Gifted Underachievers: Not A Contradiction In Terms | Jordan Box | TEDxUNISA

[Music] the academically gifted students you know the ones that I'm talking about they're the poindext is at the front of the class that can't put their hands down they've got an answer for every question they're the teacher's pet they're the one in a million Lisa Simpsons and Sheldon Coopers of the world right they're the ones that despite anything they're going to succeed and do well just by virtue of their natural talents and abilities yep well actually about 50 of gifted students are thought to be underachieving and up to 40 will drop out of school altogether

this is based on three Senate inquiries here in Australia and a number of studies and reports in the US here and around the world but how can that be that that doesn't compute they're highly academically gifted but they're academically struggling underperforming underachieving how can that be before I go into that I'll just tell you quickly what I mean by gifted so in Australian educational settings the term gifted normally applies to people whose IQ is in the top 10 or the 90th percentile of their age bracket so at a school with about a hundred and uh

1500 kids you should have a gifted program with 150 students in a class of 20 or 30 kids you're going to have on average two or three gifted students in that class whether they have been identified or not now I'm going to tell you about three young people uh and I want you to listen to their stories and have a think about maybe which one is the gifted one so firstly we've got Ian in year four Ian hates School he's angry he's destructive he's disruptive he or throw books he'll throw furniture he'll argue with the

teacher saying this is stupid I hate it school's dumb I want to get out and it got to the stage where the school had him referred to a school for Disturbed children Luke eight years old his parents described his behavior at home as normal at school it was a different story he would hide under his desk and refuse to come out instead of doing his classwork he'd roll around on the floor he would burst into a song loudly during class not necessarily words but a tune and rather than going to class he would run around

the school screaming needless to say he was mainly achieving D's in the classwork that he did do and so his teachers asked the parents to having taken away for an assessment of ADHD and Stephanie she was a great student all the way through primary school she had an academic record that she was very proud of she was on good terms with all the teachers she enjoyed violin creative writing drawing painting well once you got into year seven she sort of hit an academic brick wall she got a B and then after that she got a

C and so a little while later she just stopped handing in her work and then she started missing school parents and teachers thought maybe it's adolescence maybe it's depression it's just teenage Hood so which one of these students is gifted let's look at what happened to Anne so here's the angry year for student it looks like what some people would call oppositional Defiance disorder um during his say he was sent off to that school for Disturbed children uh and before he went he had to be uh he had to see a psychologist and have a

battery of psychometric tests and one of those was an IQ test the result of that was that his IQ was 170. now a hundred is the average 170 is off the charts to put it in perspective you would need about a thousand people his age before you found one with a comparable IQ his mind was at the level of an 18 year old they could very well have been doing High School topics but he was having to color in and read Pulp Fiction books with pictures in them and wrote learn the times tables so of

course he was frustrated of course he was angry of course he wanted to get out of there Luke uh he did go away to a psychologist to be assessed for ADHD and they also had an IQ test for Luke that came back showing that he was in the top one percent of IQ for his age group in the 99th percentile so what was happening with Luke was he was bored he was unchallenged he was disengaged and he had to make his own fun really what happened was once he was identified the school was able to

bring in a curriculum for him that's based on what they use in Singapore which allowed him to stay in the same class and he got a bit more challenged a bit more depth a bit more breath to his work he started enjoying school a lot more uh he gained confidence he built friendships he took up swimming and playing chess and started learning the piano two terms later that boy who rolled around on the floor and ran around the school screaming wrote a four-page story in English something that no one would have ever expected and Stephanie

she's also likely to be gifted but her underachievement stems from her sense of perfection and that could be a topic for tedx talk all on its own but what's happened here is she's transitioned into high school where there's different teachers different standards different peers and she's never experienced failure before so she's never had to build resilience to failure so she didn't know how to cope with it and when she got knocked back with this grade that wasn't an A-Plus that destroyed her self-concept of being the perfect student so all three of these students are gifted

but the important thing here to realize is that they come in different shapes and sizes and that these are students with additional learning needs they're not going to thrive without the right support and as we can see in fact it's quite the opposite so we've got different types of gifted underachiever there was a researcher Del Siegel who synthesized a lot of research in this area one of the researchers that he wrote about was Dr Sylvia rim and she came up with this very helpful Matrix for identifying the different types of gifted underachiever so on this

Matrix we've got the vertical axis which is their Conformity level going from non-conformist up to conformist and across the bottom their Confidence from dependent to dominant so when I go through these types of um kids you might think hey that sounds a bit like my kids or my students or I was like that when I was young or I'm like that now so we'll start off with the dominant conformers up in the top right quadrant this is where you find those students who are the jobs the socialites the dramatists they are successful on the social

scene and they choose extracurricular activities that they know they're going to excel at that's sport drama singing and they're very capable students they can learn the material but they choose not to perform to their top standard because they don't want to be labeled as a nerd and ostracized from their social group so these students need to understand that having higher grades and being popular aren't mutually exclusive when we go and look at the dominant non-conformers we've got the kids that are labeled as rebellious hyperactive and the class clown so these students um you know sometimes

they're manipulative they're very cluey and they can be the bane of a teacher's existence for probably an unexpected reason they have something that's a characteristic of a lot of gifted people as a strong sense of moral Justice if they see an injustice which might be to them an unfair rule an unfair punishment or an award being given out without Merit they would rather lose out or fail or be hurt than to let that Injustice stand so we normally find this type of student in the corridor or in front of the principal's office waiting to be

spoken to sometimes they'll turn into bullies from a sense of low self-esteem but they will defy and challenge authority figures because they feel like they've been let down okay so as we slide along to the um dependent side we find the dependent non-conformers and these students they've just got too much on their mind really to be able to concentrate on school school pales insignificance to the things that are happening in their life so we have torn Thomas here in the middle Tawn Thomas has just got so much going on he's got debating he's got drama

he's got Sports he's got a big family he just doesn't have the cognitive space to devote to school there's too much other stuff sucking that up depressed Donna she is so full on probably ruminating on these big social issues Global problems that she probably can't do much about but school is just such a insignificant thing to her compared to these bigger uh issues going on that she can't or won't focus on it and 6am he's a kid that's always sick on test day or you know when the assignment's due this happens to have a tummy

bug now his illness might be made up or it could be it's like a somatic response he's so stressed so anxious so panicky about being assessed that He makes himself physically ill up in the dependent conformist is poor Polly now she might be a victim of bullying she has low self-esteem and she's constantly seeking validation reassurance from adults and teachers passive poor is another interesting character who he's essentially just given up School hasn't been giving him what he was promised he's not getting the challenge he's not getting the rigor so he does the bare minimum

he needs to do and you won't get anything else out of him he just wants to pass and get out of there and perfectionist Pearl this kind of student she has a crippling um a crippling fear of failure they thrive in a in an organization that's got rigid structure and organization but you give this kind of student a an abstract thought or an open-ended assignment and no just not happening these kinds of students can very quickly devolve into a sick Sam or an academic Alice and these types of students are like Stephanie that we saw

earlier um they set such high impossibly high expectations for themselves that when something happens or they hit a brick wall or they just get knocked back in some way they they can't handle it um they're and everything that they they interpret as being a failure so a b seems like a failure so these types of students a b is tantamount to an f and they start to think if I can't be perfect if I can't get a pluses all the time then I may as well fail I may as well just not try if you

don't try and you fail then at least you've got an excuse well I didn't do that assignment but if you put in effort and it comes back you only got to be well then that's on you that that can destroy their whole self-identity and these students need to build resilience they need to build confidence in themselves and learn coping strategies so so what who cares um why am I here talking to you about this well hopefully I've challenged your idea this concept of giftedness um that they're not these walking encyclopedias that are rare unicorns out

there it's 10 of the population and I can tell you they're hiding amongst us okay um they're they're not um pigments of your imagination they could be the people that you least expect it could be you so what are we going to do when you come across a person that's like Luke or Ian or Stephanie don't be so quick to pathologize don't just say these kids got issues with discipline this kid's got ADHD we're going to send them off and um and pathologize this um this Behavior what we need to do is say well why

are they behaving this way what are they lacking in their education what supports do they need maybe they need more challenge maybe they need more rigor maybe they need more depth it's just uh not getting through to you it's not um engaging so um what we need to do is engage them how do we find out what they need we ask them these are individuals they're young people they know what they need in their education they know what they need in their social life they know what's missing so let's talk to these uh these young

people because when we identify what they need and when we put the supports in place they will Thrive they will flourish and they will go on to do great things thank you [Applause]