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weebecka:

This is basically the idea that any child can be gifted if they are nurtured in the right way (I think).  It grows out of his work teaching philosophy for kids to difficult kids. 

 This is based on a classic misconception that children are born with exactly the same capacity for intelligence - a bit like the 'empty jar' principle.

 They're not.

All too often these theories don't manage to grasp the realities of child education, and try and boil things down into generalisations and preconceptions that simply don't apply. There are too many variables in too many different environments and situations that as teachers we have to adapt to. You cannot enter mainstream teaching with one core philosophy and try to apply it to every lesson. It will not work.

scentless_apprentice:

weebecka:

This is basically the idea that any child can be gifted if they are nurtured in the right way (I think).  It grows out of his work teaching philosophy for kids to difficult kids. 

 

 This is based on a classic misconception that children are born with exactly the same capacity for intelligence - a bit like the 'empty jar' principle.

There are, of course, many perspectives on what intelligence is scentless_apprentice. 

By coining the term giftedness, Hymer is is looking specifically at the ways in which students generate new thinking/abilities.  It's certainly not about passing exams.

Hymer's writing style is ethnographic - which means he describes specific case studies in detail, trying to recognise to the best of his ability his own influence on both the situation and his perception of it (in fact his whole PhD is ethnographic, which is unusual and interesting).  What that means is that he is not trying to prescribe for other people in other places - he is trying to create a realistic representation of something interesting which happened so the reader can pick and chose the aspects of it they find relevant to them and their context.

I find always find work of this type interesting, provided I can find the time to read it!  It's kind of like teachers TV when they show a great idea for teaching and the teachers describes what they're doing and why.  Even if its not relevent to you at the minute it's still interesting to watch.

We've had so much top down lecturing on 'how we should do things' it's easy to get defensive.  But it's important to recognise the difference between what we've been getting and the opportunity to interact with high quality ethnographic material from which we can pick and choose what we please. 

stillrollingalong:

I wonder if we're missing a trick here.  What if Dweck's work ('attribution theory'? - what a learner attributes success to?) is right and we teachers act and teach as if ability is fixed ("they're gifted", "they're thick", etc.)?

Dweck didn't actually find an unambiguous correlation between success and the approved attribution theory ("success is down to my own efforts"). What she did find was that, in artifically constructed situations, the approved attribution theory children showed more tenacity.

It's not easy to know how to interpret these results. Tenacity is only a good thing if appropriately applied. Then not everyone should be encouraged to take mathematics, or any subject for that matter, further than GCSE.

This is all very wonderful, but I ask you this:

What is the point?

Really. Where does this get you? I'm as open to new concepts as the next man (honestly) - but what applications in teaching do Dweck's theories have?

Get rid of the jargon, take it down to an applicable level, and I'll be interested.

Frankly, achieving success by developing intelligence boils down to the fact that it has to be worked on. Potential is all well and good but the environment and the relationships have to be right to do so.

You cannot just take a child and say 'be gifted' - there has to be the capacity to achieve it (how do we assess that); there has to be the drive to do it (wanting it is not enough, but the motivation to do the steps to achieve it; and there has to be the right guidance to do so.

I am all for every student achieving their fullest potential, but the simple fact of the matter is that as classroom teachers we simply do not have the ability to overcome all of the social, economic and conceptual obstacles that we face in trying to achieve that goal. There has to be a collaboration between the teacher, the parent, the child and their social environment (people and place) in order to get anywhere. If that's not in place, then you'll continue to find that students will get left behind, and not at the fault of their teachers.

I did a paper on 'Social Influences on Motivation in Mathematics' based on a school in Greater Manchester - I found that despite every effort and every new concept and approach taken by the teaching staff in the school, it didn't matter one jot, because the greater social environment saw Mathematics as unimportant. If that's the situation, then how can we get students to their goal of 'being gifted' if there are pre-conceived, almost pre-programmed negative ideas in students' minds about Mathematics?

No matter how we challenged these received perceptions as Mathematics teachers, sometimes it will not work - and unfortunately, we have to accept that.

scentless_apprentice:

I found that despite every effort and every new concept and approach taken by the teaching staff in the school, it didn't matter one jot, because the greater social environment saw Mathematics as unimportant. If that's the situation, then how can we get students to their goal of 'being gifted' if there are pre-conceived, almost pre-programmed negative ideas in students' minds about Mathematics?

Scentless_apprentics, this is very interesting.

Could you list for me the efforts and approaches taken by the staff which created a climate which nurtured and celebrated giftedness?

By giftedness I mean students working with creativity and originality above or beyond the taught curriculum.