Notes from the Head of School

The "latest" Gifted Education Perspectives blog from Ben:

Please read and follow my blog: http://ben-hebebrand.blogspot.com/ 

Quest Academy featured in local media sources:

Please take a look at Quest media stories presented here in chronological sequence:

Oct. 18, 2012: Quest Academy's new Outdoor West Campus featured in Daily Herald:  Click HERE

Oct. 9, 2012: Quest Academy opens new pre-school space: Click HERE

Oct. 4, 2012: Quest Academy Founder is honored: Click HERE

Oct. 3, 2012: Quest Academy featured in Chicago Sun-Times story on gifted education: Click HERE

Aug. 17, 2012: Dr. Renzulli to speak at Quest Academy: Click HERE

Aug. 17, 2012: Quest Academy student earns science project award: Click HERE

June 28, 2012: Identification of giftedness in early childhood:Click HERE

June 28, 2012: Founder Helene Bartz passes away: Click HERE

June 6, 2012: Quest Academy breaks ground on new outdoor West Campus: Click HERE

May 31, 2012: Quest Academy breaks ground on new outdoor West Campus: Click HERE

May 23, 2012: Quest Academy students excel at State of Illinois Science Fair: Click HERE

Feb. 10, 2012: Twenty Quest Academy Students to enter Regional Science Fair: Click HERE

Jan. 27, 2012: Quest Academy students take 2nd place at state Lego competition: Click HERE

Oct. 14, 2011: Quest Academy Choir performs at Palatine Chamber of Commerce Annual meeting: Clik HERE

Oct. 11, 2011: Village of Palatine approves Quest Academy real estate acquisition: Click HERE

Oct. 11, 2011: Village of Palatine approves Quest Academy real estate acquisition: Click HERE

Sept. 21, 2011: Quest Academy plans expansion: Click HERE

July 8, 2011: Quest Academy sends seven students to National History Fair In College Park, Maryland: http://triblocal.com/palatine/community/galleries/2011/07/success-for-quest-academy-students-at-national-history-day-competition/

July 8, 2011: Quest Academy students impress at National History Fair: Click HERE

May 18, 2011: Quest Academy Scholastic Bowl Team Wins State Championship: Click HERE

May 1, 2011: Dr. Carol Dweck, author of Mindset, to speak at Quest Academy: Click HERE

April 14, 2011: Quest Academy Choral Students Shine at Choral Festival in Nashville, Tennessee: Click HERE

Jan. 17, 2011: Quest Academy celebrates Dr. Martin Luther King Day: Click HERE

March 19, 2009: Northwestern University's Center for Talent Development and Quest Academy enter a partnership: Click HERE  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gifted Education Perspectives

  • THINKING: Cogito Ergo Sum

    04/24/2013 9:31 AM

    By Benjamin Hebebrand, Head of School, Quest Academy


    Most – if not all of us – have encountered classrooms with posters encouraging us to THINK or we may also have encountered teachers who would use expressions such as “THINK before you answer.” I was lucky to have a teacher who encouraged me to think meta-cognitively by proclaiming “THINK about how you THINK.”
     
    “In teaching for thinking, the concern is not how many answers students know, but what they do when they do not know; the goal is not merely to reproduce knowledge, but to create knowledge and grow in cognitive abilities,” according to “Best Practices in Gifted Education” a 2007 publication released by the National Association for Gifted Children.
     
    Improving our students’ thinking most certainly is a goal in general education, but the field of gifted education has specifically researched thinking styles attributed to gifted children and how best to foster or teach thinking skills to gifted children.
     
    B. M. Shore and L.S. Kanevsky in a 1993 article identified seven possible differences or attributes as relates to cognition by gifted children. They are:
    ·         Gifted children may be able to draw upon more existing knowledge and use this knowledge more effectively
    ·         Gifted children more often and more efficiently engage in metacognitive processes
    ·         Gifted children give the cognitively complex parts of problem solving a greater commitment of time, allowing them to solve and report problems
    ·         Gifted children show greater understanding of problems especially in terms of commonalities and transfer (Personally, I will add here that as a bilingual person, I find my thinking has greatly benefitted by analyzing the similarities and differences between my native language of German and my second language of English)
    ·         Gifted children utilize assumptions that they will investigate systematically
    ·         Gifted children show greater flexibility in choosing strategies and points of view
    ·         Gifted children are intrigued joyfully and creatively when presented with complexity and challenge in their tasks
     
    Over the years, the identification of gifted children has given cognition greater emphasis. In 1993, R. J. Sternberg and E.L. Grigorenki contributed to this process by dividing thinking into three general areas, best illustrated by what they termed “mental self-government.”
    ·         Legislative function: This type of thinking involves the idea of creating, imagining, and planning
    ·         Executive function: This type of thinking facilitates implementation
    ·         Judicial function: This type of thinking incorporates all thinking related to the process of evaluating
     
    As far as fostering or nurturing a child’s thinking processes, teachers may well be served that thinking can indeed be taught and practiced. Particularly in the field of gifted education, but also in general education, we have come to employ the idea of “higher order (or level) thinking.” As teachers, we want our students to spend less time and work at the knowledge and comprehension levels but rather in the higher order thinking modes that Bloom’s taxonomy identifies with levels such as “application (of knowledge), analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.”
     
    More specifically, The NAGC Handbook of “Best Practices” outlines several broad categories to be included in daily instruction to help foster a child’s thinking: They are a) critical thinking; b) creative thinking; c) problem finding; d) metacognition; e) domain-specific (i.e. mathematics) patterns and forward thinking; f) correlational thinking; g) reflective inquiry; h) questioning created for memory, divergence, convergence, aesthetics, and ethics; i) inquiry and investigation; j) dialectical thinking skills; and k) Socratic discussion.
     
    In their 2005 publication entitled “Being gifted in school: An introduction to development, guidance, and teaching.” L.J. Coleman and T.L. Cross conclude that an “overwhelming majority of teaching methods reported in the literature on gifted education are variations on creativity, problem-solving themes. Their major characteristics involve suspension of judgment, practice in generating responses, and opportunities for children to consider how they think.”
     
    At our gifted education school, Quest Academy in Palatine, Illinois, we have for more than a decade designed our curriculum not primarily around knowledge and comprehension, but rather conceptual understandings to which we refer as Enduring Understandings. It is within those higher-level understandings that we then also spend instructional time on specific academic knowledge and comprehension. 

  • Defining Mathematical Giftedness in Elementary School Settings

    03/21/2013 12:48 AM

    by Ben Hebebrand, Head of School, Quest Academy



    The field of elementary school mathematics tends to be viewed as a sequential advancement of specific mathematical skills, occasionally resulting in a mindset that young students can accelerate their mathematical learning by “racing” or “flying” through checklists of specific mathematical skills. Indeed, I occasionally hear gifted education colleagues describing elementary mathematics as an “arms race” mentality, in which the checking off of specific sequential math skills such as single-digit or double-digit addition become the sole focus of math learning.

    Mathematics is indeed an undertaking far more than a simple progression of mathematic skills and operations. The definition of mathematical giftedness may indeed help us pinpoint what we believe to be essential in developing mathematical talent.

    Surprisingly, there has been “little research conducted on what constitutes mathematical giftedness,” according to M. Katherine Gavin and Jill L. Adelson, authors of a chapter entitled “Mathematics, Elementary,” published in the comprehensive gifted education handbook “Critical Issues and Practices in Gifted Education.” Most of the research focuses on the traits that mathematically gifted children display.
    In the late 1960s and most of the 70s, Russian psychologist V. A. Kruteskii in a Piaget-like manner observed students, aged between 6 and 16, whom he labeled “not capable,” “capable,” and “very capable.” His research has been divided into the four major giftedness categories of “flexibility, curtailment, logical thought, and formalization:

    • Flexibility: Students switch strategies in solving a problem with ease and numerous times to help them make sense of the problem.
    • Curtailment: Students skip several steps in the logical thought process because they see the solution as one whole thought as opposed to linearly connected logical steps. This phenomenon may help us understand why some gifted math students cannot explain their reasoning in finding a solution as they just cannot retrace any step-by-step process that are required for less capable math students.
    • Logical Thought: These are students who think in mathematical symbols such as “less/greater than” or “plus/minus” when filtering data that is being presented to them. These thinkers “look at the world from a logical perspective.”
    • Formalization: Based on just very few examples, students can see the overall structure of a problem and thus make generalizations very quickly.




    Agreeing on a universal definition of mathematical giftedness is further compounded by the sub-sets of algebra and geometry. Kruteskii spoke of students with an “algebraic cast of mind,” characterized by very abstract thinking, while “geometric” minds tend to visualize problems pictorially. Kruteskii actually observed that especially elementary-age students who displayed both minds, culminating in what he termed a “harmonic” mind, are highly capable mathematicians. One final important observation that Kruteskii contributed toward the idea of defining giftedness roots in attributes that actually are not “obligatory.” Specifically, he singled out “swiftness, computational ability, and memory for formulas and other details” as characteristics that do not necessarily contribute to mathematical giftedness.

    J.E. Davidson and R.J. Sternberg in a 1984 edition of Gifted Child Quarterly article entitled “The Role of Insight in Intellectual Giftedness, reported on work with fourth through sixth grade students that mathematically gifted students use three progressive “insight” processes:

    • Selective encoding: These students can “sift out” relevant information from a problem situation.
    • Selective combination: These students synthesize the relevant information.
    • Selective comparison: Students compared the information that had been synthesized together to other relevant information.



    While speed is highly valued in mathematical competitions such as the “Final Round” in a MATHCOUNTS contest, it is important to note that Davidson and Sternberg pointed out that ”speed in doing mathematics is important but is secondary to insight.” The remaining research in identifying characteristics of gifted math students points toward math students’ “focus on conceptual understandings,” “ability to abstract and generalize,” and “persistence and ability to make decisions in problem-solving situations.”

    In making the leap from defining mathematical giftedness to identifying mathematical giftedness, the practitioners of gifted education frequently – if not solely – rely on norm-referenced standardized intelligence, aptitude, and achievement tests. It is particularly the use of standardized achievement tests that is questionable, as those tests tend to focus on “low-level tasks that require students not to think and reason in ways that Kruteskii observed as defining attributes of mathematical giftedness,” as research by L.J. Sheffield of the National Research Center on Gifted and Talented points out. According to this research, the vast majority (up to 62 to 82% of the items) of questions dealt with the topic of number and operations, of which the clear majority focused on computation. The most common method in identifying mathematical giftedness is the practice of using out-of-level tests such as SSAT-L, PLUS, or EXPLORE (the test that both Quest Academy and the Center for Talent Development at Northwestern University employ). There is research that suggests these tests eliminate the ceiling effect (students reaching the highest level of their mathematical ability) for 98 percent of the students.


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