that someone will include you, listen to you, or play the game your way. Commit to kids to help them monitor for small improvements that suggest they are successfully changing the odds.

Time is on your side

Playtime is made of two things – play and time. When we talk about play, we also talk about time. I have a five minute rule. We have little chats before new kids are due to join our classes about how some new gifted kids are as far behind in their social skills as they are ahead in their thinking skills, and how this can make them really annoying playmates. (We are honest). We talk about celebrating diversity – that being different is not a problem to be solved, while lacking social skills is – and how to figure out which is which. We remind everyone that annoying kids won’t learn social skills without chances to practice, and that our playtimes will be much more enjoyable if we can give them as many chances to practice as soon as possible. We agree (again) to a five minute rule. If someone wants to play with us, no matter how uncool, we will let them, for five minutes. If everyone gives them five minutes, they will have more than enough playmates to get them through the day. Sharing the load in this way is collegial, and we strive to be collegial. We role-play saying things like “Hey, that’s not cool, try it this way”, quite gently and supportively in case our new friends need lots of help. We also role-play ending the 5 minutes graciously, and perhaps helping our newcomers to find someone else to join in with if they seem to need it.

We also talk about fractions

If you’re playing with someone who is easy to like, you tend to make the decisions in a half-and-half way if there are two of you, or make an even three-way split if there are three. You aren’t even really conscious of it. It just happens. Once you become really good friends, you often make the same decision as each other without even having to negotiate.

Play with someone new (and a little bit annoying) and it is different. You have to be careful and conscious to give them an even share of having their ideas listened to, and of calling the shots. Make the decisions on a half-and-half basis if there are two, by even thirds if there are three, and so on. Figuring this out can be hard work, but that’s ok, because you only have to do it for five minutes. What is more, the better we do it, the faster our new “friends” will become genuinely friendly and likable.

In my experience, the five minute rule and making decisions by fractions increase the odds of avoiding bullying a lot faster than saying “Stop it, I don’t like it”. Adults with an interest in preventing bullying need to get mathematical as well, and consider the effect sizes of their advice.

The five minute rule increases the odds of avoiding bullying situations at school.

This photo, by Flickr member doug88888, has attribution and non-commercial licenses.

GO Graphics – an Online Holiday Programme

I work for Gifted Online, and I’m delighted to let you know that we are having an online holiday programme! During the second week of the New Zealand school holidays (25-29 July) your children can hone their computer graphics skills in a series of online classes. This is the second of our interest-based courses. Like GO Storymakers, there will be a high appeal for gifted kids, but students do not need to be identified as gifted to join us.

Pop on over to the GO website for more information. The star at the top was made by me, using the same software that we will use for the course. (Yes, this really is about me playing with graphics software for a week and getting paid for it, but your family gets to enjoy the fun).

#NZGAW Blog Tour – The Lessons Learnt

Hosting a blog tour has been a lot of work, and a lot of fun. I’m really grateful to everyone who has been involved – as writers, readers, commenters, and linkers (tweeters, retweeters, e-mailers, facebookers and people who linked to the tour page and posts in other ways). Without you, we could not have had well over 6,000 blog page views, and hundreds of brief e-discussions about them. Thank you for all of your wonderful support!

It sounds as though gifted awareness blog tours will happen again, both in New Zealand and overseas, so I have decided to record some of the lessons learnt while they are fresh in my mind. They may also be of use to people in other advocacy movements.

1. Approaching people to blog creates awareness, whether they end up blogging or not. People who don’t currently identify with the field of gifted education, but who clearly have a lot to offer, are fabulous people to approach in this regard. If asked to express an opinion, people will consider what they may have to offer, and even if they decide that they are unable to contribute at the present time, greater awareness and some rewarding conversations result.
2. The international community will support you, and will make up a substantial proportion of your audience. Blog posts can share the local situation, as this will interest others, but posts do best when written with a global audience in mind. Some local people will discover your blog tour because someone on the other side of the planet has forwarded a link. Working with this wide readership is not just exciting, but remarkably strategic in terms of getting noticed locally as well.
3. Some bloggers do not know how to link to the tour page. This means that while they draw readers from the blog tour, they do not direct readers back. A link can often be added in a comment, but not everyone reads the comments, and not every blog has a facility for them. Next time I would ask prospective bloggers whether they have the skills (and are willing) to link back to the blog tour home page from the body of each blog post before listing them on the blog tour site. If not, I would host their post on my own blog even if they had a blog of their own. I would introduce them as a guest blogger with a link to their regular blog. This way they both gain from and give to the blog tour.
4. Be flexible – people will offer to blog after the tour is started, and some people who desperately want to blog will find that life gets in the way. Having several people booked to blog each day evens out some of this.
5. In our three week blog tour, hits on one of the blogs I can monitor peaked at the beginning of the third week, while on the other they peaked at the very end. I had originally planned a one-week blog tour – this would not have drawn many readers, as it happens. We were very lucky that one of our Members of Parliament blogged before we were expecting it, and that enough of you helped out to fill in the gaps between her post and Gifted Awareness Week. Longer is better with blog tours.
6. More hits came to the two blogs that I can monitor via facebook than via the next highest referring site, which was the blog tour home page. Twitter came in third. Use facebook to promote your blog tour, and do it well.
7. Images show on facebook links (as new posts, but not as replies to posts) and inspire hits. For this reason, images that look good at thumbnail size should be used in as many blog posts as possible. Sometimes you have to pause in the process of adding a link until facebook detects the new image you have carefully added to the blog post, but it almost always comes up as a thumbnail option if you are patient.
8. Some blogs (like the WAGC blog at the current point in time) show tags and categories above the main body of the post. If you have a blog with post tags at the top, and it is not easy or convenient to change the set-up so that tags and categories appear below the post, add your links to facebook BEFORE you add categories and tags to your post. This way, your well-chosen opening sentences will display on facebook alongside your thumbnail, instead of your highly functional but less enticing list of categories and tags. (The WAGC blog is getting a new theme soon, as it is the easiest way to reposition the tags on a WordPress blog). Test how links from your blog display on facebook before you start the tour, and have other key blog tour participants do the same. Also check how key blogs look with your proposed blog tour buttons and badges, especially if you have transparent image backgrounds.
9. Attend to other matters of canny blog-keeping to the best of your ability. See if you can find settings to display links to a good number of recent blog posts near the top of your side panel. Tag clouds and category lists will also help people to find other great recent posts when the posts are coming thick and fast. Naturally, I learnt to make these adjustments on the very last day of the three week tour.
10. Layout matters. Blog posts with lots of hits have large chunks of text rendered accessible to the skim-reader by subheadings or key phrases in bold text.
11. Calls to action, personal anecdotes, descriptions of great programmes, literary flair, indigenous issues and posts by children and young people get high numbers of hits. Informative posts only get a few hits unless they have one of those things going for them. This post will not get many hits, but it is really only written for a select few who plan to run blog tours of their own. Posts with a lot of complaining only do well if the non-complaing sections are emphasised by bold text. Posts with any hint of advertising one’s own programme tend to do badly. Do your work well and hope that someone spontaneously and genuinely says good things about you. It will get about five times as many hits. If you find yourself hosting two posts with a lot of overlap in their material, use bold type to highlight novel ideas in the second post. It seems to help.
12. If you have a lot or posts to promote in a short space of time, you will feel like a spammer (especially if you are promoting real-world events at the same time). Just promoting the blog tour home page would work if you changed its images daily, but posting one link with one thumbnail repeatedly doesn’t generate clicks, so I promoted each post. The more gifted groups and pages that people promoting your blog tour are already known and active contributors to, the more you can spread those links around and avoid feeling as though you are flooding the conversation in any one place. I will be more connected before next year!
13. I suspect we had too many posts at a time towards the end of the tour. I had enough posts to spread them over another week, but I didn’t have the energy for another week. If your blog tour is going to last for more than two weeks, I recommend having at least two “blog tour conductors” who will host, do layout, source CC licensed images and promote for new bloggers. Your blog tour home page may be somewhere that only one person has editing rights, but other jobs can be shared around.
14. Be prepared to discover and celebrate unexpected greatness! Statistically speaking, our best blogger was a first timer. Don’t restrict yourself to the known.

I've learnt a thing or two from the blog tour.

This image, by Flickr member Mark Brannan, has attribution, non-commercial and share-alike licenses.

The Next Big Thing

Today is the end of Gifted Awareness Week, and there is a new post on the WAGC blog. Tomorrow (when it’s still today in America) we’ll link in the last of the international blogs. There may be a few follow-up posts from would-be-bloggers for whom life got in the way this week, or from people reflecting on #NZGAW 2011, but the blog tour itself is drawing to a close. So what is the next big thing?

The 9th of August is the first ever World Gifted and Talented Awareness Day. Naturally, there’s a project in cyberspace as we lead up to this momentous occasion. And you can be a part of it. Because I am building on someone else’s idea, I’ll start by acknowledging them. The Purpose Education movement have an inspirational photoquotes project. This is where people who enjoy tinkering with pictures and words take a CC licensed image, or an original image of their own that they are happy to CC license, add text (and the author’s name) that expresses their beliefs about quality education, and share the product as a resource for their group and the world to use.

We began our own Gifted Education Photoquotes Project a couple of weeks ago, with a target of ten photoquotes by Gifted Awareness Week. As you’ll see, we met the target! Can we have 100 photoquotes by World Gifted & Talented Awareness Day? I’d love to see that!

Where can you source appropriate quotations? Provided you acknowledge the author, you can quote from books, journals, theses, web pages and blog posts on gifted education and advocacy. If you’ve got something terrific and brief to say, you can use your own words (but still name the author, even if it’s you – enquiring minds want to know!) Carolyn of Hoagie’s has kindly given me the link to her gifted education quotes page, and you may find other quotations pages inspiring as well. It’s amazing what has been said by many people, in many fields, over many centuries that seems oh-so-very-relevant to gifted education today.

Please add photoquotes in a range of languages, if that is one of your skills. Adding the text to the photoquote description (or a comment) as well will mean that people can use Google Translate or similar tools more easily to find out what you have written.

All you need is a Flickr account, an image, a quote, any software that will let you add words to pictures, and an understanding of CC licensing. Please contribute.

It’s lots of fun – and – it’s the next big thing!

CC licensing has allowed me to add inspiring words to a gorgeous photo, provided by a stranger.

The photoquote inherits any CC license restrictions on the image you used. The photo of the girl with the flute is by Flickr member SimonWhitaker and had attribution and non-commercial licenses. I added a share-alike license to my altered version.

Here’s another resource on CC licensing, in cartoon strip form. Scroll down for the English version. It’s very helpful.

Music – a Safe Haven

When I was a kid, late night shopping on Friday night was the big social event of the week for many teens. Weekend shopping hadn’t been invented, after all. However, there were a group of us who passed by the thrill of a milkshake in town to travel to Tauranga and practice with the Tauranga Youth Orchestra. I was in awe of the many who went because they had real musical talent. I did not. Looking back, I went because it was my geek-zone. A place where it was safe to be bright. I only remember two members who weren’t excelling in school. One must have been twice exceptional, with amazing musical talent, a brilliant sense of humour, and the worst School Certificate Maths result I have ever heard of. This was before the age of political correctness, and we just put it down to his being English at the time. The other, still at high school, got up several times each night to turn his father, who had multiple sclerosis. Hardly a recipe for top academic honours, but he didn’t do too badly, for all that, and has continued his tradition of caring to this day. He is now a pastor.

Why did these bright people gather? Does music make you academically gifted? There are certainly people who think that it helps. However, there were other forces at work as well. Our repertoire was about 50:50 classical music and the works of Neil Diamond, with the M*A*S*H theme thrown in for good measure. This was the peak of the age of Disco, and quite frankly, you had to be rather geeky to see any merit in the musical selection. I’m still not fully convinced about Neil Diamond…

Making the Youth Orchestra happen were a handful of itinerant music teachers, who freely sacrificed their own Friday Night shopping experiences to cope with our shenanigans and mould us into a musical force to be reckoned with. One of these (who was not personally responsible for the intense Neil Diamond focus) was Jim Langabeer. Jim is still a noted New Zealand musician today. Not only is he talented in his own right, but he was very good at finding opportunities to extend and showcase our most talented musicians in the Youth Orchestra, and his other project of that time, the Symphonic Band. Jim and I take an interest in each other’s activities via Facebook these days, so I was able to ask him about his thoughts on giftedness. Here is what he had to say:

Hi Mary: I peek at your gifted kids stuff on facebook, and feel happy that you are part of a large supportive team. I know that I often felt miserable during my school days, and was glad that homelife offered a few chances to enjoy special things like stamp collecting and playing music!!

These days I have 20 private students and a hundred odd school students, and I try to regard them all as gifted, or challenged, and I really enjoy my work: so many great students who enjoy flying ahead in music, and so many end up becoming friends and teaching me things. I don’t feel that NCEA has improved things for gifted music students: it is so easy to achieve, and get excellence. However many of my students find that they enjoy helping others and doing extra-curricular stuff, and so this makes for a busy and satisfying life eh?

A short note that says so very, very much. Music was a safe haven for Jim too. To see him involved in it, you would never guess that “miserable” was even a word in his vocabulary. Jim’s tangible love of music is energising and uplifting!

The other thing that jumps out at me, after all the conversations on the teacher-learner relationship this Gifted Awareness Week, is the holistic and respectful attitude Jim has to his students. He is open to discovering both talent and challenge where it lies, expects to find himself learning from his students at times, and is informed about the extra-curricular experiences that make their lives complete.

Thank you so much, Jim, for all that you have given to so many young people with an interest, and often a talent, in music!

Jim Langabeer has nurtured both joy and talent in music for many young New Zealanders. Thank you, Jim!

This photo, by Flickr member Tim Hamilton, has attribution, non-commercial, and no derivatives licenses.