I’m concerned about how the field of gifted education communicates its purpose. If we don’t have a clear story, someone else will write our story for us. And it won’t be pretty.
Part of a great story is clarity.
How Clear Is Our Purpose?
Try this: go to a few gifted programs’ homepages. This is the first place that parents, teachers, and even students would go to learn about your program. This is where you can tell your story!
The problem?
These pages seem written like they’re intended to impress academics, not to clearly communicate with the community. They’re packed with jargon, abbreviations, and phrases that only the edu-elite use. They are virtually unreadable for an average parent.
Heck, even highly-educated friends have asked me, “My teacher keeps saying they ‘differentiate’. What does that mean?“
An Example of the Problem
Here’s the national gifted association’s “who are we” statement (as of this writing):
NAGC’s mission is to support those who enhance the growth and development of gifted and talented children through education, advocacy, community building, and research. We aim to help parents and families, K-12 education professionals including support service personnel, and members of the research and higher education community who work to help gifted and talented children as they strive to achieve their personal best and contribute to their communities.
I’m sorry. What?
That blob of text is 68 words long yet says nothing. Any English teacher would rip it to shreds! When I plop it into Grammarly, it warns me:
⚠️ This text may be difficult for college graduates to read.
This is a problem because state associations try to mimic the national association. District leaders start talking to each other using the words they heard at a conference. Teachers begin to mimic their bosses. And parents are left scratching their heads, wondering, “Wait, what does ‘differentiate’ mean?” But they are too intimidated to ask the school to clarify.
Friends, the core job of an educator is to communicate with people who don’t understand!
So, Check Your Website
Parents are looking at your website to see what you’re all about. You don’t want their eyes to go crossed. You don’t want them to feel intimidated.
While NAGC’s mission statement is pretty darn bad, many districts’ websites have the same problems. Here are three pulled from random:
- Our Gifted and Talented Department has the primary responsibility of overseeing, supporting, and monitoring the programs for K-12 identified gifted and talented students district-wide.
- Our goal is to identify gifted and talented students, including those from diverse racial, socioeconomic, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds, and provide high-quality differentiated opportunities for learning that meet students’ unique abilities and talents.
- Our purpose is to engage, empower, and enrich gifted learners through unique, rigorous, self-directed educational experiences in a collaborative learning environment that supports the whole child within and beyond the classroom.
It feels like these statements are purposefully written to obscure their meanings. Are we aiming to communicate or intimidate?
Simplify! Simplify! Simplify!
A great book about writing well is, well, On Writing Well. You’ll find lovely advice like:
…the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components.
Let’s do that!
- Filter out jargon. Drop any fancy-sounding words that don’t really mean anything. I’ve written about this insidious problem before. Check your website for words like differentiation, identification, asynchrony, rigor, acceleration, proficiency, etc. Those are words that normal humans don’t know the meaning of – heck I don’t even know what some of them mean exactly.
- EAA: Eliminate All Acronyms! I get this email every week from an educator, “I’m an AIL teacher in an OCEED program. Our students are working on their GTOL projects, so I need help creating a GTA statement.” (And that’s barely an exaggeration). I have to look these terms up or ask for clarification. And I work in the field! Always write acronyms out the first time they’re used or, better yet, don’t use them at all!
- Simplify sentences. The NAGC mission paragraph has overly-complicated text structures. I have to take a breath in the middle of the sentences. Please break compound and complex sentences into short, simple sentences. One subject. One predicate. Step away from the commas! Clarity is your goal. Make it simple enough for an average middle schooler to understand. (Because some of the folks look to your website for answers will only have a middle school education.)
- Test it. Get people from outside your group to read the statement. Go outside your education level and your political beliefs. If 90% of you are ladies, get a bunch of dudes to read it. Center the communication around your community, not yourself.
The Samples Re-written
What if we strip NAGC’s original statement to its “cleanest components”?
NAGC’s mission is to support those who enhance the growth and development of gifted and talented children through education, advocacy, community building, and research. We aim to help parents and families, K-12 education professionals including support service personnel, and members of the research and higher education community who work to help gifted and talented children as they strive to achieve their personal best and contribute to their communities.
It might become:
NAGC supports people who work with gifted and talented children.
That’s pretty much all that the giant paragraph says, right? Just written in a way that an average person can read. Grammarly tells me “Your text is likely to be understood by a reader who has at least an 8th-grade education (age 13-14).”
Nice.
But! This also lays bare an obvious question, “Well, does NAGC actually support people who work with gifted and talented children?” (Uncomfortable silence.) You can see why it’s comfy to hide behind jargon. There’s a reason politicians give long, vapid answers that say nothing.
It takes courage to be clear – because it’s much easier for people to call you out.
Try It
So how complicated is your message? If you want to automate it, I’ve used Grammarly, but the Spelling and Grammar checker in Microsoft Word is useful too. You want something that will measure how long your words and sentences are.
Then. write a new paragraph that clearly explains your gifted program. Use simple words. Use simple sentences. Remove or explain acronyms. Cut out the edu-jargon. Make it so clear that someone without a high school diploma knows exactly what you mean.
Finally, if you want to, send me what you came up with: ian@byrdseed.com.