So not a lot of people are probably familiar with the phrase twice exceptional and in the
school system it’s a diagnosis to describe kids who simultaneously have a specific learning
disability whether it’s a reading difficulty, dyslexia, ADHD, any one of the learning disabilities
you could be diagnosed for.
So you simultaneous have a specific learning disability and you’re intellectually gifted,
intellectually or creatively gifted.
We have this false dichotomy that we’ve set up in the school system between learning
disabled and gifted that if you’re in special education for instance that it’s kind of
hard for us to see how you could also be gifted, right.
You could also be extraordinarily intelligent, extraordinarily creative.
And this label of twice exceptional was created to recognize that there are so many people
who have been diagnosed with a learning disability but that is not the totality of who they are.
That does not define all who they are both their strength – all of us have strengths
and weaknesses and a lot of people who have learning disabilities it can mask their strengths.
But their strengths are still there.
And we could still get at it in other ways through projects, through just recognizing
that they are not defined by their learning disability.
And there’s a lot of researches, psychologists and clinicians that are starting to figure
out new ways of finding the intelligence in people that tend to fall by the wayside.
And there’s new methodologies and new techniques that we’re using to discover the giftedness
that lies in lots of students.
There’s been an over reliance on looking at the global IQ score to assess someone’s
intelligence.
So like someone will take an IQ test and you average together their performance on the
entire test.
Well it shows that students who are twice exceptional or students who have learning
disabilities that’s not the good reflection of their true intelligence just averaging
together their performance in a testing session.
Because their learning disability can mask and pull down certain areas but they can still
show extraordinarily high areas in other ways that gets lost when you average it all together.
So there are new methodologies that we’re using to not just measure someone’s intelligence
or creativity just through a testing session.
First of all we’re using IQ tests to look at specific abilities and patterns of strengths
and weaknesses.
So not looking at that global or total IQ score.
But we’re also going beyond the IQ test and we’re getting teacher ratings.
You know the more you can triangulate lots of different information from lots of different
sources you get a much better reflection of someone’s intelligence and creativity.
Parent ratings – ask parents what’s a child like at home, you know?
Is the child really curious?
Is the child constantly asking questions?
Ask teachers.
Does the child seen like they’re bored with the material that you’re teaching?
Are they ready for more intellectual challenges?
Do they seem to question assumptions a lot?
A lot of the indicators of creativity there’s lots of other characteristics we can be on
the lookout for intellectual and creative giftedness that go beyond IQ type competencies.
Things like deep sensitivity, a deep caring about the world and about the suffering of
others.
It doesn’t even have to just be in the academic domain.
And I think we just need to keep our eyes open to as many potential indicators of intelligence
and creativity that is all around us and so we can really make sure that we limit the
amount of students that fall between the cracks.