Do Gifted Think Differently? (Education Implications)

This blog is about national development, and it delves into education and the advancement of people and ideas. One population that has often been ignored are the gifted who can invent and create things that others either struggle with or cannot do. Smart, rich, supported, easy access to Ivy League schools, etc. do open doors and make huge disparities between populations but the gifted are a different breed. The poor, minorities, and others can be born gifted and then the world gets very difficult for them until they fully develop and understand the limitations of their environment and can move around obstacles (i.e. the gifted curse).

Understanding the gifted provides a new framework for understanding how complex learning can occur in an online environment. It may be possible to accommodate standard and gifted learning in the same medium. One possible way to do that is to consider incorporating different learning styles into the same coursework. It is possible but would take some ability to understand these styles and complex layers of learning that the gifted often understand their world. 

Information can be provided on one level and deeper exploration on another so that each person can use their style and move to the depth they are capable of understanding. Moving into depth is one sphere of learning and connecting crosswise is others (interconnected curriculum). Even the idea of symbolism (mini symbolic subconscious puzzles) can be brought in as an additional pathway that enhances neural cognitive pathways built to understand complex problems (In theory.)

Others may naturally opt for a more standard approach and forgo the other complexities. The capacity to understand and the ability to dig into ideas is based in part in motivation. We see this now with some students who do the minimum and some who do a lot. Gifted are generally highly motivated when the coursework matches the interest and capacity.  They can solve a bigger problem that leads to insight. 

The advantage of this may be that one could then take what works out of the gifted learning approaches to enhance the speed of learning in the standard route thereby increasing total outputs of learning by objective measurements. This could be good for average students, and it could be used in application to enhance strategic thinking. (Remember this is in theory so we are sort of exploring it by possibility. It would appear on the surface that this is possible and there are mechanisms to do it. Some have done this already in a more face-to-face setting.)

A few questions….

Can you enhance and select the gifted virtually within the same curriculum as other students? Would it allow some to advance and highlight their skill in a way that is removed from the false anchoring’s of wealth and privilege? Could it enhance the training and development of some of our needed institutions (i.e. military)?What does that mean for future innovation and development nationally? I'm just thinking about the silliness of it all but it’s fun to think about it a little. 

You will notice from this example that the gifted think a little differently when compared to others and their thought processes often find many more variances as well as multiple heirarchies and associations between interconnected concepts. Some of this population might even be able to calculate probabilities based on real life scenarios and learned outcomes while still being able to give room for chance and variability. Are Gifted Minds Wired Differently?

The video below discusses some of the different learning styles. It is older but you can see the complexity by which the gifted learn. It can be enhanced with the right learning environment.