3.6.11 SIP: The Systemic Intervention Protocol to Support Talent Development for Underachieving Gifted Students

At school, teachers expect gifted students to be able to achieve highly, preferably in all school subjects. When achievements lag behind this expectation, teachers might be disappointed and might refer to these students as underachievers (Heacox & Cash, 2014, Siegle & McCoach, 2017). In doing so, teachers limit their perspective on giftedness to the results the student should achieve and deny the gifted student the right to learning as a developmental process (Kieboom & Venderickx, 2017). However, achievements are the result of behaviour. Behaviour is the result of the interaction of a person and the environment, the student’s ecological system (van Meersbergen & De Vries, 2016). If a student does not develop as we expect him to or when the development does not result in getting high achievements while the student obviously has the intellectual capacity for it, there is something wrong in the interaction between the student’s educational needs and the educational responses provided (Delisle & Galbraith, 2015, Siegle & McCoach, 2017). This requires a scrutinous analysis of not only the student’s capacities and behaviour, but also the educational context provided (van Meersbergen & De Vries, 2016, Ziegler, Stoeger, Balestrini, 2017). This requires looking in the mirror of education and teaching and reflecting on the question where we find opportunities for change. In this presentation, we shift from the notion of underachievement to the notion of “under learning”. “under learning” refers to a learning process wherein the student’s potential is not addressed effectively. “Under learning” is, therefore, not a qualification of the student’s achievements. It is a qualification of a learning process wherein the factors of the student’s ecological system are not meeting the educational needs of the student. We use a systemic approach to analyse the student’s learning process. The student is part of this so-called ecological system. How can we, from an educational point of view optimise the student’s ecological system? What has to be done to tune in to the student's educational needs and how do we organise meaningful educational responses. The SIP, Systemic Intervention Protocol is a tool that helps teachers to match student, curriculum and the ecological conditions for learning.

Author(s):