School for School Counselors Podcast

How Can We Truly Support Gifted & 2E Students?

• School for School Counselors • Episode 123

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In this episode of the School for School Counselors podcast, host Steph Johnson talks through the unique challenges faced by gifted and twice exceptional students. Despite their abilities, these students often struggle with perfectionism, social isolation, and managing dual needs. Steph discusses practical strategies for school counselors to support these students. 

She also introduces the new "Technique of the Week" segment as well as insights into the goings-on in her own school counseling program.

00:00 Introduction: The Struggles of Gifted Students

01:34 Understanding Gifted and Twice Exceptional Students

05:14 Diving Deeper into Gifted Students' Challenges

07:44 Strategies for Supporting Gifted Students

13:59 Technique of the Week

GET THE FREE OUTREACH PLANNING GUIDE HERE

GET THE FREE ROLE-PLAY TECHNIQUE GUIDE HERE



References/Resources:

Assouline, S. G., & Whiteman, C. S. (2011). Twice-exceptional learners: Psychological and educational perspectives. Psychology in the Schools, 48(3), 205-214.

Baum, S. M., & Owen, S. V. (2004). To be gifted and learning disabled: Strength-based strategies for helping twice-exceptional students achieve success in school and life. Prufrock Press.

Foley Nicpon, M., Allmon, A., Sieck, B., & Stinson, R. D. (2011). Empirical investigation of twice-exceptionality: Where have we been and where are we going? Gifted Child Quarterly, 55(1), 3-17.

Reis, S. M., Baum, S. M., & Burke, E. (2014). An operational definition of twice-exceptional learners. Gifted Child Quarterly, 58(3), 217-230.

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Speaker 1:

What would it be like to be a gifted student in a school and still struggle? For gifted students and twice-exceptional students, this is a daily reality. There are high expectations for these kiddos, mixed in with some unique challenges we don't often realize. And in today's episode, we're going to look at the world of gifted students and twice exceptional students to figure out practical ways to support them through their educational careers, from managing their emotional intensities to building a sense of belonging with other students around them. We're going to figure out what it really takes to help these students thrive. We're going to figure out what it really takes to help these students thrive. Hey y'all, I'm Steph Johnson and I am so glad that you've joined me back here at the School for School Counselors podcast. I'm a full-time school counselor, just like you, on a mission, because I believe that each and every one of my colleagues deserves support, validation and empowerment. That's why I founded School for School Counselors, where we take practical tools and make them work in the real-world situations that you face on the daily. Through this podcast and our community, I want to bridge the gap between what they taught you in grad school and what's really going on. I want you to feel competent, connected and inspired to make a difference, even if you're working in difficult circumstances. And as we continue our conversations about special student populations, I want to look at gifted and twice-exceptional students. They have some pretty unique needs. Gifted students often face high expectations due to their abilities, but they often battle perfectionism and sometimes they have to confront some pretty strong feelings of social isolation. Twice exceptional students, who are students who are gifted but also have learning challenges at the same time, have additional barriers. On top of all that, and I think because these students know how to fly under the radar, they know how to make things look okay, we don't often recognize their unique challenges and needs. The good news is that we can help play a role in helping these tremendous students navigate these challenges and by the end of this episode, I'm hoping that you're going to feel better equipped to support both gifted and 2E students and provide them some tools for some super meaningful growth.

Speaker 1:

Now, before we get into the gifted and 2E conversation, I would love to take a little side trip out in the dirt roads a little bit to look at some of the latest and greatest going on in the world of school counseling. This is something new. I'm trying on the podcast just to broaden our perspectives a little bit and to just kind of give us some additional knowledge or perhaps sometimes a peek into what's going on in my own school counseling program and I will share with you. Currently in my program on my campus, I am elbow deep in holiday outreach programs. The previous podcast episode was all about setting up those outreach programs on your campus and assisting students while still maintaining their dignity. That's a huge, huge push for me on my campus. I never want a student who is the recipient of supports to feel any different than their peers. I want them to feel empowered through those initiatives and not belittled.

Speaker 1:

So I published a guide for setting up your holiday outreach programs. You can find it on our homepage schoolforschoolcounselorscom. You can find it on our homepage schoolforschoolcounselorscom. It will walk you step-by-step through creating those holiday initiatives like coat drives, like food drives, like gift donations, whatever the case may be. This guide is going to take you through it step-by-step. You can find it at schoolforschoolcounselorscom. Currently I am organizing three different initiatives at the same time. I am working on a canned food drive for the week prior to Thanksgiving. I am working on a gift drive for students later on in the month of December, and I'm also working with an incredible donor in our community to bring full Thanksgiving meals to over 200 of our students in need. Y'all that is a lot of coordination, it is a lot of organization, but I love it. It fills my heart and I'm so grateful to be in a position where I can assist and where I can also lead others in maintaining recipient's dignity throughout the process. All right, so enough about me and my school counseling program.

Speaker 1:

Let's jump into gifted students and twice exceptional students. According to CROSS 2016 and Recent Team 2014, we often look at our gifted and 2E students as self-reliant. We assume they have everything they need. They don't need any extra help or supports, and that often shadows the hidden struggles that they're facing. The truth is, these students actually require additional helps to handle the academic pressures they face, but also their unique social challenges. Our twice-exceptional students in particular often feel a pull between their strengths and their struggles, and they start to feel confused and somewhat isolated because it's almost like they have a foot in two different worlds. My own child is an example of this. She is in all honors and gifted classes except for one where she has a learning disability, and it's an interesting dichotomy to watch unfold right in front of my very eyes, where she's part of one group during her school day, but then she switches to being part of another peer group, and it is confusing and it is somewhat isolating for sure.

Speaker 1:

Gifted students often learn to fear failure. They often feel like they have to get it perfect all the time right, and as adults sometimes we cheer them on to that end. We are very guilty of reinforcing those perfectionistic tendencies, and that can be exacerbated in twice-exceptional students who struggle to meet those academic standards and they feel like if I just keep pushing, if I just keep pushing, I'll finally get to where I need to be. If these kiddos can't meet the standards that they've set for themselves, or the standards that have been set for them by others at school or at home, they can feel misunderstood or they can feel inadequate. And then, as we look at the dynamics of the peer groups for gifted students and the dual identity of twice exceptional students, we have a keg of dynamite on our hands here. We need to make sure that we are taking a thorough look at these challenges and really preparing to assist and support these students throughout their school experience. So what are some things that we can do to support the social-emotional needs of gifted and TUI students.

Speaker 1:

One strategy supported by the research is validating and normalizing the unique experience of these special populations. When we can validate their feelings about their situations, it has been shown empirically to reduce stress and foster a safer environment for students. We've got to acknowledge what's going on, especially with our two E's, that it's normal to feel amazing at one thing and not so great at another, and that if they're not amazing at all the things, that doesn't mean they're faking or that something's wrong. We also need to encourage all of our gifted students to remember self-compassion. This is going to be really important in countering perfectionism and reducing the stress of unmet expectations, because, as much as these students resist it, they are going to fall short from time to time. So self-compassion is going to be a huge, huge safety net for them.

Speaker 1:

Another way of supporting our gifted students is providing resources for managing that perfectionism, the resulting anxiety and or any learning challenges in our 2E students. Mindfulness and relaxation are going to be a huge help for both that performance anxiety and for the learning challenges, and we need to really be looking at accommodations for our 2E students, even though they often excel in the majority of their classes, they have an area or maybe two where they need some accommodations, where they can still access their education and be successful and also have their giftedness supported at the same time. At the same time, third, it's very important for us to work to build peer connections in inclusive counseling groups. Now, normally I'm not a huge fan of small group counseling on school campuses, and that might blow some of your minds, but it's concerning to me how easily we seek to pathologize students in the environment in which they spend most of their waking hours, and so for me to run a small group for students, it has to be a pressing need or something that doesn't feel like a label has been placed on their behavior or their ability to perform at school. This, however, would be a good opportunity to create a counseling group where gifted students can discuss the pressures that they're facing in their academic careers, allowing students to connect over those shared experiences and feelings that the majority of their peer group probably does not have, and we can lead them to understanding that they don't have to just be labeled as a gifted kid right, or they don't have to choose between being labeled as gifted or challenged. They can be that and more. There are so many layers to them, so many elements to their awesomeness, but often they get stuck in this sort of tunnel vision of performance and perfection and they can't see past that. So it's a great opportunity for us to give them a more rich understanding of who they are and what they're capable of. All right, so we've talked about validating and normalizing gifted students' experiences, providing some resources like mindfulness and accommodations for managing perfectionism and anxiety, and building peer connections in inclusive counseling groups. Now let's look at how we can help these students develop balanced and resilient identities, much like what I was just talking about understanding what their non-academic strengths are. Wren and Plucker 2014 assert that exploring these strengths help students form more balanced identities. So that could look like encouraging students to explore hobbies or skills that bring them joy, that don't necessarily have a performance component, or recognizing intangible qualities like empathy, creativity and resilience, and talk about how important they are as standalone qualities, but also how they can be valuable to academic performance.

Speaker 1:

We can teach self-advocacy skills to our 2E students. They may need help communicating their needs. Teachers may not understand that just because they're labeled as a gifted student, they also need supports. We can help them do these things by practicing self-advocacy through things like role play. That's my go-to technique in my counseling office. It helps in so many situations and this is a prime example. Or we can teach students how to respectfully facilitate discussions on expressing those dual needs, how to be assertive about those and be able to explain them in a way that their teachers can understand. We can also help students build resilience and a growth mindset, for them to understand that success is about persisting, not about being perfect all the time. And we can help students reflect on the challenges they're working to overcome using things like journaling or group discussions, where they can talk about times that they overcame struggles and really identify their own resilience. All right, so we've talked about strategies for supporting the social-emotional needs of our gifted students and also about helping them to develop balanced, resilient identities.

Speaker 1:

I'm going to stop for just a minute and introduce something else I want to try in the podcast, which is the technique of the week. I think we could all stand to have some great new tools in our toolbox for those on-the-fly moments in our counseling offices, and so I want to bring you a different approach each week that you can turn around and use instantly in your counseling office, instead of feeling like you have to search Teachers, pay Teachers to select some print and pray lesson that you hope is going to make a difference. These techniques are going to be turnkey, so to speak. You can just take them and run with them and instantly see impacts. This week, we're going to look at a really versatile approach for school counselors. That we've already talked about in this episode, and that's role play. We've already talked about in this episode, and that's role play.

Speaker 1:

Now, role play may sound simple, but it is powerful for helping students build social skills, develop confidence and work through difficult situations. You could use it to work with a student on assertiveness, you could practice how to manage anxiety in social settings, or you could even help students prepare for a challenging conversation. Role play is one of those magical techniques that can be adapted to pretty much anything that's sitting in front of you, and so I want to talk a little bit about role play and how it can help you in your school counseling practice. At the heart of it, role play is a simulated practice, right, it allows students to act out scenarios that they find challenging or anxiety-inducing, but it's controlled. It's a low-stakes, safe environment, and when students can step into these scenarios, they get a chance to rehearse what they will say, maybe how they'll feel or how they want to behave. This is going to help build their confidence and reduce their anxiety, because they're challenging head-on all of those what-if questions we always have going on in our heads.

Speaker 1:

Right, sports athletes visualize successful games all the time. That is a form of role play. Musicians do the same thing to mentally rehearse a performance, and so students who are using role play and counseling are essentially doing the same thing. They're rehearsing for their own performance. They can help themselves feel more prepared for the real thing, but it also gives them a chance to try different approaches and different options to see what's going to feel best to them in the moment. Role play is awesome for things like social skills, assertiveness, conflict resolution, peer interactions, even emotional regulation and stress management.

Speaker 1:

Now there are some key things you can do to ensure that your role play initiative with the student is successful, and I've created something for you to help you along that path, and I've created something for you to help you along that path. It's called 10-Point Techniques, and our role-play edition is available now on our website. Go to our homepage schoolforschoolcounselorscom and you can print out your 10-Point role-play technique. Don't worry, it's not as complicated as it sounds, but it will walk you through role play with students step by step. I hope that approach is helpful to you. Like I said, I'm going to try to bring you one new approach or technique each and every week, just to expand your toolbox or maybe getting you to think about some of the things you already know and unique in different ways.

Speaker 1:

So in closing this episode, remember that it is so important for us to validate gifted students' experiences on campus and that we need to be ready to support gifted students' challenges as well as the unique needs of twice exceptional students. We need to be helping them build connections. We need to be helping them create well-rounded identities and be able to feel like they can meet their challenges head on. This week I would love for you to try one strategy with the gifted or 2E student. It could be something as simple as just validating that dual experience or helping them explore self-advocacy skills. What can you do to support your gifted students? And remember to go download that 10-point role-play technique printable. It's going to be gold for you. You can print it out and have it at your desk for those on-the-fly moments where you think, man, we really need to practice this before they go out and perform it in the wild, and you'll have everything you need right there at your fingertips. It's a gift from me to you because I believe passionately about supporting and empowering my school counseling colleagues.

Speaker 1:

All right, I hope you enjoyed this episode.

Speaker 1:

Gifted students require understanding. They require some flexible supports and sometimes some more intensive supports than we would initially imagine, but you are uniquely equipped to help these students and everyone at your campus grow academically, grow socially and grow emotionally. I think that you are amazing for what you do each and every day. I know I tell you that on the podcast all the time, but that feeling never changes. In the middle of the craziness of this time of year, the uncertainty on school campuses in general and the escalation in student needs that we've seen since 2020, you continue to raise your hand, you continue to volunteer, to walk through those doors each and every day and say what's the worst you got, let me help, and I think that's amazing. I think that speaks to your heart. I think it speaks to the kind of person that you are, and I count myself so very, very lucky to be working beside you. I'll be back soon with another episode of the School for School Counselors podcast. In the meantime, I hope you have the best week. Take care.