Paper for the 2005 QAGTC Conference 13 March 2005 "Framing Giftedness: From Policy to Practice"
Title: Pursuing Student Interests is excellent Gifted Education
by Greg Smith M.A., M.Ed.
Abstract
Silverman's observes (1991) that the best learning is driven by interest. So the most desirable gifted education identifies and supports abiding interests. Feeding an interest needs many resources, and is hungry for satisfaction, explanations and challenge. Pursuing an abiding interest helps one find happiness. Interests lead students beyond their comfort zones, and nurture autonomous learners (Betts, 1985). Interest controls intellectual functioning and has a very important adaptive role. Interests create 'flow' experiences in periods of intensity.
Building upon Betts' Learner's Need Assessment questionnaire, the Cohen and Gelbrich's Interest and Theme Inventory (1990) will be introduced which reveals the gifted learner's interest profile, enabling the teacher and program coordinator to target identified interest vectors in home, school and community programming.
Our experience supports Silverman's observations (1991:11) that best learning is driven by interest. She writes:
Responding is characterised by active participation of the learner. This is the level at which interests are born. The student moves from compliance to active initiation and eventually to marked enthusiasm. . . When a student is asked to read about the life of an eminent individual, he might do so at first out of obligation. As he begins to identify with the person he may decide to read more about the woman on his own. If his interest increases, he may attempt to read everything that was ever written about her.
High interest drives accelerated learning. This is especially evident in the Night of the Notables Program where learning about eminence is done by pursuing an interest in the life of an eminent individual. Without an step by step limitations, the gifted learner becomes a voracious reader, question poser, problem solver, and widely-researched biographer. Such marked depth of response is appropriate in gifted education.
Defining "interests"
We readily use the terms common or special interest, national interest, self-interest, vested interests, passing interest, community interest, disinterested commentary, etc. "Interest" as used here includes its cognitive, affective and motivational elements.
An interest has personal relevance and is self-chosen; pursuing it brings an aggregation of skills, development of perspective, and a delineation of self identity within the world. An interest needs many resources; it is hungry for satisfaction, explanations and challenge. Pursuing an abiding interest helps one find happiness. Pursuing it, life becomes creative and life-giving. Humans are intensely interested in life's meaning and so a gifted education at school level will be characterised by discovery, dialogue and construction of meaning. It lays the foundation for life's journey; getting wisdom at later stages of life is achieved in pursuing interests.
Educational models that encourage student interests, with a sharing of resources and a synthetic approach seem to be better learning-for-life models. In them, skills are self developed, reinforced and applied by the learner with teacher supervision only as needed. Such newer educational approaches stress the greater worth of process (Costa and Liebmann, 1995:1), not primarily the product. They focus on the learner and the teacher as engaged together to achieve mutuality. Its theorists use terms like: empowering students to learn for themselves, empowering students with core skills they need for life, leading students beyond their comfort zones, or nurturing autonomous learners (Betts, 1985).
A model is proposed here which identifies and pursues students' questions, interests and concerns as the agenda of their education. This paradigm shift from prevailing schooling practices is a better way forward, for even more worryingly today, syllabuses define content and set outcomes that can be measured for assessment and reporting purposes. While this is valuable academic work in the conduct of schools, it is far less student-centred than is desirable.
It could well be argued that in the nineteenth century's, Gradgrind models of lockstep education, children's creativity, thinking and interests had been denied their rightful place in the school's curriculum. Piaget noted that interest controls intellectual functioning; that it has a very important adaptive function (1970:158). Interest is characterised by intensity, a focus on questions arising, and engines transfers to other areas of life. Interest is stimulated by events in the local environment that puzzle and focus attention and energy. Teachers can maintain and heighten such interest, and children enjoy the pursuit of learning when it is fired by interest.
Interest is critical if learning is to proceed. Interests can be shared. Interest can be engendered, supported and fuelled by peers, mentors, teachers, siblings and parents. In fact they can often be its catalysts. Interest begins and defines the quest. It monitors the learning, sets the agenda and indicates its direction. Interest supplies a vector-path, the engine and the monitoring.
In fact, learning fired by interest is transformational. At once arising from puzzlement, dis-equilibrium or asynchronicity, interest raises productive questions to pursue. Interest (in the abstract) leads to the development of personally relevant interests (in concrete forms) or overarching themes for investigation, which are areas for study to choose and master. Focusing energy, skills and previous learnings, a learner's interest produces that coalescence that gives the learning its coherence as a productive activity. The pursuit of interest is itself transformational along a moral vector towards a healthy self-concept.
Interests are more enduring than they seem. They are the core, the constant and recurring motif that gives coherence to the learning process and to the growing sense of control over self and the world that the learning gives. Interests with a linear trajectory (Cohen, 1988:34) may be called "training to produce excellent performers"; for others, interests in a more spiralling pattern run parallel with, overlap or vector from education. Such interests colour other realities in the child's life. Everyone has abiding interests. Education should nurture these enduring interests because they are so central to all of us. An authentic education will address them seriously. In an open and free world, a child or adolescent with interests should be at liberty to pursue them at school.
How can student interests be translated into a school curriculum? First, they can indeed be identified. Questionnaires could recognise a class's major abiding interests, which can yield an agenda for research, debate and reporting type courses. Second, individuals' interests can be catered for at school too; a simple Interest Inventory can be devised to decode abiding preoccupations. Identifying them ensures they are objectively affirmed as personally relevant and warranted as worth pursuing in a gifted education programme. What better time to pursue them than when they press in on the adolescent's self worth, and contribute to his or her sense of control over the world? Through sympathy and professional observation, teachers could 'tune in' to students to validate these interests. The imperative should be to advance along the interest vector, not to deny or delay them until the hypothetical 'right time' is reached or a 'right expert' appears. To deny that opportunity for inquiry is to deny the reality of the quest and by implication, to deny that 'what concerns me now' is not meat for a gifted education programme.
An interests-driven curriculum is eminently enriching and holistic; it shows how one's hereditary, opportunity, life experience and knowledge can be integrated into a successful life. It has a strong affective focus. Groups of students in 'communities of inquiry' (Splitter, 1995:141) could jointly pursue their themes or interests productively. Mentors out-of-class and teachers in-class are valuable sources of inspiration and information when pursuing interest areas. "The community is a valuable source of adult role models, mentors, moral exemplars, and individuals who pursue their lives and work with passion and who can guide the young . . . person to the development of his or her own passions [deep interests]" (Silverman, 1993:72). Themes gathering up students' and teachers' 'interests' could continue in sequences across terms, semesters or even years. In this way, a gifted programme would develop coherent and relevant scopes and sequences.
In practice, individuals and groups could work in parallel, or in workshop or seminar modes to share and enrich one another. Richer resources can then be brought to bear as needed. Extra-mural experiences would become normal grist for the study. Students could publicly affirm their ethnic and cultural background in their choice of study themes. Interests nurtured by mentorships, contracts and packets are the only realistic way forward to cater for very different readinesses, different levels of commitment, hidden and nested family histories and prior learnings. Shifts to deeper questions could then be made not at an end of term fill-in week but at discovery point turnstiles generated by the interest-study itself.
Pursuing a specific interest area, the autonomous learner works at his or her own pace and to their own depth, free to move where he wishes, working within their own time frame, comfortable within their own learning style and encouraged to be creative about the products of learning. Learning in this way, what is learnt commits students as personally relevant and life-enriching.
COHEN & GELBRICH'S INTEREST AND THEME INVENTORY (1990)
An instrument has been available (attached) that can help the programming coordinator and teacher identify these deep abiding interests. It takes only a few minutes to complete the 78 questions with self reporting responses, using three scores: 0 = does not resemble me, 1 = resembles me a little or 2 = resembles me a lot. This inventory allows the teacher to identify the child's interests and so devise differentiated studies activities according to these interest profiles.
The instrument yields a highest score on six themes, Aesthetic/Expressive, Power/Control, Symbols and Symbol Systems, Nature/Nurture, People/Relationships and Putting it all together.Usually, children’s strongest themes are readily apparent because they have the highest total scores. Generally children have between two and four themes.However in some cases, children may have little or no interest in one particular aspect of a theme.
Clearly, interests do not stop and begin at the school gate. Indeed, this instrument may be more useful for home and community settings where gifted children pursue their interests in free time. Home schooling providers will especially welcome it. The inventory does offer parents and other professionals surer guidance on catering for their gifted child.
In schools, identifying the interest better targets the purchase of resources and grouping of individuals within free time activity areas. It does show the benefit of having regular allocated periods in the weekly program where the gifted child can continue his or her interests as personal and fulfilling intellectual and fine motor skill pursuits of worth. I am thinking of a whole range of personal interests that affirm the self, the intellectual life, research, expertise and autonomous learning; like stamp collecting, politics, music, robotics, language, art, and hobbies.
Such interests defy age appropriate limitations; they invite the role of experts, practise self-management skills, question-generating, and self-affirming behaviours. Such moments of intensity are centrally important in the definition of the growing person. Interests are important for intellectual functioning and nurture those centrally important adaptive behaviours. Interests value process-time and permit achievement in areas considered important by the child herself. Discovery, construction and engagement in the creative ‘flow’ experience are all central fruits of pursuing interests. What better them would frame giftedness by implementing policy into excellent practice?
Conclusion
I have argued here that interests are natural, organising dynamics to structure learning that is personally relevant and meaningful. In a postmodern era when the content of learning is so contentious, a better focus on process and environment is featured in the study of interests. Interests arise from many ordinary sources and they can grow into careers. If schools begin to design programmes to cater for their clients, they would begin with identifying students' interests. For gifted students’ interests are paramount to them as gifted learners. A user-friendly instrument for ascertaining major abiding interests was outlined. Using it, gifted programmes will pre-eminently cater for, feature, and nurture interests because they are holistic, transformational, self-chosen, validating the real self and inherently relevant. Pursuing student interests is excellent gifted education. #
REFERENCES
Betts, G. (1988). Autonomous Learner Model. Melbourne: Hawker Brownlow Education.
Cohen, L. M. (1988). Developing children's creativity, thinking and interests; Strategies for district, school and classroom. Oregon School Study Council 31.7.1-69.
Cohen L.M., & Gelbrich, G., (1990) Interest And Theme Inventory. Permission of author gained 2005.
Costa, A., & Liebmann, R. (1995). Process is as important as content. Educational Leadership 52 (6), 23-24.
Piaget, J. (1971). Science of education and the psychology of the child. London: Longman.
Silverman, L. (1991). Preventive counselling for the gifted. Understanding Our Gifted. Vol 3, No. 4, March-April, 10-13.
Silverman, L. (1993). Counseling the gifted and talented. Denver, CO: Love.
Smith, G. B. (1992). Learning styles of the gifted. [On line]. Available: http://home.pacific.net.au/~greg.hub/giftedstyles.html [2000].
Splitter, L., & Sharp, A. M. (1995). Teaching for better thinking: The classroom community of inquiry. Melbourne: ACER.
To apply for COHEN & GELBRICH'S INTEREST AND THEME INVENTORY (1990)