How not to encourage gifted pupils

What do you do with the best and brightest students of your class when you’re a teacher? You give them high marks, congratulate them, and most of all, you try and present them with more challenging and stimulating work to make sure they actually stay at their best and brightest. What do you not do with the top students in your classroom? Well, pretty much what these incompetent teachers are doing: refusing to acknowledge their talent and skills out of fear that such encouragement would promote “elitism”. Seriously.

As many as three-quarters of state schools are failing to push their brightest pupils because teachers are reluctant to promote 'elitism', an Ofsted study says today.

Many teachers are not convinced of the importance of providing more challenging tasks for their gifted and talented pupils.

Bright youngsters told inspectors they were forced to ask for harder work. Others were resentful at being dragooned into 'mentoring' weaker pupils. Three schoolgirls studying

Previous studies have pointed to a widespread ideological reluctance in schools and local authorities to champion academic excellence (file photo)

In nearly three-quarters of 26 schools studied, pupils designated as being academically gifted or talented in sport or the arts were 'not a priority', Ofsted found.

Teachers feared that a focus on the brightest pupils would 'undermine the school's efforts to improve the attainment and progress of all other groups of pupils'.

Such reasoning is just stupid. Applauding talented students for their work is not gonna make all the other kids sulk in jealousy, unless they’re already nursing an inferiority complex to begin with. When you have a child for whom the standard workload is simply too easy and therefore lacking in interest, you don’t hold them back because the other kids aren’t at their level; this creates frustration in more advanced students as they’re forced to deal with work that simply doesn’t match their capabilities. Brainiacs (and for the record, I see that term as a compliment) need to be challenged, they need to be pushed and kept interested in their assignments. Holding the best students back out of a fear that encouraging them to reach their full potentials could create feelings of “elitism” makes no more sense than forcing Leonardo da Vinci to stick with color crayons (or the historically accurate equivalent), for crying out loud. When someone is gifted, then they’re gifted, and to hell with how others may feel about it. There’s no reason for them to be held back if they can accomplish more.

(via Fark.com)
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