Students With Exceptionalities

Gifted Students

Gifted students need an appropriate environment where they can be challenged to grow and to fulfill their potential. Gifted students challenges are unique. Academic Leadership: The Online Journal states:

"Among these gifted students, some struggle with behavioral, emotional, and social development concerns. Their cognitive abilities set them apart from their peers. Their exceptional abilities can cause anxiety, underachievement, and feelings of isolation from the majority of other students. However, for many of these students, it is the stereotypes regarding intelligence that has brought about or perpetuated their struggles."

Emotional and social struggles are just one area of concern for families of gifted children. On the other side of the coin is the question, "Will their current educational program provide the type of challenging environment that encourages the gifted student to realize his or her full potential?"

Often times, the school’s response to students with exceptionality is to change the workload: Learning Disabled students get less, Gifted students get more. In actuality, these students need something different. Different instructional, different learning opportunities, more flexibility in the structure of a program, and the ability to spend time engaged in learning that interests them.

These students show unusual talent in one or more of the following areas:  

• Creative Thinking: exhibits original thinking in oral and written expression, comes up with several solutions to a given problem, creates and invents, improvises often

• General Intellectual Ability: formulates abstractions, processes information in complex ways, observant, excited about new ideas, learns rapidly, uses a large vocabulary, inquisitive

• Specific Academic Ability: good memorization ability, advanced comprehension, acquires basic skill knowledge quickly, widely read and high academic success in special interest area

• Leadership: assumes responsibility, high expectations for self and others, foresees consequences and implications of decisions, likes structure, well-liked by peers, self-confident

• Psychomotor: Challenged by difficult athletic activities, exhibits precision in movement, excels in motor skill, well coordinated, high energy level

• Visual/ Performing Arts: outstanding in sense of spatial relationships, unusual ability in expressing self, feeling, moods, etc., through dance, drama, music, etc., good motor coordination, observant, exhibits creative expression, desire for producing “own product"

Dyslexia and Reading struggles

Dyslexia: A specific learning disability that is neurobiological in origin. It is characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition and by poor spelling and decoding abilities. These difficulties typically result from a deficit in the phonological component of language that is often unexpected in relation to other cognitive abilities.

In other words, children with dyslexia have difficulty hearing the sounds of words, which is a key component of learning to decode and spell. Their poor decoding ability results in dysfluent reading, which could lead to comprehension issues. These are children who “seem bright” but for some reason still struggle to decode and spell. Most are of average or above average intelligence. The reading struggle is “unexpected in relation to other cognitive abilities,” so the parents are often surprised when their bright child is struggling to learn to read.

We see the beauty in dyslexia. These children are often times gifted in other areas. They tend to stand out in their visual-spatial abilities and their emotional intelligence.

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

An estimated 8 million — or 1 in 20 — adults in the United States have AD/HD, yet 85 percent have not been formally diagnosed or treated. Many of these are mistakenly diagnosed with another condition or their difficulties are dismissed, so their AD/HD is never addressed. Conversely, there is also a tendency for clinicians who are not experts in AD/HD to give the diagnosis to patients who do not have it. ADDA advocates an appropriate, comprehensive evaluation, including a developmental survey; medical, educational, and behavioral history.

Although children with ADHD are on medication, there are alternative options. Research has found that children with ADHD benefit from exercise, getting outside, changes in diet, practicing mindfulness, and Omega supplements.