I am repeatedly asked to put forward the names of the 'Gifted and Talented' students in my classes. Given that I teach psychology I am, I presume, being asked to suggest who has the 'gift' of an innate ability in psychology. ....really? I mean ...REALLY? Wouldn't it be more realistic to ask, 'Which child in your class has had a stable, supportive background with parents who have been keen to stimulate and encourage their child at home and have been successful in engendering high aspiration and a sense of agency and academic self-worth since they were born?' Okay, it doesn't have the same ring as 'G&T' but at least it doesn't rest on subjective, fairy-tale notions such as 'Gift.'
Let's take the other end of the spectrum. Recently I was covering a lesson for a colleague. This was a bottom set English group of 13/14 year-old children. The first thing that happened was that one of the boys handed me a report card which had on it his target for each lesson. The target was to stay in the room for the duration of the lesson.... Think about the sub-text of that: 'We don't really care that you're not going to learn anything [because you're a 'Low Achiever'], but please don't bother us by wandering around the school: just make sure you're physically present in each room you're supposed to be in.'
Then there was the work which had been set for them: read some text about bananas and make a list of the key points. There was an exemplar on the next page which showed the students what a list looks like. It turns out that a list is a given number of points all stacked on top of each other. Looking at this work I started to wonder whether even I was going to manage to stay physically present in this room for an hour.
A quick chat with some of the these kids was ample time to see that they were absolutely as capable as their counterparts in the top set. What they didn't have was much sense of how and why they should expend effort on the work being given to them. How and why they should dare to fight back against the messages and LABELS they have obviously been deluged with for years both implicitly and explicitly: bottom set, low achiever, E grade student, NOT gifted, NOT talented.
But these labels are never good, not even for the those being labelled 'Gifted' or 'A grade student.' There are many students I see towards the end of their schooling who have learned how to work our system and have always gained A grades. On one level, that's great - they've often worked hard to do that. But here's the problem: what they have learned from our system is that it is all about the outcome (the grade). Not only that, but the outcome somehow personally reflects on who they are. These students are now TERRIFIED of getting a B, or a C, or worse... This, in turn, means that what they want from me, as their teacher, is quite simple: what do I write in this A level exam to get an A? Anything which deviates from this is often met with something close to hostility in such students. And yet, exam boards are (rightly) wise to such an approach and so, increasingly, they are constructing exams which require thought and understanding rather than memory and pre-learned answers.
These A grade students are a classic example of what Carol Dweck refers to as Fixed Mindset: they do not really value the process of learning, only the outcome. When they make a mistake they see no opportunity, only personal failure. Similarly, the students in the bottom set English group have a Fixed Mindset: they do not really believe that they are capable of success, so why put in the effort?
The opposite of this is Growth Mindset, where the process of learning is valued. Mistakes are opportunities to learn, therefore risk is highly valued and learning is always worth the effort, for its own sake. When a child thinks like this, Dweck has shown that they are likely to surprise both us and themselves in terms of the outcomes. Dweck also shows that it is relatively easy to get students to adopt a Growth Mindset.
So how have the students mentioned above learned to adopt a Fixed Mindset? To my mind, it starts and ends with the labels we give them: Bright, Gifted, Talented ....High Achiever. It is never alright to label young people who are developing rapidly and whose extraordinary potential most of us adults have no idea of.
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