A Recipe for Thriving: Setting 2e Students Up for Success, Part 3 of 3
✨ Do more of what makes you awesome ✨
This month we’ve been exploring the five best practices for serving twice-exceptional children in the classroom, as developed by pioneer Dr. Susan Baum and her colleagues. In Part 1, we unpacked what it means to create a psychologically safe environment using Nonviolent Communication and Restorative Justice practices. In Part 2, we dove into asynchrony, time, and friendship, and today we’ll dig into the final characteristic:
1. A psychologically safe environment
2. Tolerance for asynchrony
3. Time
4. The opportunity to forge positive relationships
5. A strength-based, talent-focused environment (Baum, et. al. 2017)
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A strength-based, talent-focused environment
Every single human, regardless of cognitive ability, wants to be known, by at least one person, for what they’re good at. It’s essential to our self-awareness, our self-efficacy, and our self-worth. Knowing where and how we excel, and then improving and growing in those areas of strength and talent, is any human’s best chance at finding fulfillment and contentment.
This doesn’t mean that hurdles to achievement should be bypassed or challenges ignored. Instead, it means that hurdles and challenges should be positioned as opportunities to grow and get better at what one already enjoys and naturally excels at.
When I opened Sunnyside Micro-School in the fall of 2017 in beautiful Oakland, CA, our unofficial tagline was “Do More of What Makes You Awesome.” This motto was everywhere at Sunnyside: posters, stickers, and on the front cover of binders. In other words, I wanted Sunnyside students to find their strengths, use their strengths, and love their strengths. Some of our students were (and I’m sure remain) amazingly creative in their ability to generate many solutions to a problem. Others were great reasoners and had massive amounts of stored knowledge on a range of topics. There were also performers who loved learning through performance and entertainment. Each of these students was seen wholly, and space was made for each of those unique characteristics to thrive. This space was not created incidentally, but by design.
Sunnyside students were welcome to access learning in a mode that worked for them. This might be through reading, videos, being read to, listening to an audiobook, interacting with infographics, and more. They were then invited to demonstrate that learning in a manner that was personal and meaningful to them. This is distinct from learning styles like “auditory learner” or “visual learner”; we know that teaching to learning styles is ineffective (Paschler, et. al. 2008). Rather, this is cognitive respect: understanding that a spectrum of cognitive capabilities requires a spectrum of learning modalities and approaches.
Moreover, as professionals, Sunnyside teachers were interested in what our students could do and what they loved to do. This is in contrast to most educational environments, which are built upon the idea that children need to be “made better,” and that they’re full of weaknesses that must be remedied. These weaknesses range from everything from not being able to read to not knowing how to be friends. While reading instruction and social education are vital aspects of education, there are ways of going about both that utilize a child’s strengths and talents. This is in contrast to the deficit model that most conventional education environments are operating from. The targets are the same, but the lens by which we bring them into focus are worlds apart.
Now that we’ve covered all five best practices, I’m curious about which one(s) resonated the most for you. Are you already incorporating these into your classroom—or what are some of your own best practices in working with 2e students?
For my paid subscribers (thank you!), I’m also opening up another round of Q&A. If you have any questions, particularly from this month’s posts, I’d love to hear them! Not a paid subscriber already? Unlock perks like Q&A and other paid subscriber-only events, as well as bonus posts on all things micro-school and cognitive diversity, by clicking the upgrade button below.
With gratitude,
Jade
References
Baum, S. M., Schader, R. M., & Owen, S., V. (2021). To be gifted and learning disabled: n Strength-based strategies for helping twice-exceptional students with LD, ADHD, ASD, and more (3rd ed.). Routledge.
Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2008). Learning styles. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 9(3), 105–119. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1539- 6053.2009.01038.x