Judy Weiner is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and Licensed Clinical Social Worker who specializes in the social-emotional needs of gifted and twice-exceptional (2e) individuals. She is affiliated with SENG (Supporting Emotional Needs of the Gifted), leads parent groups, and serves on the Oak Park Unified School District GATE Advisory Committee. 

Judy framed her presentation around the Columbus Group’s definition of giftedness: asynchronous development where advanced cognitive abilities and emotional intensity create inner experiences that are qualitatively different from the norm. This asynchrony often increases with intelligence and requires adjustments in parenting, teaching, and counseling to support optimal development. 

She encouraged parents to reflect on how their expectations align with their child’s unique profile, reminding them that success looks different for every gifted child. 

Factors Contributing to Underachievement: 

Judy discussed common contributors to underachievement in gifted youth, including: 

• Identity and peer issues 
• Multipotentiality (high ability in many areas) 
• Schoolwork that is too easy or too difficult 
• Poor study or organizational skills 
• Perfectionism and procrastination 
• Power struggles caused by over-involved parenting 

Instilling a growth mindset can help gifted students understand that intelligence is not static and can be developed. This can lead to a desire to learn and tendencies to embrace challenges, learn from criticism, and be inspired by others’ success.  

Understanding Motivation: 

Judy emphasized that behavior is a form of communication. She used the iceberg metaphor to show how surface-level behaviors may stem from deeper issues like anxiety, skill deficits, or unmet emotional needs. Open conversations can help uncover these hidden challenges. 

Supporting Passions and Interests: 

One way to build motivation is by supporting the areas and topics children care most about. Encouraging curiosity, facilitating access to experiences, and offering opportunities aligned with their passions can improve engagement and self-confidence. 

Creating the Right Learning Fit: 

Judy highlighted the importance of working with educators to ensure appropriate pacing and challenge. She defined differentiation as tailoring the curriculum to match a student’s learning level, style, and interests, and not simply giving more or harder work. Ideally, learning should fall within the child’s Zone of Proximal Development, where tasks are challenging enough to stimulate growth without being overwhelming. 

Judy’s Recommended Books: 

• Mistakes That Worked by Charlotte Foltz Jones 
• Ish by Peter H. Reynolds 
• Letting Go of Perfect by Jill Adelson and Hope Wilson 
• How to Motivate Your Child for School and Beyond by Andrew Martin 
• Why Bright Kids Get Poor Grades by Sylvia Rimm 
• Moving Past Perfect by Thomas S. Greenspon 

Coming This Fall: 

We’re excited to keep the conversation going with two upcoming sessions you won’t want to miss:

• On Wednesday, September 10, join us for Secrets to Finding the Best-Fit High School, a practical and timely discussion for families navigating the next step in their child’s educational journey (in-person session).
• On Wednesday, October 8, we’ll take a deeper dive into perfectionism in Practical Interventions for the Practically Perfect. Gifted education expert Lisa Van Gemert will share strategies you can use right away to help gifted youth manage perfectionistic thinking and behaviors (virtual session).

Mark Erlandson, the parent of a gifted student who presently attends a boarding school out East, is a former lawyer and public high school English teacher from Wisconsin starting a new business as a legal writing consultant.

Now that my daughter is a high school senior and headed off to college in the fall, among the items I worry about is whether we have properly prepared her to be academically successful there. At first blush, the idea seems absurd. We have read to her since she was a baby, provided intellectually stimulating activities while limiting television and electronics, even sent her to an elite boarding school. What else could we possibly have done?  While it is too late for me, don’t let it become too late for you: Teach your gifted child good study habits.

Many gifted students have never really experienced a true academic challenge during high school, especially those who were not enrolled in special schools, even if they have taken AP or honors classes. For them, education is the memorization of facts to be regurgitated at a later date. Therefore, when these students encounter the more rigorous and demanding curriculum of college, they may be without the effective study skills and habits necessary since colleges require more application of concepts rather than just memorization of facts. (See my last blog for a discussion of the “grit” they will also need to meet this challenge.) Most students look at studying as simply re-reading or restudying class material that was not very challenging to begin with.

This type of study experience will only lead to boredom and frustration. Therefore, if your child is not challenged in his or her regular classes, provide challenging material and projects yourself. Although many experts recommend making this material interesting as well, it is probably best to provide a mixture of both subject matter that your child enjoys and subject matter he or she finds less interesting. Life requires us to persevere and use our study skills in both situations.

Here are some important study skills gifted students need to acquire:

1. 1. Time management – often gifted students have been able to still succeed while procrastinating and completing assignments at the last minute. Help your child learn to:
      • study at a regular time every day and week – make it a habit;
      • set a daily, weekly, and semester schedule, assigning amounts of time to each subject or project;
      • be sure to revise this schedule periodically;
      • prioritize goals on a daily basis – priorities will change as deadlines approach;
      • break long-term projects into short-term attainable steps.

1. 1. Motivation – help your child to:
      • recognize the “real world” application of the material being learned, e.g., a poetry analysis develops not only analytical skills applicable across a spectrum of occupations, but the creativity employers emphasize and  21st century jobs require;
      • define success as learning new material and working hard, not getting an A on an assessment. Praise effort.

1. 1. Organization:
      • find a place free of everyday clutter to study;
      • visit office supply stores to get an idea of all of the possible products available to help with organization;
      • let the student select the organizational method (your method may not work for them);
      • realize the first choice of organization aids may not work and another method may need to be tried.

1. 1. Studying in chunks:
      • try not to study for longer than 25 minutes as studies show the brain struggles to concentrate on a specific topic for longer than that;
      • break for about five minutes at a time, no longer;
      • if possible, change your environment when you change subject or topic, e.g., study for the math exam in the bedroom and the literature exam in the kitchen (it will help your brain to recall and organize information);
      • start with a harder subject/topic and then alternate with easier ones.

1. Note-taking:
   • take notes when listening to a lecture. (Practice with a TED lecture online if the content presented in class is too easy);
   • develop an abbreviation and punctuation system that makes sense to you;
   • use indentation and white space on the page to separate and organize information;
   • consider a formal method of note-taking, e.g., Cornell notes;
   • check your notes as soon as possible after taking them to make sure they are complete and coherent;
   • re-write your notes as a way of reviewing for an assessment;
   • use mnemonic devices to help recall information from notes.

Two very helpful sites for finding more information about study skills and strategies are Study Guides and Strategies and Cybrary Man’s Educational Web Sites: Study Skills/Organization. Dartmouth College has some excellent videos for those who are visual learners.

In some ways, being gifted can sometimes seem more like a curse. Developing study habits is one way to combat that.

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Lisa is the mother of 3 gifted children and lives outside of San Francisco.

My oldest son didn’t get his first letter grade until he was a senior in high school. His elementary and middle schools did not give grades. In high school, the students only received a single GPA. His assessments were in the form of red lined papers or handwritten comments. By the time he received his first letter grade in the fall of his senior year of high school, it was too late to make any difference; the letters had no meaning and they did not motivate him.

Despite the lack of external grade motivation, my son worked hard and did very well in middle school and high school. He didn’t start that way. In elementary school, he daydreamed. He did only what was required of him in the classroom and no more. I had to ask myself, how did my oldest son go from a daydreaming 5th grader to the top of his high school class without the hammer or carrot of a letter grade? Where did he find the motivation to do well in school?

While looking for an answer, I ran across an article in the November 2012 edition of Scientific American Mind. According to this article, motivation is derived from three critical elements: Autonomy, Value and Competence. Research suggests that you will have more motivation if you feel in charge, feel capable and find meaning in the activity. With this new framework, I thought about my son’s last 8 school years.

In elementary school, I felt as though I had to do a lot of prodding because he showed so little initiative. I didn’t allow him to have autonomy. So, that particular element had to be satisfied elsewhere. The second element, value, had to come from the rewarding feeling of a job well done—right? He didn’t agree. He found no satisfaction in an error-free worksheet. That element also had to come from somewhere else. All I had to work with were his feelings of competence. Unfortunately, he felt most competent when doing work he could master quickly, and he shrank from more difficult challenges. Somehow, I needed him to get out of his comfort zone.

So, I know it wasn’t the grades or my parenting that provided the catalyst for my son’s change in behavior. What made the difference? I talked to my son and asked him how he developed the motivation to excel at school. His comments all focused on how his learning experience changed.

Project Based Learning

Project based learning gave my son a sense of autonomy and imbued his work with value. Allowing my son to have a choice in designing a project and the ability to display his unique vision was the key to helping him find meaning in his work. For example, my son designed and built a scale model of a solar house in 6th grade. The project spanned math and science. He used angle geometry to compute ideal overhangs and created a budget for the construction. He studied how the location of the sun in the sky varies in different places and times. He even tested the effectiveness of his design at the Pacific Energy Center‘s heliodon in San Francisco. 7 years later, my son still has the project in his bedroom.

Inspiring Teachers

How do you get a child to value information that he perceives has nothing to do with his day to day life? You either help him find meaning or introduce him to someone who finds it incredibly meaningful. My son’s history teacher was so passionate about the colonists that he would pound on desks and turn over chairs during a lesson. Who knew the puritans could elicit so much passion? His middle school writing teacher, an aspiring novelist himself, provided intriguing, open-ended character prompts as jumping off points for student work. While the teacher provided the inspiration, my son created work that was all his own. His self-evaluation said it all:

“When I’m writing on my own, my work is my own. My writing belongs to my world, slowly weaving meaning in the threads of my life… My god, I’m building a world, not a string of imitations.”

Meaningful Feedback

The third element, competence, was enhanced by the feedback provided by the teachers. In the detailed written evaluations by his teachers, my son discovered that he was admired for the generosity he showed his classmates as he shared insights and techniques. He was celebrated for his curiosity and ingenuity. When he received constructive criticism, he knew what to do to improve, increasing his sense of accomplishment and at the same time giving him a sense of control over his progress. These words of encouragement and criticism did more for him than an A. His confidence grew with each evaluation.

We all know that the process of learning can be inherently motivating, but as parents, we feel that we have little influence over the process. So, we focus on outcomes. But we do have some influence over what classes they take and why. We can choose to talk about what they got on a test or how they felt about what they were learning. I was put to the test when my son wanted to learn how to perform on the trapeze instead of taking the AP prep class and exam. He’s still performing on the trapeze in college and decided to stop taking math classes. Despite my misgivings, I hope that by allowing him to choose classes and activities that he values and that make him feel competent, he will end up motivated, productive and happy.

What motivates your kids? Please share in the comment section below.

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