The Rockaway College Concept Paper: Student Population

II. THE STUDENT POPULATION OF ROCKAWAY COLLEGE: 

While the learning programs of The School and The College are meant to include the full spectrum of Gifted and Talented, they are meant mostly to directly serve the Twice-Exceptional (2E), also known as the Gifted and Talented Learning Disabled (GTLD).  

Generally speaking, this population is characterized by wide discrepancies in strengths and weaknesses and by asymmetrical growth in social, emotional and cognitive aspects of personality making schooling success problematical within contemporary, grade level standardized school settings    

Conventional understanding of this population separates exceptionalities into gifts/talents and disabilities and thus produces the following characteristics which themselves are divided into gifts and disabilities (from “A Guidebook for Twice Exceptional Students”, Montgomery County Public Schools, Rockville, MD; and, “Twice-Exceptional Students:  Gifted Students with Disabilities”, Colorado Department of Education, Denver, CO).  Note: The bright neuro-diverse child may possess some, but not all, the listed characteristics at the same time or even over a life-time.

    

-Gifts: 

     • highly self-directed

     • a wide range of interests not related to school topics

     • a specific talent or consuming interest area for which they have an exceptional memory and knowledge

     • extreme curiosity and questioning

     • high levels of problem-solving and reasoning skills

     • penetrating insights

     • high levels of divergent thinking

     • extreme creativity in their approach to tasks

     • very inventive

     • an unusual imagination

     • artistic

     • uninhibited and articulate in expressing their independently developed advanced ideas and opinions

     • a superior vocabulary

     • highly empathetic

 -Disabilities:

     • a dramatically uneven cognitive/social-emotional growth

     • very high energy levels

     • difficulty sitting for tests, evaluation tests as well as typical classroom tests

     • perfectionist

     • discrepant verbal and performance abilities

     • deficient or extremely uneven academic skills which causes them to lack academic initiative, appear academically unmotivated, avoid school tasks, and frequently fail to complete assignments

     • extreme frustration with school

     • auditory and/or visual processing problems which may cause them to respond slowly, to work slowly, and to appear to think slowly

     • problems with long-term and/or short-term memory

     • motor difficulties exhibited by clumsiness, poor handwriting, or problems completing paper-and-pencil tasks

     • lack of organizational and study skills, often appearing to be extremely “messy”

     • unable to think in a linear fashion

     • difficulty in following directions

     • easily frustrated, gives up quickly on tasks and is afraid to risk being wrong or making mistakes

     • distractible, unable to maintain attention for long periods of time

     • unable to control impulses

     • emotionally immature

     • misread social cues

     • poor social skills

     • highly sensitive to criticism

     • possess low self-esteem “disguised” through the use of any or all of the following behaviors:

        • withdrawal

        • daydreaming and fantasy

        • apathetic behaviors

        • disruptive behaviors

        • clowning behaviors

        • denial of problems

        • anger

        • self-criticism

        • crying

The bifurcation of the neuro-diverse into gifts/talents and disabilities divides intervention and accommodation into the same manner as other children with the same special need, resulting in a total inability to meet the needs of this population. 

Gifts are served through Acceleration and Enrichment.  Acceleration turns out to be more of the same conventional subject content and skills paced faster than regular education.  This fails the bright neuro-diverse as it leaves the disabilities unaddressed and it denies their unique gifts in self-direction, divergent thinking, a wide range of interests not related to school topics as well as a specific talent or consuming interest area for which they have an exceptional memory and knowledge, among others.  Enrichment is the imposition on the gifted of what is thought by teachers and other school officials to be of interest to gifted students.  This fails the bright neuro-diverse as, it, too, leaves disabilities unaddressed and it, also, cannot account for the high degree of self-direction, not to mention the denial of other characteristics such as a wide range of interests unrelated to enrichment topics, or a specific talent or consuming interest area for which they have an exceptional memory and knowledge, among other gifts.

Disabilities are served through the “Continuum of Services”, the overarching goal of which, especially in New York City, is “to enable special needs children to learn the same content at the same pace as their non-disabled peers.” (Garth Harries, Memorandum Regarding Recommendations to Improve Services to Students with Disabilities, July 2, 2009, pp. 7-8)  This grand objective is undertaken almost exclusively through the remediation of deficit.  Remediation applies various degrees and levels of strategies to enhance cognitive weakness so a deficit area works roughly equal to the same cognitive area in non-disabled peers.  This fails the bright neuro-diverse as the Continuum completely ignores gifts and as its laser focus on remediation falsely assumes children’s neurology is in need of repair and is amenable to being reversed to approximate the operation of regular education peers.

In New York City, where Rockaway College is to be sited, the bright neuro-diverse are placed in special education.  The Department of Education operationally defines giftedness as those scoring within the top 10^th percentile on admissions tests, which excludes the bright neuro-diverse as they do poorly on these assessments. (Recall the characteristic:  • difficulty sitting for tests, evaluation tests as well as typical classroom tests.)

Since disabilities mask gifts and, thus, disabilities are easier to recognize in classroom performance than gifts, disabilities, then, are identified, gifts are not, creating a mis-placement of the bright neuro-diverse in special education.

Outcomes demonstrate the failure of the current approach for Special Needs which include the bright neuro-diverse:

          --Graduation statistics for the class of 2009 show that only 1 in 4 [that is 25% of] students with disabilities graduated from high school in 4 years.

          --Data released by New York State education officials calculates that just under 17% of students with disabilities in New York State graduate high school college and career ready.  (Out of School and Unprepared, Arise Coalition, February 2011, p. 2)

Unlike the conventional approach to this population, Rockaway College follows the neurology of the child to create schooling success for this population in the way Susan Baum follows the talent (To Be Gifted and Learning Disabled: Strategies for Helping Bright Students with LD, ADHD, and More, 2004), in the way Thomas Armstrong follows the gifts (Neurodiversity: Discovering the Extraordinary Gifts of Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia and Other Brain Differences, 2010), in the way Stanley Greenspan follows the autistic child’s capacities in Floortime (The Floortime Approach to Helping Children Relate, Communicate and Think, 2003), andin the way Maria Montessori follows children’s sensitive periods (The Secret of Childhood,1966). 

Following the neurology of children, Rockaway College comes to operationally assume that the bright neuro-diverse present a synthesis of both giftedness/talentedness and cognitive/social-emotional deficit where strength and innate compensated weakness create a unique and indivisible learning style, The Neuro-Learning Style, that cognitive deficits will never be remediated to approach strength, or to a rough equality with non-deficit peers, as innate neurological construction sets inelastic cognitive capacities even as children grow to maturity, that learned compensatory strategies can work together with strengths and innate compensated weakness to achieve tasks, and that the individual Neuro-Learning Style of each child will emerge as an intrinsic motivation toward different aspects of learning content and skills, establishing quality differentiated outcomes for the different Neuro-Learning Styles.  Following the neuro-learning style works in Rockaway College to achieve learning tasks as each Neuro-Learning Style self-selects knowledge acquisition according to the dynamic of strength/compensated weakness satisfying students’ needs.