Clever and Quirky: Seeing Through the Mask Part 1

Written by Laura Teresa Dascoli, BMus, GradDipEd(Sec), MEd, GradCertEdRes. PhD Candidate, Monash University, and Coordinator of Learning Enhancement – Hume Anglican Grammar (Donnybrook & Kalkallo Campuses)

Laura will present around this topic at the Diverse Learners Symposium, 17 & 18 June 2022 at the Melbourne Convention & Exhibition Centre

It’s just a regular day in your classroom. All your Year 5 students arrive on the bell, greet each other, unpack their schoolbags, sit at their tables, and read their novel… just as the classroom routine requires. James arrives 10 minutes late as usual. He looks like he’s had a rough morning. Maybe he’s even been crying. Doesn’t he want to come to school? He slumps in his chair and tosses his bag on the floor next to him; many of his belongings falling to the ground. You greet him but he doesn’t respond. He’s holding with a small rubber squishy toy he pulled from his pocket. Looks like you’re going to have to start the day yet again, by telling him how to do all the daily routine tasks the other students already know how to do. You sigh. He knows better than to bring toys into the classroom, too. This is, after all, a learning only zone! You think to yourself… It can be frustrating. He’s so smart. He knows the entire periodic table forward and backward. He can tell you distinctive features of each element, where they’re found and what they’re used for. Come to think of it, he’s the school’s dinosaur expert as well. He’s quite obsessive about those topics and knows so much about them, yet he struggles to follow a daily routine, cries all the time at school and has difficulties making friends.

How many times throughout our career as a teacher might we think about, or observe behaviours in our classroom that we feel we have a puzzle piece missing in our teaching approach for that child? Maybe it’s taken longer than usual to understand the child and their needs. Perhaps they’re not making the progress you expected over a period of time. They may exhibit lower engagement levels than what you may have anticipated, or you just feel they’re not putting in enough effort.

This article is part one of two, aiming to assist teachers with identifying the twice-exceptional children in their classrooms, and begin to provide some strategies to assist with supporting their needs using the notion of a ‘whole-child’ approach.

 IDENTIFICATION

Finding the twice-exceptional (2e) children in our classrooms (or even within our own families) can be tricky. Current research suggests that up to 1.75 students in an Australian classroom of 25 young people may be twice-exceptional (Ronksley-Pavia, 2020). Knowing this, it’s important we start looking for those missing puzzle pieces for our students who just don’t quite yet make sense to us.

Our 2e children are often known as ‘clever and quirky’ and sometimes for good reason. Being twice-exceptional means there is both a disability present, as well as giftedness. Often, you’ll catch glimpses of a bright mind through their occasional profound, left-of-centre or analytical comments. At other times, a high intellect might be blaringly obvious, or a specific talent revealed; often by accident!

The masking phenomenon can wreak havoc with identifying our 2e children, as often, the most obvious behaviours we first notice may include their disorganisation, difficulty with following instructions, failure to regulate their own emotions, workbooks of incomplete work or their social difficulties. This on occasions, can result in teachers addressing these observations with a ‘deficit approach’ which can sometimes mean we fail to identify the child’s gifts and/or talents. The implications of this may be that the child is at risk of continued underachievement and an overall lack of personal fulfillment over time. The masking phenomenon refers to a child’s disabilities masking their gifts and/or talents and their gifts/talents masking their disabilities. Meaning that sometimes, neither are truly obvious. Due to this, a child may be underachieving or achieving at an average level, but as a teacher or parent, you may feel they’re capable of far more… there might be some puzzle pieces missing to the overall picture of the child’s needs.

TEACHING THE WHOLE CHILD

There are many basic strategies that classroom teachers can employ to begin to support a child they may suspect shows characteristics of being 2e. Many of these, encompass supporting the development of effective executive functioning skills such as self-regulation, organisation and time management.

Supporting the ‘whole child’ refers to not only targeting academic growth, but understanding that academic growth simply cannot occur without the fundamentals in social-emotional wellbeing being present. This includes aspects such as self-concept, confidence, time management, organisation, and the ability to thrive within their social settings.

 STRATEGIES

Fidget toys can be an effective tool with attempting to ‘re-zone’ a child once they are overstimulated. Some may argue they provide an additional layer of stimulation, but used in a quiet space to assist the child with calming down if they have been emotionally overloaded, they can be effective with focusing their attention on that specific sensory experience. Fidget toys can also work well for some children as a way of keeping their hands busy, which enables their body to stay still whilst in a group environment, affording the child to focus on what their teacher is explaining, or the instructions being given. This can also reduce any disruptions to the child’s peers through excessive body movement whilst sitting on the floor as a class.

In an attempt to reduce external stimulation, allowing a child to remove themselves from an overstimulating or overwhelming environment can be effective in supporting the positive development of emotional self-regulation. This must be structured and not allowing the child to ‘run,’ but teaching them that if they begin to feel a certain way, they have permission to relocate themselves to a particular place where they can still be supervised, but feel safer and be afforded the opportunity to not become overwhelmed. This skill can take an extensive amount of time to teach so that the child is self-regulating independently, but the trick is for them to have the awareness and understanding to recognise even the smallest of signs that they are becoming overwhelmed. This needs to start by explicitly identifying together the physiological responses to stress and anxiety that they experience, and then use those feelings to teach the self-regulation strategies. For example, ‘When you feel your heart start to beat faster, I want you to…’ or ‘When your fists start to clench, I want you to…’

Another strategy which works for many children is the use of intellectual conversations with their significant adults, which allow them to unpack or debrief from a particular scenario where their response may not have been appropriate in that moment.  Discussions surrounding behavioural responses, outcomes, impacts and consequences for stakeholders including themselves, can be an effective way to teach self-regulation skills both at home and in the classroom. Through intellectual discussions a child can begin to learn that their response wasn’t necessarily wrong, it just wasn’t effective for them and those around them, and then build on this with more appropriate strategies for future use. Providing this safe space for discussion is imperative for a 2e child to be able to openly discuss their learning journey to stronger self-regulation strategies.

Organisation and time management skills can be explicitly taught through a child’s preferred learning method. There are many visual and mathematical ways time management and organisation can be taught to a 2e child. Checklists that are laminated with items that can be physically ticked off once completed are an excellent way to provide that visual scaffolding and for the child to see what still needs to be completed. For children of pre-reading age, picture checklists can be created to substitute written checklists. Teachers and parents will need to initially prompt, guide and remind the child about using the checklist, but by having those conversations of processes we as adults often do subconsciously, the child will soon enough be working through their checklists autonomously.

It’s important to note that some strategies may work well for some children but not others, and what works well for some today may not work well in a month. One of the biggest challenges in the life of a teacher is to continuously monitor the effectiveness of strategies for students and modify as the child’s needs evolve.

Laura will present around this topic at the Diverse Learners Symposium, 17 & 18 June 2022 at the Melbourne Convention & Exhibition Centre

References 

Ronksley-Pavia, M. (2020). Twice-Exceptionality in Australia: Prevalence

Estimates. Australasian Journal Of Gifted Education, 17-29. https://doi.org/10.21505/ajge.2020.0013 

Vygotsky, L. (2011). The Dynamics of the Schoolchild’s Mental