Information and strategies to help gifted students navigate the social-emotional demands of the school culture.

1. Social Emotional
Needs of the Gifted
Jennifer Marten - February 2015

2. Defining Social Emotional Learning
● Recognize & manage their emotions
● Set & achieve positive goals
● Demonstrate caring & concern for others
● Establish and maintain positive relationships
● Make responsible decisions
● Handle interpersonal situations effectively
(from Judi Dodson’s presentation at Plain Talk about Reading and Learning)

3. Asynchronous Development
(h/t to Ian Byrd for the image)

4. Problems Associated with Asynchronous Development
● Uneven development
● Peer relations
● Excessive self-criticism
● Perfectionism
● Avoidance of risk-taking
● Multipotentiality

5. Behavior as a Result of Underdeveloped Skills
● Self Regulation
o ability to calm self/manage frustration
● Thought Stopping/Thought Interruption
o ability to short circuit the cycle of negative thinking
● Thinking Traps
o ability to recognize common patterns of thought
● Social Skills
o ability to take another person’s perspective
● Executive Functioning
o ability to think before acting & follow sequential steps
● Flexible Thinking
o ability to avoid becoming upset when things don’t happen as planned

6. Funnel and Cylinder Analogy
Gifted Students... ● Receive more information (large
funnel)
● Encounter more emotional stimulation
(filling up with unprocessed
experience)
● Make more connections (creating more
experience by their internal workings)
● See more options (having to apply
more emotional energy to deal with the
results of all that processed
experience)

7. “Trying to teach a child to relax in the midst of
high anxiety is like trying to teach someone
how to swim when there are sharks in the
water.”
~Jerome Schultz

8. Finding the Triggers
● Unstructured Time
● Transitions
● Writing demands
● Social demands
● Novel events/unexpected change

9. Emotional Thermometer
● Match feelings with strategies
o frustrated - get a drink, use calming box
● Narrate the behavior clues for students
o “Your voice is very high-pitched and your talking very fast, you
seem anxious.”
● Give explicit intructions/practice in self-calming
● Calming boxes
o Contains small items student can keep in a box in the desk for
use in times of stress

11. What may appear as a student’s defiance or
procrastination often is hidden anxiety or
stress.
~ Dr. Jerome Schultz

12. Procrastination
● Starting early/finishing early often means
more work (More-ferentiation)
● Anxiety over whether or not they CAN do
activity (Imposter Syndrome)
● Unsure of how to start (too many thoughts)

13. Reducing Resistance to Writing
● “How I Feel About Writing” sheet
o deconstruct writing into small parts to get students to
see the parts of writing they like or don’t mind
● Rate the difficulty of the writing assignment
before and after
● Use of technology (thoughts often come
faster than fingers can write)

14. Educational Flexibility
● Pace
● Difficult work without having to first do what
everyone else is doing
● Compacted curriculum
● Alternate assignments
“There is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequal people.” ~ Thomas Jefferson

15. Motivators
● Need to know the real world connection
(when will I ever use this?)
● Need to see relevance (why do I have to
show work?)
● When they ask why, they don’t mean to be
rude, they are just trying to sort and sift info.

16. Stressors
● Things that are timed
● Quick or unexpected changes in schedule
● Worry that there is something ‘wrong’ with
them
● Moving on before their curiosity is satiated
● Staying on topic after their curiosity is
satiated

17. Being gifted doesn’t mean they are high achieving; it just means they think
and see the world differently- mostly through making connections.

18. References
Interventions can salve unseen anxiety barriers
From Distress to De-Stress: helping anxious, worried kids
The survival guide for gifted kids
Gifted Children Are Frequently Misunderstood
Calvin the Unexpected Gifted Kid
9 things I Wish People Knew About Highly Gifted Kids
Funnel and Cylinder Theory of Gifted
Using an Emotional Thermometer
Nurturing Social-Emotional Development of Gifted Children
Self-Regulation Scale