Although we often define gifted students by their intelligence, their unique social and emotional needs are often a surprising challenge. As a gifted kid myself, I knew nothing about these common issues nor did my parents. I wonder if the teachers in my gifted program even knew? By having a better understanding of gifted students’ needs, we can better serve as their teachers and mentors.
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Here are a few articles addressing some specific social-emotional needs of gifted learners.
Table Of Contents
- First, Fix Instruction
- Self-Doubt
- Challenges Come Way Too Late
- Advanced Here, But Not There
- Surprisingly Intense
- When They Don’t Fit The Stereotypes
- Hard To Find Friends
First, Just Fix Instruction
The easiest social-emotional win is to simply make sure students’ brains are being fed appropriately. High-quality, actually-interesting instruction will go a long way to making a kid happy at school. As a teacher, I shouldn’t have gotten quite so bogged down with social-emotional concerns while I was still asking low-level questions, accidentally crushing students’ curiosity, or handing out ✨bonus worksheets✨ when someone “finished fast”.
As a teacher, just getting better at teaching was my biggest win. Good instruction helps meet many social-emotional needs.
Onto some specific, possibly surprising, needs.
They Doubt Themselves
Highly-praised students can suffer from Impostor Syndrome, doubting that they’re as great as other people think. When people told me how smart I was or how great of a student I was, it added a very weird pressure. I felt like I was a fraud and didn’t deserve the praise I had received. I started to think that people expected me to be perfect and not have to work at it. Eventually, my own self-doubt led to a bit of a breakdown. Turns out that this is a common experience!
Read more about Impostor Syndrome.
Challenges Don’t Come Until College!
Everything’s easy for gifted kids… until it isn’t! They’ve been conditioned (often by our own well-intentioned praise) to associate “smart” and “easy.” So guess what happens when things get… “not easy”? Suddenly we have kids thinking “wait, maybe I’m not smart!” And, so often, this doesn’t happen until college, when so many supports are suddenly gone… yet students need help for the first time.
Read more about how calling kids “smart” while offering them easy work is a big problem.
Advanced Here, But Not There
Although their intelligence is (by definition) advanced beyond their age, other traits may be slower to develop, matching grade-level peers or even lagging behind expectations. The fancy term for this is asynchrony or, simply, developing out of sync. I like to use super-heroes as a metaphor: sure, the Flash is fast, but that doesn’t mean he’s equally strong. Or smart. Or able to read minds. Just because one area is advanced, doesn’t mean other areas will be.
Read more about how gifted students can lag behind and be advanced at the same time.
Surprisingly Intense
As part of their intense intelligence, gifted students often exhibit other intensities or overexcitabilities, including intense emotions, increased sensitivity to their five senses, lots of physical energy, and an intense imagination. These intensities don’t fit the stereotype of a “smart kid,” so students (and their parents) can start to worry that something’s up. It’s not!
Read more about intensities and overexcitabilities.
When They Don’t Fit The Stereotype
Our stereotype of the gifted child is often wildly inaccurate, leading to misidentification or overlooking gifted kids who don’t fit out preconceptions. My favorite example is Calvin, from Calvin and Hobbes, who is one example of a kid who probably would have benefited from a gifted program.
Read more about Calvin, the unidentified gifted student
Hard To Find Friends
Often, I hear parents say they kept their kid out of a gifted program out of a fear of some kind of social isolation. Friends. This is like denying someone water in the desert because you’re afraid they’ll get wet. Gifted kids need to be with people who are their intellectual peers. People who they can have a darn conversation with! Here’s me talking about how my own love of dinosaurs made it hard to find friends my own age (even though everyone else loved dinosaurs too).
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