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Ten Strategies for Developing Growth Mindset in Gifted Students

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Ten Strategies for Developing Growth Mindset in Gifted Students

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How exactly do you help students switch mindsets? Here are some strategies that have proven effective for helping them make this transition.

1. Help students recognize their strengths and their weaknesses. Show them how to use their strengths to develop their weak areas or find learning partners who are strong in areas where they may be weak.

2. Provide descriptive, accurate, and constructive feedback that focuses on how students can develop themselves in specific tasks or skill areas.

3. Focus praise on the effort students put forth toward a goal.

4. Offer authentic challenges on issues they or others care about that will take time, effort, and persistence to solve.

5. Teach specific skills of studying, organization, metacognition, time management, goal setting, and monitoring.

6. Use preassessments to help students recognize what they already know/understand and are able to do, and what they don't know/understand and are not yet able to do. Be mindful that students may perceive preassessments as shameful (especially if they are in the fixed mindset). Reassure students that preassessments are meant to focus teaching and learning.

7. When teaching discrete strategies, show students how using the strategy will help them develop certain skills. Some gifted students are whole to part learners and may avoid practicing discrete strategies (part) if they don't understand how it leads to greater skill development (whole).

8. Structure time throughout the day when students can reflect on their learning process, talk with others about tasks that were easy or difficult, or take note of their personal feelings on the topic.

9. Create learning activities where students will need to rely on others to complete the tasks. In these "unlike" groups, students learn to appreciate other people's skills and realize they have skills unique to themselves.

10. Continually support students by showing them how their efforts lead to success.

From Differentiation for Gifted Learners: Going Beyond the Basics by Diane Heacox, Ed.D., and Richard M. Cash, Ed.D., copyright © 2014. Free Spirit Publishing Inc., Minneapolis, MN; 800-735-7323; www.freespirit.com. For more strategies for teaching gifted students check out Differentiation for Gifted Learners.

We welcome your comments and suggestions. Share your comments, stories, and ideas below, or All comments will be approved before posting, and are subject to our comment and privacy policies.

© 2018 by Free Spirit Publishing. All rights reserved.

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Ten Strategies for Developing a Growth Mindset in Gifted Students

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How exactly do you help students switch mindsets? Here are some strategies that have proven effective for helping them make this transition. Help students recognize their strengths and their weaknesses. Show them how to use their strengths to develop their weak areas or find learning partners who are strong in areas where they may be...

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You get the letter from school in the mail. A teacher has identified your child as potentially "gifted" and wants to send him or her for further testing and evaluation. Flash forward: the tests are completed, your child is a whiz, and enrichment classes will become a part of his regular school routine.

What wonderful news! It was in my family. Until all of a sudden, it wasn't anymore. Instead of my seven-year old feeling enhanced self-confidence and pride in her intellectual and creative abilities, what I began to see was a newly anxious little girl who cried over imperfect scores on her handwriting test and wanted to give up books "forever" when she found out she placed second in her class' monthly reading contest.

Somehow, being praised for being "smart" at home seemed like old hat to her, but the more public label of being "gifted" at school created a level of pressure that quickly became overwhelming. My once-eager learner no longer wanted to try new things, for fear of not being good at them right away. My I'm-too-busy-to-slow-down girl lingered endlessly at the homework table, eraser-in-hand, until her lowercase "e" hit the dotted lines "just so" on the Zaner-Bloser handwriting tablet. My self-confident little go-getter told me she "wasn't smart anymore" and even "hated herself" after getting one item wrong on a math test.

Wow. Talk about being overwhelmed. I couldn't believe what I was seeing and hearing--her plummeting sense of self-worth was devastating to us both. I did what any good parent would do; first, I blamed and berated myself (gee, wonder where she got those tendencies from?) Then, I reached out to the internet. As I read up on gifted children, I learned about many characteristics common to gifted children and one challenge in particular that I will follow through on right away: fostering a growth mindset.

What is a " growth mindset?" First, let me explain the "fixed mindset," as defined by cognitive psychologist Carol Dweck. Gifted children, lauded for years by relatives, friends, and teachers about their natural intelligence and innate abilities, often develop the belief that everything they do should come out well and that their smarts alone are enough to guarantee that things will come easy. In the mid-to-late elementary school years, when class work and extracurricular tasks begin to require effort and genuine persistence, many gifted children first start to doubt their intelligence. Their fixed mindset dictates that if they are not the best, don't score a perfect 100%, or can't find a solution easily and immediately, then they must be stupid, bad, and worthless. All-or-nothing thinking, as it turns out, is a hallmark of some of the greatest young thinkers out there. It can also be a deal-breaker to their otherwise unlimited potential.

How can parents and teachers counter the fixed mindset and replace it with a growth one?
1. Play up personal strengths
In a competitive society, many kids strive from an early age toward the superlatives. They want to be the best, the fastest, the smartest, and they want to do it all first. If being the best is your child's fixed priority, help him re-structure his focus to achieving personal strengths and celebrating individual accomplishments.
2. Play down competitions
While there will always be those who talk about preparing kids for a dog-eat-dog world, when it comes to perfectionistic children, there is no need to emphasize competition. You can be sure that these kids are well aware of their competitors and are knocking themselves out to be on top. Help take the pressure off of your child by providing opportunities for personal bests and group achievement. Take the focus off of contests and scores and help your child instead prioritize the effort he puts toward achieving his goals.
3. Provide opportunities to try out new things
Perfectionists are often "risk evaders," who fear trying something new, in the event that they are not immediately and effortlessly good at it. Offer your child many opportunities to try new activities, sports, and projects without the pressure of having to be good at them right away.
4. Encourage practice
Whether it is math problems or a new piano piece, emphasize to your child that practice is the best way to become good at something. Gifted and perfectionistic kids benefit from realizing that they do not have to excel at something right out of the starting gate and that practicing skills is not a sign of weakness, but rather a path toward excellence.
5. Celebrate mistakes
That's right. My daughter looks at me like I'm a nut when I do this, but I make a big deal out of my own mistakes, letting her know that it is only through making errors that I have had the opportunity to learn and grow. One of the best activities she and I ever did together was searching the internet for facts and figures on how often Babe Ruth struck out. Yes, even the home run king made very public errors in front of huge crowds. For my little baseball fan, if the Babe can mess up and still be a champion, so can she!
6. Idealize improvement
When my daughter's karate teacher wanted to promote her to the next level in her class, she was hesitant. She couched her resistance cleverly, telling me that she didn't want to move up because the kids in the more advanced group were so much bigger than she was. Ever the protective and safety-conscious mom, I went along initially. With additional thought and careful consideration, however, it became clear to me that her fear in advancing was not about size, but rather about not being good enough. With the growth mindset in our heads, her sensei and I joined forces to champion the improvements she made each day in the advanced class and to make incremental accomplishments more important than instant goal achievement.

7. Praise hard work and effort

Probably the most valuable lesson I have taken from my research on gifted and perfectionistic children is to focus my praise on my daughter's hard work, efforts, and persistence rather than on outcomes, scores and results. Now, instead of responding just to the straight A's on her report card, I compliment her specifically on the hard work she showed throughout the marking period to achieve her goals.

Please visit Signe at www.signewhitson.com, Like her on Facebook, or Follow her on Twitter @SigneWhitson.

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Fostering a "Growth Mindset:" 7 Ways to Nurture Your Gifted Child

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You get the letter from school in the mail. A teacher has identified your child as potentially "gifted" and wants to send him or her for further testing and evaluation. Flash forward: the tests are completed, your child is a whiz, and enrichment classes will become a part of his regular school routine.

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Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

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Students who are gifted are blessed with, and challenged by, divergent thinking patterns, intense emotionality, acute social perceptibility, and sensory sensitivity. Kazimierz Dabrowski, a Polish psychiatrist, in his theory of positive disintegration noted a group of people who demonstrated five "overexcitabilities." These included intellectual, imaginational, emotional, sensual, and psychomotor aspects of their development. Overexcitability is a translation, of course, and really meant a neurological hypersensitivity. He observed that these individuals have an intense activity of the mind, a vivid imagination, a heightened sensory experience or awareness, a surplus of energy, and heightened emotional sensitivity. Many people working with gifted children today accept this theory, and it is present in the definition put forward by the Columbus group of giftedness as,

"Giftedness is 'asynchronous development' in which advanced cognitive abilities and heightened intensity combine to create inner experiences and awareness that are qualitatively different from the norm. This asynchrony increases with higher intellectual capacity. The uniqueness of the gifted renders them particularly vulnerable and requires modifications in parenting, teaching and counseling in order for them to develop optimally."

This differs from bright, convergent thinkers for whom the system is designed. So how do we support an "at-risk" population that most people don't recognize as being at-risk, and in fact believe are "lucky" and don't need support?

While many people associate the use of universal design for learning with the inclusion of students with disabilities, the Three Block Model of UDL is designed to create accessibility to the social and academic life of the classroom for ALL students, including those who are gifted. The stated goal of the model is to create schools in which all students develop a sense of pride in who they are as a learner, feel a sense of belonging to their learning community, are intellectually engaged, and are challenged to learn and grow. Like all students, students who are gifted require supports for social and emotional learning, as well as intellectual engagement, growth, and success.

Block One - Social and Emotional Learning

Students who are gifted often struggle to find their true peers. If a student has advanced intellectual interests and intense emotionality, it can be difficult to "fit in." Chronological peers may not share the same interests or desire for intimacy, yet older peers are more developed physically and perhaps, socially (e.g. ready for dating relationships). As a result, students who are gifted require two primary interventions/supports:

1. Facilitation of friendships and peer relationships

2. Development of emotional resiliency/coping skills

Use of the RD program, class meetings, and learning teams can help students develop a positive sense of self, and a sense of belonging within their learning community (Katz & Porath, 2011). Counselling may also be supportive, and teachers can use strategies such as bibliotherapy and videotherapy to allow all students to explore strategies for social problem solving and emotional coping. Block Two - Inclusive Instructional Practice
Students who are gifted are most often divergent thinkers. This means that multiple areas of the brain are involved in their thinking, resulting in lateral, connective thought patterns rather than a convergent, logical-sequential processing style. Several strategies built into the Three Block Model support the inclusion of students who are gifted:

1. Integrated Curriculum - supports connective thinking inherent in divergence.

2. UBD - using essential understandings as a focus for instruction and assessment allows students who are gifted to focus on holistic conceptual understanding of "the big ideas."

3. Inquiry - allows gifted learners to pursue areas of passion and interest

4. Differentiated Instruction - supports diverse preferences for learning modalities, reduces the expectation that students who are gifted be "perfect" at everything.

5. Strength Based Approach - allows gifted learners to appreciate their areas of talent, while also recognizing those of others.

6. Four stage assessment rubrics - encourage students to "go beyond" what the teacher has asked to the "exceeding expectations" criteria. Rubrics are based on a Bloom's taxonomy, thus emphasizing higher order thinking rather than rote learning, and reducing the need for acceleration and enrichment (retrofitting) as the tasks are open ended.

Students can have higher order thinking and still have a learning disability in a skill area such as reading, writing, or computation. They can also have sensory and physical disabilities, mental health challenges, emotional and behavioral disorders, ADHD, and so on. The frustration of having high level thinking, but being unable to acquire or express knowledge in ways that traditional schooling often demands can be intense. Students with dual exceptionalities often have very low academic self-concepts, struggle socially and emotionally, and at times exhibit challenging behavior.

It is critical that this population be identified and supported. Frequently, students are recognized for having a disability, and their gifts are ignored, resulting in further frustration and a loss of potential development. When students demonstrate higher order cognition orally, but struggle in a skill area, they should be flagged immediately and assessed for a dual exceptionality.

All of the same strategies listed above support students with dual exceptionalities - and it is even more important for this population to be offered these supports.

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Students who are gifted are blessed with, and challenged by, divergent thinking patterns, intense emotionality, acute social perceptibility, and sensory sensitivity. Kazimierz Dabrowski, a Polish...

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When considering the needs of gifted learners in the classroom it is difficult, if not impossible, to classify one approach as the best. Each learner is so different, and there is no single tool, or method that will ensure success. This is why the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is essential in creating a learning environment that provides options that are relevant and realistic for each student. The benefits of implementing the UDL framework are not limited to gifted students, and will improve the experience of all diverse learners in the class.

The three principles of UDL are examined below (Meyer et al., 2014):

This principle of the UDL Framework addresses the This principle addresses the 1. Provide Multiple Means of Engagement
It is essential to provide gifted learners with options and expectations to engage and motivate them. By providing multiple means of engagement in the classroom the WHY of learning is addressed through options of self-regulation, maintaining interest in effort and persistence, as well as peaking interest in new and exciting ways (Meyer et al., 2014, p. 53). As educators it is our job to get students excited about learning. We are igniting the affective network, which assumes that students will focus their attention on whatever is valuable or important to them at the moment (Meyer et al., p. 61). With gifted students we need to create an optimum challenge. By using methods such as self-directed learning, allowing students to determine their goals, and objectives while ensuring they are meeting curricular goals, we can help the student gain confidence as well as optimize engagement (Meyer et al., 2014, p. 53). By referring to the suggestions in, "Enduring Practices","Instructional Considerations" and "Practical Inclusive Strategies" it becomes obvious that all students could benefit from the use of these strategies. This will in turn promote a positive collaborative community where all learners are challenged and motivated to learn.

WHAT of learning, providing options for comprehension, language, perception, and options for display of information (Meyer et al., 2014, p. 54). Again, we are providing more options, and allowing the students to feel in charge of their learning. We want to show students the various means of accessing and interpreting knowledge, this is done through multiple mediums such as games, various audio mediums, and various visual mediums. By challenging students to determine the way they receive information more efficiently we are supporting the development of resourceful, knowledgeable learners. Gifted students may already have a great deal of background knowledge on a subject, it is important that there is acknowledgement and adaptation within lesson plans to enhance the learning experience for these students (Meyer et al., 2014, p. 54). By considering the baseline for achievement, an educator can then determine a course of action. Perhaps the student could create a project that extends beyond the curriculum and challenges them in an area that they may need to develop more. No single medium works for every student, this includes gifted learners. The use of "learning centres", "tiered assignments" and "independant study"as described on the "Enduring Practices" page allows for flexibility in learning and the use of multiple means to gain knowledge. Through these strategies educators are scaffolding student's learning and tapping in to their recognition networks by accessing background knowledge and using different methods to construct meaning for each individual (Meyer et al., 2014, p. 63). By varying access and understanding of knowledge, and challenging preferences and abilities through the use of flexible and adaptable lesson plans and formats, all students in the classroom can be provided the opportunity to accelerate and challenge their learning.

HOW of learning. As educators we need to guide appropriate goal-setting, support planning and strategy development, and increase students' skills in self-regulation. This principle provides students with strategies to accomplish goals, and opens their eyes to ways in which they can monitor and control the development of their own learning (Meyer et al., 2014, p. 54). A significant part of this with gifted students would involve assessment. They typically are more focused on the process of learning not necessarily the end product. Formative assessment would be crucial to measure ability in product and process. Providing formative assessment allows for flexibility and adaptation to meet curricular goals, and engage the students by monitoring progress and difficulty. By allowing for multiple means of expression students can display their knowledge in many forms (Meyer et al., 2014, p. 73, 76). This will allow them to represent their knowledge in a way that makes sense to them, and develops skills in self-monitoring and goal-setting. The mismatch between what a gifted student knows and what the curriculum calls for in many cases differs so greatly that it presents a huge learning challenge. By initiating the UDL framework the student can gain confidence, and take responsibility of their learning through activating the strategy networks by developing proper skills in reasonable goal setting, self-monitoring, and various means of expression (Meyer et al., 2014, p. 65).

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When considering the needs of gifted learners in the classroom it is difficult, if not impossible, to classify one approach as the best. Each learner is so different, and there is no single tool, or...

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Strategies for Diverse Learners  Using UDL Framework with Focus on Gifted Learners

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Strategies for Diverse Learners  Using UDL Framework with Focus on Gifted Learners