Defining the gifted and talented self... After school
The school day was a disaster for me. There was not one single educator over the first twelve years of my education who found a way to engage me, encourage me or tap into my considerable curiosity about others as a means of engagement. My schoolday classroom was simply a place I bided my time until my real learning could begin, after school.
Thankfully, my mother recognized my talent for dance and considered it her responsibility to give me the time and place to immerse myself in this area of strength. Within a year of starting dance class at nine years of age, I was dancing six days a week, three hours each weekday after school, four hours on Saturday mornings, and continued to do so throughout my teenage years. It was at the dance studio that I learned, beyond the basic skills of dance, about myself, the world and the disposition of an artist. The high standards and encouragement of my mentor, my dance teacher, now 95 and still a formidable presence, continue to echo over forty years later.
I began my teaching career at a school for middle and high school students with language-based learning differences. These students, labeled as underachieving, were challenged by reading and writing tasks and remediated at their levels of disability. From my own experience as a learner, I wondered why no one was tapping into their strengths, their interests, talents and passions. These were highly creative learners and I intended to make use of it! The result was a simple homework assignment that resonated with my literature class and moved them into a collaborative, original playwriting process to a schoolwide drama production. I guided the process, yes, but the movement forward was student directed. I simply opened the door to opportunity where each one could find a way to express themselves through their areas of strength and motivated them to read and write along the way (the challenge) to meet their creative potential (the gifts). Underachieving? Hardly.
My educational philosophy led me to Bridges Academy in Los Angeles, where teaching to the strengths of Twice-exceptional (2e) middle and high school students is de rigeuer...a given. I had only to say what a student needed as an opportunity for success and the powers that be arranged for it to happen. Can you imagine? Granted, we had classrooms with only eight students...but even that small group might demand eight ways for a teacher to differentiate curriculum to allow each student access through his or her area of strength.
These reasons for my own successful learning and, ultimately, teaching are what compel me as an educational consultant and learning specialist to create learning experiences within the academics, the arts and technology that offer in-depth study and provide highly motivated learners the opportunity for boosting self esteem, along with learning the skills and dispositions of their chosen disciplines. As anyone working in their area of ability knows, when we already have the skills necessary for problem solving, problems become welcome challenges and their solutions markers of our success.
