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Cutting Loose

Kids in a Tacoma pull-out program form bonds of acceptance

TACOMA, Washington— Twenty-one fifth-graders sit on the floor in a large circle, each clutching a piece of the rope that teacher Susan Wiley has woven through her class of highly capable students at Lowell Elementary School.

Some students hold tightly to the rope, while others finger it nervously—wrapping it gently around their wrists and hands or shaping it into a miniature lasso. It's the last day of class together for this batch of Challenge kids. They have attended Wiley's daylong pull-out program for three years, and next year they will scatter to different middle schools, new homes, and faraway destinations (one child will move to Mississippi, another to Jakarta, Indonesia, when school ends).

Wiley, holding the two ends of the 30-foot rope in her lap, looks around the circle of children, takes a deep, calming breath, and begins. "This is really important to me," she says. "And I hope it will be meaningful to each of you. This is our last session together, so please take this seriously."

The students quiet down and focus on their teacher. Wiley asks them to reflect for a moment on how life is like the rope they hold in their hands. Several students immediately shoot their hands in the air, but Wiley slows the process with a gesture that says, "Hands down. Think about this for a moment." After reflecting briefly, students talk about how knots in the rope represent problems in life that must be unraveled and overcome. And they discuss how a rope can break or snap when the tension is too tight. It's important, they note, to know how to take care of yourself and to relieve the tensions in your own life. "How do you do that?" Wiley asks. "Where do you go when your rope is too tight?"

The students' answers reflect the transitional place they are in life. Behind them is the world of childhood, and ahead of them lies the unknown world of adolescence. "Usually, I find somebody I can trust to talk to," says one boy. "I listen to music," offers another. "I sit on my swing and sing," says a girl in the class. "I talk to my teddy bear about all of my problems," a girl confides.

One boy says he looks for a quiet place to think. "I like getting away from people," he says, "so I go to my room. I can climb out my window and sit on the roof and be by myself."

Wiley listens, then asks for a verbal contract from the students. "I charge each of you next year to find an adult—someone you can trust and talk to—to go to when you need help. It will be real important that each of you have a trusted adult in your life."

Wiley goes around the circle and ceremoniously cuts each of the children loose, leaving them with a strand of rope that will serve as a reminder of how they are linked together and how they can rely on each other in the future.

The shared strategies for addressing emotional issues remove feelings of isolation often felt by gifted children, Wiley says. "Students in this class trust they will be accepted and supported by each other, which is not always the case in other environments," she says. "This need for a different curriculum and interaction with a group of peers becomes one of the justifications for creating a block of time where gifted students can meet routinely."

Wiley, a Challenge teacher for 16 years, has 85 students in grades three through five. Some of them, like those she is meeting with on this rainy, gray day in the Pacific Northwest, attend Lowell Elementary. On other days, though, her daylong class is made up of home-schooled students, gifted kids from private schools, and children from other Tacoma public schools who are bused to Lowell for the program for highly capable students.

"The pull-out program works well here," Wiley says, "because it's been here for so long. Other teachers have gotten to know me and we all work well together."

For example, Wiley has initiated a "Bright Ideas" program at Lowell that provides all students with an opportunity to pursue independent study about a topic that excites them. "Any student in the school can come to me with an idea, and I will hook them up with a mentor to pursue it," Wiley says. "The mentors are usually parents or other experts in the community. It's really important to get mentors who are accessible, who the student can call on and connect with."

Other teachers also can refer enterprising students to the Bright Ideas program, and groups of students can work on a project together. "I like to see children working in groups," Wiley notes. "They keep each other motivated. They're able to bounce questions off each other. They tend to go into more depth when they're working with a partner."

With her Challenge students, Wiley often takes a project ap proach that addresses learning in a variety of ways. In one activity, the Night of the Notables, students select a famous person and conduct indepth research on him or her. "Because they have selected the person, they have ownership in the learning," she says. "Once they are hooked on the learning, I can lead them through the process skills that apply to learning in most situations."

Those skills—interviewing, writing letters, telephoning people, getting past secretaries to talk to sources, historical research, use of the Internet, and others—are critical to learning. "The content is not the important piece of this," Wiley says. "The process of learning is what's important. Once you have that, you can learn anything."

Learning, Wiley maintains, also needs to be connected to the child's world or to his personal interests. Simply lecturing or drilling kids will numb them to the joys of learning. "Kids have to have a need to learn something," she says. "If it's not relevant to them, why would they want to learn it? So I look for that hook—that idea that will provide the spark or the freedom for them to choose."

And it works, she adds. In the Night of the Notables, students create artistic renderings of their subject, write about her, and present an oral report for classmates. In their oral presentation, some students come dressed as the person they researched. They reveal such details as what the person ate, how she lived, her timeline for success, the failures that helped her learn, her strengths and how she used them, and her weaknesses and how she overcame them.

The Tacoma School District calls its programs for highly capable students Challenge. The program strives to:

An enrichment program that encourages Challenge students to be self-motivated, to work cooperatively, and to think critically and creatively can help highly capable students reach their full potential. "We've created a community of children here who can be who they are and have a sense of joy about themselves," Wiley says. "In here, they just really respect each other."

That self- and mutual respect is apparent when the students discuss their participation in the recently completed science fair. Wiley's fifth-grade class had researched their self-identified science projects, hypothesized their outcomes, and completed experiments to determine if their hypotheses stood up to scientific testing. Often, their findings debunked their hypotheses.

For example, one girl tested four chemicals in an effort to determine which would spur marigolds to grow best (warm tea worked best, though the student had hypothesized that warm milk would work better). Another student applied the scientific method to determine which had more bacteria: the thumb or the tongue (he had hypothesized that the thumb would be fouler, but the tongue was more bacteria-laden). A third student investigated what material works best for growing crystals—an experiment that led to an unintended discovery when some of the materials spilled.

The key for these children is to take advantage of even wayward experiments to discover and explore new territory. "Isn't it interesting," Wiley notes, "how accidents and mistakes often lead to new discoveries?"

The lessons that Wiley passes on to her Challenge students are the ones that are increasingly important for all students to learn: decisionmaking skills, critical and creative thinking, teamwork, and consideration.

"If you want a good world," Wiley says, "if you want people to behave decently in this world, then you need to model it. People around you will learn from it. We affect the people around us."

More than anything else, Wiley says, her pull-out program allows students to operate on a level that challenges them intellectually, socially, and emotionally. "It allows them to be who they are."

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