Reversing Underachievement

 

Adapted from Gifted Underachievement: Root Causes and Reversal Strategies Handbook

Alexander R. Pagnani from The University of Georgia

Identification Tips for Guidance Counselors 

 

• Work to educate your school’s guidance/counseling staff about the issue of   gifted underachievement.
• Actively seek to identify your school’s underachieving gifted, and use this handbook to develop a plan of services.
• Continue working to reevaluate and improve your school’s gifted identification procedures, to help discover non-identified gifted underachievers.
• Never use gifted education services as a carrot for academic or behavioral expectations, or threaten to withhold them as a stick.

Tips for Guidance Counselors 

• Focus reversal programs on matching tailored services to demonstrated student needs.  Recognize that each student’s reversal plan will look different as a result.  
• Act as a liaison between teachers, school counselors, gifted education coordinators, and parents to create a services plan.  Disseminate information and ensure that all are on the same page.
• Educate parents on the need to express consistent, positive messages about education and its importance.
• Support outreach programs that educate new parents on child development, parenting styles, and the “happy medium” between dependence and domination.
Tips for Teachers 
• Emphasize self-efficacy to build student motivation.  Show students that they can achieve by assigning small projects at first, and building up in scope and complexity as the child’s self-confidence improves.
• Maintain high expectations for your students at all times.  Expect them to succeed and show them how to succeed.
• Work to actively teach organizational study skills.  Demonstrate that one’s process is as important as one’s products.
• Build close connections with students’ parents if possible, both to understand your students’ home lives and to ensure that parents are sending the same messages that you are.  

Lesson Strategies That Help

Bibliotherapy / Cinematherapy

 One of the most creative ways to address students’ social and emotional needs, whose deficiencies can often cause gifted underachievement, involves the use of therapeutic books or films.

Bibliotherapy and cinematherapy (often called “guided reading” or “guided viewing”) each have a long history in academic research – and an even longer history of use in “real world” educational settings.  Books and films hold cherished places in our culture, and matching students to a story is a good way to show them that they are not alone in their problems.

 When students read a book or view a film that features a similarly troubled protagonist, they often progress through four stages of emotional response: 
Identification, catharsis, insight, and application (Hébert & Kent, 2000).  The first stage involves realizing the connection they share with the character, based on the common challenges they face.  The second stage is one of emotional relief, echoing the words of
C. S. Lewis in that “We read to discover that we are not alone” (Hébert & Kent, 2000).  The third stage is one of insight, as the student reads or watches as the protagonist solves or copes with his dilemma, providing a model for the student to follow in his or her own life.  The final stage occurs when the student takes the lesson and applies it to his or her own social or emotional challenges, hopefully with a similar positive outcome.  Teaches and guidance counselors who successfully use bibliotherapy and cinematherapy to aid their students’ development typically follow a six step plan:


1. Assess the student’s needs and interests - What factors are causing the child to underachieve?  Does a quality book, in an area of student interest, exist to help?
2. Choose an individual or group approach - Is this problem common? Would bringing a group of similar students together be therapeutic - or embarrassing?
3. Select an appropriate book or film – Is the book interesting to students?  Is it realistic?  Have I previewed it, to make sure it is clean and appropriate?
4. Enjoy the book or film with your students - individually or as a group/class?
5. Discuss the story together – How can I use the book as a lens to address student needs?  What questions can help them progress from identification to insight?
6. Assign fitting follow-up exercises – What extension activities would help learning to continue?  Which ones would have real meaning and value?

Discussion is the lynchpin of bibliotherapy and cinematherapy – and educators must be careful in structuring their questions.  Students need to be brought along to the idea of “opening up” quite slowly, and must be provided with introspective “cool down” time as well.  I recommend a “bell curve” approach to question intensity, with non-threatening opening questions, gradual incorporation of the character’s issues, open identification discussion, time spent discussing the character’s solutions, and a return to non-threatening concluding remarks.
Plenty of resources exist to help counselors and teachers locate quality books or films that address common social and emotional challenges.  Three of the most beneficial, yet most overlooked, are the school’s media center specialists, public librarians, and bookstore employees.  In addition, the Internet can be a treasure-trove of book recommendations and reviews.  When selecting a book or film, remember that it must have initial appeal to the students – look to their interests and hobbies, and try to “hook” them with those.   Remember as well that you are not looking for a book about underachievement, but rather about the problems causing your student to underachieve.