Clark, B.
Davidson Institute for Talent Development
2006
Source: Davidson Young Scholar Seminars
Barbara Clark, Ed.D. provides ideas based on the findings from neuroscience studies that can help parents understand and nurture children whose behaviors and needs are significantly beyond those usually found with children in their age range.
TIPS from 2007 Seminar
Brain research has developed into a knowledge base that can be used to explain and provide solutions for important issues including intelligence, learning and memory, the development of giftedness, gender differences, and underrepresentation of some cultures in the gifted population.
Key Points for understanding and applying brain research in your home:
- Intelligence is dynamic in development – both nature and nurture are critical.
- Neuroplasticity is available throughout life.
- Essentials for the growth of intelligence – Experience, integration, association, and feedback.
- Integration of brain functions develops understanding and retention.
- Memory requires change in the cell body – powerful experiences change short-term to long-term memory and create learning.
- Movement supplies oxygen to the brain and allows efficiency in learning.
- Belief is powerful; it affects all learning.
- There are important differences in the development of the brain by gender.
- The early years provide the foundation for intelligence.
- Memory requires change in the neural cell body, changes short-term to long-term memory, and creates learning.
- The culture of poverty critically affects brain development, especially during early learning. It also creates possible underrepresentation of some populations.
- In the growth of intelligence and brain development there is only progression or regression; the brain does not remain static or simply maintain.
According to brain research, an enriched environment includes:
- Space for learning
- A wide range and variety of materials for learning
- Stimulation to all of the senses
- Novel challenges appropriate for the child’s stage of development
- Access to ideas
- Social interaction with intellectual peers
- Exposure to a broad range of skills and interests: mental, physical, aesthetic, social, and emotional
- Choices and the opportunity to choose
- Exploration that engages the learner as an active participant in the learning process.
- Opportunities for self-evaluation
- For cognitive growth your child needs – numerous and varied experiences, support for exploration and decision making, challenges in areas of skill and interest, a variety of materials, availability to higher levels of knowledge, encouragement of curiosity, and problems to solve.
- For affective growth your child needs – choice & perceived control, opportunities to develop alternatives, mistakes to be seen as learning experiences, empowering language, and a safe place to be heard.
- For physical growth– relaxation, ways to reduce tension, room for movement, attractive and interesting spaces and places.
- For intuitive growth your child needs – expectation of and opportunities for creativity, frequent use of imagination, fantasy, and visualization to support learning, and opportunities to estimate and predict, and to know and be with both adults and children who value their hunches and insight.
Topics explored during the Seminar provided these tips:
The adolescent years:
Teens can cry, laugh, or get angry all in a short time. They can love and hate things and people at the same time. These mood swings are just as baffling for the teen as for the family. With gifted youngsters their high level of sensitivity can make this normal process even more disruptive and their perfectionist tendencies make this period more extreme. Parents can:
- Discuss feelings and emotions, especially mood swings, with their teens as a natural, but sometimes hard to handle, brain/body process.
- Read up on the specifics of these changes and how they affect the emotions and share the information with their teen. Be specific and supportive.
- Praise them often for things that go right. Help them establish supportive routines to provide stability in their lives.
- Try not to worry the small things. Listen with acceptance of your teen and a non-judgmental attitude of what is said even when you do not agree.
- Look at consequences with the youngster. Allow alternatives and choice.
- Celebrate successes.
Multitasking:
Studies show that doing more than one thing at a time or switching back and forth from one task to another involves time-consuming alterations in brain processing that reduce our effectiveness at accomplishing either one. These shifts have been shown to decrease rather than increase efficiency with both time and energy becoming depleted.
- Multi-tasking, so valued by our children, and even seen as necessary by many adults, actually results in inefficient shifts in our attention. Brain research has shown that actually our brain can work on only one thing at a time. It is designed to work most efficiently when it works on a single task and for sustained rather than intermittent and alternating periods of time.
- Multi-tasking or interrupting our concentration decreases our efficiency and our ACCURACY. Memory is affected and the important synthesis and connections the brain can so effectively create are lost.
The Gifted Brain:
The gifted brain is the result of a dynamic, stimulating interactive process that leads to high levels of intelligence and quantitative and qualitative differences in performance. How giftedness is expressed depends both on the genetic patterns of the individual and on the experiences provided by that individual’s environment.
- Children are not born gifted, but they are born with a unique and nearly unlimited potential.
- There are conditions needed to build the strong, integrated, flexible, complex brain we will call gifted.
- a variety of quality experiences from our early beginnings as the neural patterns and sequences are being formed.
- development of the concepts of integration, choice, patterns, and sequences starting with a child’s early experiences.
- feedback throughout the acquisition of knowledge and skills.
- enrichment of the environment and the experiences that the environment provides so that the growth of intelligence is facilitated and expanded rather than limited and inhibited.
- The qualities found in a gifted brain are
- more complex thought because of the larger number of dendrites the cells have developed as a result of stimulation
- thinking in more depth because of the biological changes in the cell body from continuing stimulation
- faster and more powerful thought processes due to more glial cell production resulting in increased myelination of the axon sheath resulting in faster synaptic exchanges.
- all of these processes are dynamic and require stimulation at the level of the child’s development.
- If there is not progress, there is regress; it is not possible for a brain to just maintain function
- Optimal learning and intellectual development requires that the environment be viewed as a support for learning including the physical environment, social-emotional environment and the instructional environment.
For further reading on this area of inquiry and research a few suggestions are:
Brizendine, L. (2006). The female brain. New York: Morgan Road Books.
Clark, B. (2008). Growing up gifted (7th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill/Prentice Hall/ Pearson.
Diamond, M., & Hopson, J. (1998). Magic trees of the mind. New York: Dutton.
Edelman, G. M.(2004). Wider that the sky: The phenomenal gift of consciousness. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press.
Hawkins, J., & Blakeslee, S. (2004). On intelligence. New
York: Times Books/Henry Holt.
Kandel, E. R. (2006). In search of memory: The emergence of a new science of mind. New York: W. W. Norton.
LeDoux, J. (2003). Synaptic self: How our brains become who we are. New York: Penguin Books.
Restak, R. (2003). The new brain: How the modern age is rewiring your mind. Rodale.com
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TIPS from 2003 Seminar
The knowledge of the brain, how it functions, how it develops intelligence and memory, and its amazing possibilities for learning is growing daily. This information will allow parents to increase their ability to understand and nurture their children. Here are a few ideas based on the findings from neuroscience and the results of their application that can help parents understand and nurture children whose behaviors and needs are significantly beyond those usually found with children in their age range.
As much as possible, integrate development of the cognitive, social/emotional, physical, and intuitive functions of the brain in the activities the child participates. This will often happen naturally at home, but usually must be purposefully planned at school. Make use of the community and all its resources for field trips and explorations. Expose the child to as many disciplines, cultures, and ideas as possible. These can be more than just visits, they can be learning experiences and discoveries of the how, why, and when of other cultures, other people, and other knowledge. By seeing many facets of the world the child may find his or her life’s passion.
Developing Cognitive Abilities:
- Develop a responsive learning environment in your home where the child can discover basic and complex concepts, experiment with ideas, and experience many ways of learning and areas of knowledge.
- Value reading and story telling
-Have many types of reading material available in the home.
-Show your child your enjoyment of reading.
-From infancy, read to your child and tell stories including fantasy, personal stories that include adventures of the child and members of the family, stories to teach about parts of the body, events of the day, and knowledge of our world. Encourage the child to share their stories, verbally and in writing.
-Make the library and book store a familiar part of the child’s life.
- Balance the time the child spends on electronic input with time spent with many other forms of play and learning.
- Allow children to make decisions as soon as they understand the consequences of the decision, and allow them to take increasing responsibilities for their learning and behavior. Make sure there is a lot of choice available in the environment.
- Teach the child about how the brain functions in this area appropriate to the child’s level of understanding. Help the child understand how these functions affect his or her life and how to personally enrich these functions.
Developing Social/Emotional Abilities:
- Allow the child to work and play with intellectual peers regardless of age in addition to age peers.
- Make home a safe place where the child can try out ideas and share concerns and successes.
- Plan a time daily when the child can have each parent alone with the parent’s full attention for mutual sharing.
- Share your experiences with perfectionism, feeling inadequate, and other issues from your life and how you handled them when the child is facing these very concerns in his or her life.
- Teach the child about how the brain functions in this area appropriate to the child’s level of understanding. Help the child understand how these functions affect his or her life and how to personally enrich these functions.
Developing Physical Abilities:
- Find activities that the child enjoys that challenge physical abilities in addition to intellectual abilities that are often preferred.
- Help the child enjoy physical activities without the pressure of always working to maximize performance. Learning about the body and the enjoyment of movement is important.
- Value and teach relaxation techniques for the child’s use and how to know when such use is necessary.
- Teach the child about how the brain functions in this area appropriate to the child’s level of understanding. Help the child understand how these functions affect his or her life and how to personally enrich these functions.
Developing Intuitive Abilities:
- Allow time for both planned and unplanned, spontaneous activities
- Make it safe for the child to share ideas, observations, and personal experiences, especially within the intuitive areas.
- Expose the child to the fine and performing arts as a participant, observer, and creator.
- Teach the child about how the brain functions in this area appropriate to the child’s level of understanding. Help the child understand how these functions affect his or her life and how to personally enrich these functions.
The following are some common characteristics of highly and profoundly gifted individuals:
- An extraordinary speed in processing information.
- A rapid and thorough comprehension of the whole idea or concept.
- An unusual ability to perceive essential elements and underlying structures and patterns in relationships and ideas.
- A need for precision in thinking and expression resulting in need to correct errors and argue extensively.
- An ability to relate a broad range of ideas and synthesize commonalities among them.
- A high degree of ability to think abstractly that develops early.
- Appreciation of complexity; finding myriad alternative meanings in even the most simple issues or problems.
- An ability to learn in an integrative, intuitively nonlinear manner.
- An extraordinary degree of intellectual curiosity.
- An unusual capacity for memory.
- A long concentration span.
- A fascination with ideas and words.
- An extensive vocabulary.
- Ability to perceive many sides of an issue.
- Argumentativeness.
- Advanced visual and motor skills.
- An ability from an early age to think in metaphors and symbols and a preference for doing so.
- Ability to visualize models and systems.
- Ability to learn in great intuitive leaps.
- Highly idiosyncratic interpretations of events.
- Awareness of detail.
- Unusual intensity and depth of feeling.
- A high degree of emotional sensitivity.
- Highly developed morals and ethics and early concern for moral and existential issues.
- Unusual and early insight into social and moral issues.
- An ability to empathetically understand and relate to ideas and other people.
- An extraordinarily high energy level.
- A need for the world to be logical and fair.
- Conviction of correctness of personal ideas and beliefs.
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