Podcast: Supporting Teachers in Supporting Students’ High Performance

How do instructional coaches and instruction leaders support teachers in maximizing students’ high performance? How should we be preparing teachers to identify possible indicators of high talent and to create opportunities for talent and giftedness to flourish? Steve Arnold, the Head of Gifted and Talented at GEMS Education explores these questions and identifies the importance of adaptive teaching verses siloed differentiation. What should teachers know about the neuroscience of learning?

Email Steve: steve.arnold@gemseducation.com

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Podcast Transcript:

[00:00:00.290] – Steve [Intro]

Welcome to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast. As instructional coaches and school leaders, you are tasked with guiding continuous teacher growth to create student success. This podcast looks to support you with strategies from experienced guests, as well as my own insights that I’ve gathered over the years. I’m thrilled to have you with us. Thanks for tuning in.

[00:00:29.960] – Steve

Supporting teachers and supporting students’ high performance. Leading our podcast today is Steve Arnold. He serves as the corporate head of Gifted and Talented at GEMS Education, where he leads initiatives to identify and nurture exceptional abilities among students. Steve advocates for an inclusive and growth-oriented approach to gifted education, emphasizing the importance of recognizing and developing talent across all areas of schooling. Welcome, Steve, and thanks for joining us.

[00:01:02.670] – Steve Arnold

Thank you so much for having me.

[00:01:04.880] – Steve

I’m wondering if you’d kick off our conversation with a definition for the phrase gifted and talented.

[00:01:13.570] – Steve Arnold

Sure. This is where I get into dangerous territory immediately, because I’m about to potentially talk myself out of a job, because I think the word giftedness in particular is deeply problematic. And I think it comes from a historic view, where we really did have this opinion that certain individuals were born with something special that was always going to come out, that was always going to occur, and that they had this almost superhuman ability lying within them in a certain area. And it can seem like that. It certainly can look like that, because, of course, what we see from the outside is only the outcome. So when we see a brilliant pianist, we only see the outcome. And when we see a brilliant athlete on the television, we only see the outcome. We don’t see what’s going on behind it. So we do have this view that, how come I can’t do that, but they can? They must have something that I don’t. And there probably is some genetic element to particularly some certain areas of high performance. It wouldn’t have mattered if I had been born on a basketball court. I was never going to play in the NBA because I’m 5 foot 10, and I can’t jump very high.

[00:02:33.660] – Steve Arnold

So there were certain things that were barriers in the way for me. But what’s really interesting from an education perspective is that those genetic differences certainly do have an impact, certainly in physical pursuits. And there’s no doubt that we are born with neurology, I guess, which leans towards one way or the other, leans you towards being good at certain things. However, particularly when it comes to cognitive pursuits, the evidence suggests that the genetic influence is probably less than 10%, probably much less than 10%. Meaning that actually, unless there’s a specific barrier that exists, which, of course, sometimes there is, all of us have the ability to be high performing at something. And so when we talk about giftedness, what I actually think we’re talking about is high performance or expertise or whatever other word you want to put in it. We’re not talking about some mystical, magical power that we’re born with to do something really well. You can look at examples from history, of course, we speak to both things. People often cite Mozart. See, I’m not very good musical composer. I think it’s Mozart I’m talking about – now, he was a child prodigy, was he not?

[00:03:56.010] – Steve Arnold

I’ve read an awful a lot about his early life. I read this great piece about how he was composing these complicated pieces at age eight. This writer said, yes, he was composing complicated pieces at age eight, but they weren’t very good. He happened to also grow up in a house that was filled with musical instruments, and he had that environment. Actually, behind those compositions at age eight, even at a young age, what hours and hours and hours of deliberate practice and playing around with things. Sure, he probably did have this inclination towards music, and he certainly grew up in the right environment. But perhaps you and I would have been composing at age eight, had we been born in the same circumstances. Who knows? The other element to my problem with the word giftedness at times is it gives little credit to the person who has generated that high performance. Because what we know is a high performance never, ever, ever, ever comes without an awful lot of hard work and dedication. I think that’s a really important message, particularly in education, to be giving kids.

[00:05:11.760] – Steve

There’s a story that I recall hearing a lot of years ago about a pianist, who performed at the Ladies Garden Party. When she had finished playing, she went over and sat down for a tea, and the women at her table, someone spoke up and said, “That was just wonderful. I’d give anything to be able to play like that.” Her response was, “No, you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t give up half the things that I’ve given up in order to develop that skill and that talent.” [laughter]

[00:05:50.800] – Steve Arnold

Yeah. And that really specialized high performance, these absolute experts in these areas, it also really comes with balance. You can’t have it without, as that story describes, you can’t have it without enormous sacrifice.

[00:06:08.440] – Steve

Yep. There’s few well-rounded high experts. I wanted to ask you, and I guess you’ve already touched on this, but let’s explain a little further about misconceptions that exist around identifying and supporting gifted and talented learners. I think I’ve heard one now is missing that role of commitment, I guess, that a person has, which might be labeled as motivation.

[00:06:44.170] – Steve Arnold

Yeah. Absolutely. So identification is an interesting one. As you said in the introduction, I very much champion what I call an inclusive approach to give to the talents of education or I perform it, whatever we want to call it and that’s because my views are based upon research, and the research suggests, as I said earlier, that almost anyone, perhaps even all the children we have in front of us, are capable of developing this high performance in any given area. So the question then of identification is what you’re actually looking for is potential, and we’ve just talked about the fact that the potential is in abundance, and then you’re looking for current high performance. So are they actually been able to employ those things? And so when we’re thinking about classroom environments, we’re thinking about education, we can use things like certain assessments that give us an insight into reasoning ability and cognitive ability. And we can use those, but we should never, ever use those in isolation, because, again, they only give us a snapshot. We also know with all standardized testing is that very high scores are very, very reliable, but lower scores are far less reliable because of the tremendous number of variables that are attached to it.

[00:08:05.260] – Steve Arnold

So just because a child isn’t scoring high on an abilities test at the moment, doesn’t mean they should be ruled out of potential high performance in the future. We also have to keep in mind that the areas of human endeavor that people can become high performing in is almost infinite, and schools only recognize a very small slice of that. So I guess it’s a very long winded way of saying in terms of identification, I do a lot of work with teachers on how to remain open and vigilant to high performance whenever it might arise. And as well as using assessments and their view of how children are achieving against the curriculum, there are certain characteristics of cognitive giftedness or high performance that we talk about that give you an insight into that potential. And particularly when we’re working very young children, those that work in the early years of education are fortunate. They get this unfiltered view in terms of how these children think. They haven’t been corrupted by us and our systems yet, and they’re just bringing with them what they’ve had in their short lives.

[00:09:19.750] – Steve Arnold

We get this really unfiltered view. We talk about these characteristics, and they’re things like early language development. How quickly are they able to make connection between words? How are they able to use sophisticated language? Are they playing with language? In my current context, working in the Middle East, the really important part to remember there is it doesn’t have to be the language of instruction. How are they actually able to manipulate and use language? It’s other things like curiosity. Are you seeing a child who every time you give him something to play with, he wants to take it apart? Or is there a student in your class that just becomes fixated on a certain element of a subject and just wants to focus on that? So is there that evidence of intellectual curiosity? Social and emotional behavior. Have you got children that start to develop empathy at an earlier age than their peers. Now, I’m not saying that all gifted people also need to be really well balanced in advance, socially and emotionally, because we know that’s not the truth, but we also know that being able to develop those skills is a really good sign of cognition.

[00:10:28.430] – Steve Arnold

So Is there evidence, early evidence of divergent thinking and creativity? So the children, where you give them some materials or a task, and they do something completely unexpected with it, and they do that on a consistent basis, that’s a sign of culture and giftedness. And the exciting thing for us is, particularly in young children, we can see those things that develop – I was about to say naturally, that’s not the right word, that develop as a result of their early childhood experience and their genetics. But the really exciting thing is all of those characteristics that I’ve just spoken about can be actively taught. So you can teach children to be curious. So you can teach them to walk towards new experiences, to be open to change, and all those sorts of things. You can obviously teach language skills and advanced language skills. You can certainly teach social and emotional understanding and behavior. So as educators, indicators, the thing that’s missing in terms of identification is just how much influence we have over these things that are identifiers. And so what we should be doing is setting up our classrooms so that part of the curriculum or something that sits beside the curriculum is actively teaching these cognitive traits and characteristics.

[00:11:52.030] – Steve Arnold

There are two studies, and stop me if I’m talking too long here, Steve, but there are two studies which I often cite. And one is It’s to do with language development, and one is to do with curiosity. So one of the studies says that, and I think it’s published by Harvard, I’ll send you the citation so you can get this right. But one of them suggests that the number one indicator of long term academic success is the quality and quantity of language used in the home in early childhood. So that long term academic success really hinges on that ability to use language. And it’s not a surprise because everything we deliver in the school is delivered through the medium of language. And in fact, all concepts are built on language. So if we know that, then we have this ability to influence that and to make sure that that is a priority and that we work with families as well as children to really prioritize language and discussion. And it doesn’t mean that they have to be searching through a thesaurus every night. It just means things like they have to prioritize talk, and they have to be open to using in new and unfamiliar language with their children in a supportive way.

[00:13:04.390] – Steve Arnold

And they have to do lots of reading, obviously the other things, so we can influence that. So there’s one… And that study was a study of young adults who had a track record of extremely high academic results in the US. The other study was a meta study where they looked, they were trying to identify character traits of gifted people. So they had a group, again, of young adults in the US, all of whom had been identified as being gifted during their education, as being academically gifted. And then they used that group of people, and I think it was about 3,000. It was a large group, and they did the big five personality traits with them, and to see if there was a correlation. And what they were suspecting is this idea that academically gifted individuals would be socially awkward, and they’d have that element of being anxious and shy and things like that. But what they actually found was there was one personality trait which tied them together. There was one really clear correlation, and that was with openness. In other words, curiosity. So academically gifted people, advanced people were, yes, very curious, but also it’s more to do with being really open to new ideas, being open to new experiences, walking moving towards change and new experiences rather than backing away.

[00:14:33.680] – Steve Arnold

And that, for me, was as a parent and as an educator, was a really profound moment because I thought, well, you can actively teach that.

[00:14:43.950] – Steve

Model it, sure.

[00:14:45.210] – Steve Arnold

You can model it. You can teach it. And so therefore, if we do that, if we set our classrooms up in that structure, we stand to actually grow the number of, quote, unquote, gifted children that we have rather than just identifying the top few.

[00:15:02.230] – Steve

A lot of the listeners to this podcast have coaching roles in school, either as a school administrator or as an instructional coach. What might be indicators when they’re in teachers’ classrooms that would suggest teachers might be missing either the identification or the support of gifted and talented students?

[00:15:27.830] – Steve Arnold

I think any evidence that suggests that the model of… We talk a lot about adaptive teaching models rather than differentiated teaching models. The reason we talk about that is the old… I’ll say old, it’s not that old, but the traditional view of differentiated planning for teaching is that you have your groups of children in your mind based on assessment, and you pitch the learning towards them. And we know what that does is particularly for the top end. It’s really good for those kids that you’ve chosen in the top end that you’re going to challenge and extend, but it almost has the opposite effect on the others. So it’s almost detrimental to the others. So looking at teachers who silo those children, if you like, and pitch the learning directly to those individuals and not to the others, is one thing which I’d really discourage. A collective stretch and challenge is a wonderful thing, but it should be, even if it’s not accessible to some of the children at that stage, it should be visible, and they should feel like it is open to them should they want to pursue that. And that’s a huge part of fostering that curiosity and that aspiration and things like that.

[00:16:37.440] – Steve Arnold

So trying to keep an open mind is what it’s all about. The other thing is, quite often teachers make assumptions or miss opportunities, I should say, for pointing out to people when they see evidence of high performance. So in other words, we assume kids know what they’re good at. A lot of evidence suggests that actually children don’t know what they’re good at, and you only have to examine your own view of yourself and your abilities to reinforce that. In my experience, certainly, it’s very rare that we look at ourselves going, you know what? I’m really good at that. It tends to be the opposite. It tends to be the opposite. And so what we underestimate, too, is the impact of being really targeted and explicit with our feedback when we see high performance. So it’s not just saying, “well done, Timmy, you’re so clever.” It’s saying things like, “I noticed what you did there, whatever it might be, I noticed what you’re doing there. Do you understand that that is really complicated and really impressive what you’ve done. That’s not what we’d expect for someone of your age. So maybe this is something you want to pursue.

[00:17:51.310] – Steve Arnold

Maybe you’d like to find out more about this because clearly it’s something that you’re good at.” And having those conversations is really important because a key factor for developing high levels of talent, as you mentioned earlier, is motivation. And motivation for children rarely comes intrinsically. It most often comes from an outside source. And again, if you listen to interviews and read biographies of high performing athletes, and musicians, and performers, and generally there’s a story in there about how someone saw something. A teacher said this, a parent said that someone saw something and they sparked this belief. And that belief is what leads to deliberate practice. You don’t work hard at something that you don’t feel motivated to do. And that hard work is really important. So being that agent in the classroom, and this is true for five year olds, and it’s true for 15 year olds, that actively looks for those examples of high performance, and then makes that ready to listen to that child, and sparks that motivation is another thing that I would really encourage. And there are structured ways you can do it. And I guess the third thing I’d say in terms of what you could look for is classrooms that embrace creativity.

[00:19:13.980] – Steve Arnold

So classrooms that allow children to take ideas and make something new with them, and that innovation and creativity. And that’s where you get children living in that cognitive dissonance, that you’re breaking that cycle of learning and knowledge. You are building those neural pathways that involve higher-order thinking. So not being inflexible with your tasks, making sure you’ve got that room for adaptation and innovation. Creativity is not only everything for cognitive development, but it is everything in terms of what we need in our next generations of workers – I mean, it’s all going to be how we use this technology that we have to solve problems.

[00:19:55.980] – Steve

Your comment about differentiating to the levels struck a chord of an observation I did in a school where it was a middle school, and they had separated the students by their supposed ability levels. I saw this teacher teach a social studies class to the upper group. All I was thinking is what an amazing teacher she was. Two periods later, I saw her teach the same content to the group that had been labeled as a lower group, and I was dying. I could not believe it was the same person. It was strictly the mental mindset at which she had gone into her expectations influencing what she was inviting the kids to do.

[00:20:55.480] – Steve Arnold

Yeah, absolutely. You think about what that does, what that does to that… Children are very perceptive, and that sends a clear message to those children that you need to be taught this way, otherwise you won’t understand it. You don’t get the fun and exciting stuff because you won’t get it.

[00:21:12.700] – Steve

She even had the assignments for each of the three groups on the board. If you were in the lower group, you saw what the higher group was doing. It just spelled right out. What should we be doing to support teachers in their support? School administrators, coaches – what kinds of things should be happening for teachers that best prepare teachers to serve in this role?

[00:21:45.320] – Steve Arnold

I think we don’t give teachers, particularly new teachers, enough credit in terms of giving them both the cognitive science and the neuroscience behind learning. That phrase which I really like, which is, “teaching is an art, but learning is a science.” We know a lot more about how the brain wires and neural pathways and I think actually we need to do a little bit more, even though it might seem a little bit off topic when teachers are saying, I want to know about the curriculum, I want to know about teaching strategies. But actually, I would love to be more time around how the brain actually creates neural pathways and the difference between a heavily myelinated neural pathway and a non-myelinated neural pathway and how that works. It’s not a difficult concept to understand. And in fact, we can all see examples of it in our own life. Because what that understanding does in terms of what’s going on neurologically upstairs, is, it gives them that foundation to say that if I just give these kids the time and space to practice things in a very, very deliberate and meaningful way, then we can actually change the brain and make things develop really rapidly.

[00:23:12.500] – Steve Arnold

When you understand that, there’s a book called, “The Talent Code” by Dan Coyle, which I’m sure a lot of people will be aware of. And it’s not a book that’s linked directly to education, but it’s all about his observations of places that develop high-level talent. And he talks about neural pathways in there. And what he just discovers effectively is that there’s three things that you need to develop high level talent. It is deliberate practice, motivation, and expert coaching. So in other words, and those of you who are aware of Renzoli’s three-ring model of giftedness, you identify that those things almost match these three rings. You can’t have high level talent develop without the hard work, and there’s a deliberate practice. But you can’t have the hard work and deliberate practice without the motivation. So there’s the inspiration. There’s the positive affirmation and the right environment, things like that. And then the third one is the master coaching. And that’s the thing that I think that intimidates, particularly beginning teachers a little bit, because the assumption they make there is to be a master coach of a very, very high performing child, I need to really I’m going to need to know my stuff.

[00:24:31.350] – Steve Arnold

I’m going to need to be three or four steps ahead of them at all times. And when you’re talking about a 15-year-old doing higher math, that can be tricky. But the thing about the master coaching bit is all it really means is the child needs to know where they’re headed and have a really clear picture of what excellence looks like. They need to have a really clear picture of where they are now, and then they need a roadmap in order to to where they’re going. Now, you don’t necessarily need to be able to do the thing or to be the expert of the thing in order to provide that really clear view for that child and facilitate that expert feedback. One of the things I do as well as teaching the underlying neuroscience is to actively teach strategies for extension which don’t involve the teacher having to cram the night before and learn the content themselves. You can facilitate make high performance without being the subject expert. Now, knowledge has a place. Subject experts have their place, and I’m not diminishing that. I think it’s a wonderful thing to have. But teachers shouldn’t feel intimidated in terms of being able to extend children just based on subject knowledge.

[00:25:46.060] – Steve

I can help you find where you can get it.

[00:25:48.750] – Steve Arnold

Yeah, exactly.

[00:25:49.850] – Steve

Without having it myself.

[00:25:51.520] – Steve Arnold

And that’s powerful. That’s really powerful for a child to actually hear a teacher say, I don’t know these answers, but I bet I can figure out a way for us to get there.

[00:26:04.120] – Steve

Well, Steve, this has just been an awesome conversation. I’m so glad that you joined me. I’m sure that some of the listeners are going to have a question or two they’d love to pass on to you. What’s the best way that somebody can follow up and connect with you?

[00:26:19.940] – Steve Arnold

That’s a really good question. So I’m very happy to receive emails. Is it okay to give my email on here?

[00:26:26.920] – Steve

Go ahead.

[00:26:28.520] – Steve Arnold

Yeah, it’s just steve.arnold@gemseducation.com.

[00:26:38.930] – Steve

We’ll post that in the lead-in to the podcast, make it easier for folks to find.

[00:26:44.040] – Steve Arnold

I’m also on LinkedIn, but I don’t really understand how to give my handle for that. But if people search for Steve Arnold, they’ll find me there.

[00:26:51.930] – Steve

Yeah. All right. Thanks a lot, Steve.

[00:26:54.520] – Steve Arnold

Appreciate it. Thank you very much.

[00:26:57.790] – Steve [Intro]

Thanks for listening, folks. 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.