What role do teachers play in generating opportunities for the key elements of high performance: deliberate practice, motivation/inspiration, and master coaching? Steve Arnold, the Head of Gifted and Talented at GEMS Education illustrates teachers’ roles. He identifies the impact of the “required curriculum” and teachers’ options like the use of disruptive questions.
Contact Steve Arnold: steve.arnold@gemseducation.com
Visit the GEMS Education website here.
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Podcast Transcript:
[00:00:00.200] – Steve [Intro]
Hello, and welcome to the Teacher Edition of Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud. Teaching is a complex and rewarding journey, and I’m always eager to explore the many ways teachers engage students in their learning. This podcast is dedicated to supporting you, the teacher, as you inspire and guide your students. Thanks for joining me. I’m excited you’re here.
[00:00:30.110] – Steve
Seeking and Building Students’ High-Level Talent. The current Corporate Head of Gifted and Talented at GEMS Education, Steve Arnold, is joining our podcast. Steve has been a grade six teacher in Australia and a system leader in schools working in the areas of curriculum and assessment, as well as inclusion and well-being. I have asked Steve to guide a conversation today around what teachers can do to maximize the identification of and support for high talent in students. Welcome, Steve.
[00:01:08.180] – Steve Arnold
Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.
[00:01:11.330] – Steve
I’m wondering if you share what experiences you’ve had that have shaped your views and understanding around giftedness.
[00:01:21.230] – Steve Arnold
Yeah. So as you described there, I began my career in Australia, which is where I’m originally from, teaching grade six, which is the top end of the primary school in Australia. And then I went on this bit of an odyssey and ended up in the UK. And after a few years teaching in the UK, I ended up for the first time in my life in an independent all boys school as Deputy Head Academic, so in charge of all things curriculum assessment. And this particular independent all boys school was highly academically selective. So we had a group of cohort of all boys who on abilities testing, reasoning testing had indicated they had very, very high academic ability. So the pressure, if you like, was on, particularly with fee paying parents, to make sure that we had our curriculum and our assessment and everything to do with teaching and learning was extending these children and preparing them for these top end universities and amazing careers and things like that. So this is the first time I found myself in this environment of high academic ability. And I really did my homework, and we looked at extension, acceleration through the curriculum and all those sorts of things.
[00:02:41.620] – Steve Arnold
Over the course of a few years, my view completely changed, because we soon started to see what actually made the difference in terms of giving meaningful stretch and challenge to these boys. And it wasn’t what you might think. It wasn’t about giving them extra maths or moving them through to the next exercise in the textbook or about making sure that we had the top-end subject knowledge, or that that does have a place, what actually made the difference was changing that linear model of progression through the curriculum of actually saying to these kids, okay, you have this fire level of reasoning ability, and you have this ability to retain knowledge. Let’s see what you can do with it. So for finding opportunities for that creativity and innovation and divergent thinking, not only was it far more engaging for the boys in general in terms of being in that environment, in terms of the impact it had on longer term academic progression, it was far more powerful. And it was far more powerful because what we were actually doing is prioritizing cognitive development over knowledge retention. And that’s not to say that knowledge retention didn’t have a place, but actually we were building the building blocks of high performance in the mind by actually building these neural pathways that led to high levels of cognition, being able to make connections between very different ideas, being able to take some knowledge and make something new with it, being able to evaluate, being able to analyze, being able to research, being able to collaborate, all of these really important skills that not only develop the thinking skills that are vital for future careers and future success.
[00:04:34.910] – Steve Arnold
That was a bit of a revelation for me because I thought this wasn’t what I expected. I expected that part of my job was having to go out and recruit professors and PhDs and the best of the best in terms of subject knowledge and be absolutely on point with that. But actually, what made the difference was embracing creativity and innovation.
[00:04:56.190] – Steve
I’m wondering, could you describe what a teacher could initially spot in students that would cause the teacher to look further for student talents? And I’m wondering if I can pose it to you from two different directions. The earlier your early childhood primary one, but then I’m wondering about secondary students that have been overlooked as the second area. Would you hit both of those for us?
[00:05:29.640] – Steve Arnold
Yeah, absolutely. I’ve got a deep respect and admiration for early years educators. And I think not only are they miracle workers, but they’re also in quite a privileged position because they get to see this unfiltered view of the children as they come in and their early child experiences. So for those of the teaching younger children, there are some signs of cognitive ability or cognitive giftedness that aside from any assessment, will give you a bit of an insight into the way they’re developing. One of them is language acquisition and the use of language. So the children that not only acquire language early, but use quite complex language and understand links between language at an early age, that’s a real sign of cognitive ability, but also of longer term success, because, of course, language is how we deliver the entire curriculum. It’s how we build on concepts. So if they have this natural inclination towards language, they’re really fortunate. And that’s true if they’re multilingual, so if at home, they’re speaking a language other than language of instruction, that can be a huge benefit to them as well. So embracing that multilingualism is really important if it exists in your environment.
[00:06:54.190] – Steve Arnold
Curiosity is a huge one. So children that demonstrate this desire to take things apart, see how things work, explore. The children have that really busy mind. That’s a really positive sign, even though sometimes that can be slightly disruptive. It is a really good sign of that cognitive ability. As is divergent thinking. So again, when you give young children, I don’t know, whatever it might be, some materials, and you expect them to make something, a building, a model, whatever it is, and they take it and do something completely different with it. But relevant to the task, that ability to think creatively and be divergent, that is a terrific sign of intelligence, as is the early development of social and emotional understanding. Empathy can take some time to develop, but some children develop it really early. And that is a sign of long term success and high level cognition of the ability to actually bring others into play. We always talk about the stages development, how you have that stage where you’re in parallel play, where there’s two young children, they’re playing at the same thing, but it’s irrelevant with the other one standing there. They just happen to be using the same resources.
[00:08:12.960] – Steve Arnold
Then all of a sudden, we see them play together. And when that happens quite early, that’s a really good sign, too. So there are lots of different things. But I always use this analogy with my teachers when we’re talking about young children, that I always say to them, I want you to imagine that you’re five, And I want you to think about those cognitive characteristics I just mentioned, and you can choose one to have an abundance. Which one would you choose for your long term success? And it’s really interesting hearing what their preference would be. But what research tells us actually for long term academic success, it is language development, and that’s no surprise. And the other one for long term, or to increase your likelihood of being classed as gifted, it is the curiosity piece. It’s being open to new experiences, it’s having that really curious mind. So they’re really good characteristics to look for and spot. But on the flip side, they’re also really good characteristics to build in the children. So you can be the identifier, but you can also be the agent of change. So you can make sure your classroom environment in the early years is pitched towards doing all of those things, embracing curiosity, embracing divergent thinking, focusing on language development, then you actually increase your likelihood of having gifted children, because we know that it’s all about experience and deliberate hard work.
[00:09:43.870] – Steve Arnold
So that’s the early years. The older years are quite interesting. I’m sure a lot of listeners with lots of experience will have come across the disengaged child who turns out to actually have a pretty high level of understanding hidden beneath their… and the things to look for are actually quite similar. So this idea of divergent thinking can manifest, particularly in teenagers, in very different ways. Divergent thinking can manifest in taking ideas and doing something really exciting with them, but it can also manifest itself in a blunt resistance to anything that you put in front of them. And they want to do things – they have a way of thinking, a way of working, and they’re not interested in conforming. And that can feel like disruption, and it can sound like disruption, but it can also be a sign, actually, that they have something really high functioning going on underneath. You can’t always, with these children, rely on assessment results because it’s so dependent on their willingness and desire to engage in those processes. I think the other thing that you can you can really look for it, or that can be overlooked is if you suspect that there’s a higher level of underlying ability that you’re not seeing yet, is looking for alternative settings, almost, or environments for them to demonstrate that knowledge.
[00:11:16.130] – Steve Arnold
So sometimes there’s a reluctance, particularly in teenagers, to be different in any way, even if that means being exceptional. Sometimes the worst thing a teenager – the worst idea to a teenager is being different, full stop, even if that difference as being pretty good at something. So allowing them to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding in a way that suits them, in a way that’s potentially not public, in a way that’s potentially just an understanding between the child and the teacher is a really important thing to explore for those who might seem disengaged. Yes, there are lots of potential barriers, but the really important thing to understand is it doesn’t matter whether they’re five or 15. There is the underlying potential potential and ability for a child to become high performing at any age and any stage. So remaining vigilant to that and not letting your existing ideas about their ability stand in the way is really important. If you see high performance, even if it’s just the early signs of high performance, tell them and be open to it.
[00:12:20.830] – Steve
How would you describe the role of environment, experience, and hard work as you connect to giftedness or talent?
[00:12:32.160] – Steve Arnold
Yeah, it’s almost everything. The things that you listed there are almost everything. This question of what role does genetics or God-given talent, if you want to call it that, what role does that play in the talent development? Well, the research is in, and it does depend on what area of talent we’re talking about. Obviously, there are physical characteristics for any physical talent, which are advantageous. If a pianist has long fingers, that helps. If a high jumper has long limbs and a high level of natural muscle density, that helps. So there are things to do with certain pursuits, but in terms of cognitive pursuits, actually, it’s probably all a mixture of environment and deliberate practice. So it’s that exposure to things and then being able to, having the desire to work really hard on. And we’ve said before that when you see humans who are really high performing and experts in things, you only see the finished product. You don’t see what’s going on underneath the foot. You don’t see all the hours of work. And nobody develops high-level talent without working hard. There’s a great quote, K. Anderson, who’s one of the godfathers of this research, where he says, research shows again and again that geniuses are all always made, not born.
[00:14:02.950] – Steve Arnold
So it’s always about that environment and that delivered practice. You can’t have high performance without it. And so what does that mean for teachers? Well, it means that there are three things that you really need to be able to foster to develop high talent. And it’s the fundamentals of what our job is. One is, there has to be that delivered practice. There has There has to be opportunities to actually have repetitive practice to embed those neural pathways, but you can’t have that deliberate practice without the motivation. Now, motivation is an interesting one. We might call it inspiration. We might call it whatever that spark is that actually drives that deliberate practice, that desire to spend hours and hours on that deliberate practice. So you need that deliberate practice and that motivation or inspiration, and then you need the master coaching. And so this is a really important element to remember for teachers. Master coaching for really highly talented individuals or teaching for really high talented individuals doesn’t have to mean that you know more, that you become an expert. You don’t need to be an expert to teach an expert. If that were the case, we wouldn’t generate any experts.
[00:15:25.500] – Steve Arnold
We wouldn’t generate any geniuses because you can’t always know more than than somebody else, especially if they’re just being that high level of talent. What that master coaching means is you give them a crystal clear view of where they want to get to. You give them a crystal clear view of where they are now, and then you give them a really clear pathway of getting from where they are now to where they need to be. And we as educators, we can facilitate that. We understand how that works. We don’t need to be the finished product in order to facilitate that. One of the things I’d really, really implore teachers to do if they see signs of giftedness and high ability, is to absolutely embrace it and try not to be threatened by it, and be very, very honest with that child in terms of how you’re going to help them. You don’t have to know all the answers. You go through that learning journey together, and you can embrace that process. And that’s an incredibly powerful I need to do as well.
[00:16:32.760] – Steve
So how do you help a teacher who’s got the question in their mind of, I’ve got this required curriculum, and now I’m hearing about environment in experiences. How do you encourage teachers to deal with what at least appears a conflict?
[00:16:54.370] – Steve Arnold
Yeah, and it can be a conflict. We have requirements. We need to get through a curriculum. We have qualifications to work with. There are constraints. We can’t just have these open, wonderful, creative, innovative environments, where we’re following the wind with the child. I think the curriculum gives you your framework I think one of the things I would say is if you have a particularly talented pupil in a curriculum area, for example, and let’s use, I don’t know, it could be the sciences as an example. You have a budding scientist in your mix, and they’re absolutely so far above what the other people are doing in their level of understanding. Your professional judgments are really, really vital. So you can make professional judgments and assumptions that along the path of the curriculum, either they will already have some of that requisite knowledge, or if they don’t already have it, they can arrive at that knowledge, A, very quickly, or B, through an alternate means. It’s so important that, yes, we want this innovative and creative stretch and challenge, but it’s so important that that stretch and challenge is in some way tied to the curriculum.
[00:18:12.520] – Steve Arnold
Otherwise, it does become unmanageable. And I wondered if I could just outline one strategy, my favorite strategy for doing this.
[00:18:21.700] – Steve
That’d be great.
[00:18:23.770] – Steve Arnold
So something I’ve developed here at GEMS is called Disruptive Questions. And when I say I’ve developed it, I didn’t invent and like all things, it came from a culmination of other things. So there’s a book from published by Harvard, I think, called, “The Innovator’s DNA.” And it’s a book related to business and how to be innovative in business. And one of the sections there is about disruptive questioning in business. So how to actually use disruptive questions to move forward. And I read it, and I thought, this is so applicable to education. So I’ve adapted that idea to education and to come up with these disruptive questions. Now, all a disruptive question is, is it’s a single question that is tied directly to your learning objective or your lesson, what you’re trying to teach them, that disrupts that linear cycle of knowledge. An example of a disruptive question could be, for example, let’s say we’re teaching an ancient Rome. And for the whole class, our objective for this week, however it might be, is to understand the key events of the fall of the Roman Empire. What caused the fall of the Roman Empire? There’s our base learning.
[00:19:35.280] – Steve Arnold
That’s what I want all my children to come away with. But I have this very high performing child who’s obsessed with Romans, and he knows everything inside out. So How can I actually provide the right stretch and challenge to him without going a million miles away from the curriculum? So all I need to do is to match that lesson objective to one disruptive question, which could be something like, what could have been done differently to prevent the fall of the Roman Empire? Now, in order to answer that question, that child still needs to know and understand the events that led up to the fall of the Roman Empire. And then he needs to make predictions in terms of what would change and what would the end result be. So in terms of where that child is cognitively, it’s way above and beyond. Or it could be a question like, what would the world be like now if the fall of the Roman Empire had been prevented? So what would be the ongoing influence of the Roman Empire? How might that affect language? How might it have affected culture? What do you know about the spread and the direction of travel?
[00:20:47.280] – Steve Arnold
And again, it’s joining all these complex ideas. Now, at the end of that lesson, I can be confident that in terms of my curriculum, that all of my children have covered the key events of the fall of the Roman Empire, including that child. What’s more, when we talk about an inclusive stretch and challenge, that child can feed back what they had done to the whole past, and it’s relevant, and it’s interesting, and they can engage with it, and all of a sudden you have this aspiration and inspiration, where the kids start to think, well, maybe I’d like to try something like that next time. And it’s a really simple trick to match each learning objective to one of those disruptive questions. We often talk about this taxonomy and going up the layers of thinking. Well, I think we can short circuit that a bit. All you need is one meaningful question, and then you’ve linked it to the curriculum. So that is one technique that I really encourage people to try.
[00:21:44.180] – Steve
I like it. Just to wrap us up here, I’m wondering if there’s any closing thoughts you’d like to share in both encouraging and supporting teachers in bringing these opportunities for high performance to a large number of students?
[00:22:06.200] – Steve Arnold
Yeah, it’s a really good question. I think giving teachers, and if you are a teacher, allowing yourself the time and space to build that understanding of what learning looks like, the science of learning, how we develop knowledge, how we develop skills. Because once you have that thorough understanding of how you actually develop and build on high performance, talent, giftedness, whatever you want to call it, that then comes with a really clear understanding that while the performance might be exceptional, the individuals are not exceptional. In other words, we probably all have the ability to develop that high performance if we have the right mix of deliberate practice, motivation, master coaching. So as soon as you have, as soon as a teacher has that idea, all of a sudden, the approach to challenge becomes completely different, because in the back of their mind, they’re thinking any of these children actually could develop high performance if I put those three fundamental principles in place, and if I have that stretch and challenge that is accessible and visible to all. So one of the things that I really encourage with teachers is making sure that they feel comfortable in taking a little bit of risk.
[00:23:29.360] – Steve Arnold
But the great thing in planning for stretch and challenge and creative stretch and challenge in your bathroom is it’s low states. If I compare it to an adaptation for a child that might have a specific barrier to learning, if I don’t get that adaptation for that child right, that child potentially doesn’t access the curriculum, and that is a disaster. That’s not good for that child, and it needs to be rectified immediately because there’s a problem there. On the other hand, if I have I have very high performing children, and I have designed a creative, stretch and challenge task for them, and it misses the mark, then if it misses the mark because they’re not ready for it yet, then I just bring them back to the core curriculum, and I really haven’t lost anything. If it misses the mark in terms of that they completed quickly or whatever it is, then there’s something then to build on. We haven’t lost anything. We haven’t actually had that moment of disaster. So it is a fantastic, positive element of classroom from teachers teaching to experiment with and to build your practice in, because you can put that stretch and challenge in there without having that really high risk in place.
[00:24:40.920] – Steve Arnold
It’s also a fantastic thing to collaborate with others with, because once you build this bank of understanding, whether it’s a bank of disruptive questions or whether it’s a bank of really creative tasks that’s linked to the curriculum, you build your capacity all the time in doing it. But I’d really like to encourage people to just have a go and take some risks.
[00:25:02.530] – Steve
Well, the message I’m hearing is that I can become a high talented teacher.
[00:25:11.060] – Steve Arnold
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And it’s all got to do with having that open and inclusive approach to it and understanding exactly what’s going on in the background so we can foster that talent for anyone. You don’t have to be a subject expert. You do have to be an in developing that talent and understanding how it works.
[00:25:34.000] – Steve
Well, Steve, it’s been great. What’s the best way for a listener to get in touch with you if they have a question they’d like to follow up on?
[00:25:44.350] – Steve Arnold
Yeah, I’d be really happy to field any questions. They can search for me on LinkedIn. If you just type in Steve Arnold, Gems Education, you’ll find me on LinkedIn. But the other way is by email, and it’s simply steve. Arnold@gemseducation. Com. So that’s G-E-M-S education. Com, and I’ll be happy to hear from you.
[00:26:04.470] – Steve
Terrific. We will put that in the lead into the podcast so it’s easy for folks to find. I really appreciate your time and your energy and your inspiration.
[00:26:14.240] – Steve Arnold
I really appreciate it. Thank you, Steve. It’s been great.
[00:26:19.380] – Steve [Outro]
Thanks for listening, folks. I’d love to hear what you’re pondering. You can find me on Twitter or LinkedIn at Steve Barkley, or send me your questions and find my videos and blogs at barkleypd.com.
