Note:  These guidelines do not apply to the “Referral” or “Portfolio Conferencing” versions of the Brilliant Behaviours.

So much can be learned about students by listening and watching them.  Who are they when they are truly immersed in challenging tasks they enjoy? This is when their brilliance will be invested and visible–waiting to be observed.

Preparing: Things to Know and Do Before Observing

When to observe:  The Brilliant Behaviours observation forms can be used as soon as the person doing the observation knows the student(s) well enough to make fairly accurate judgments. This is likely anytime after the first month of classes.

As mentioned elsewhere, a student’s greatest academic strengths and passions are the areas in which their need for curriculum differentiation is also greatest.Students should be asked about their strengths and interests before selecting activities for the observations.  If a student is strong in more than one subject, begin by observing in the strongest. Then make additional, separate observations in the other subjects.  Don’t generalize behaviours from one strength to another; for example, expecting a brilliant math student to be a great writer.  Many students learn and behave quite differently in different types of content, tasks, and settings.  Making separate observations allows them this freedom.

Investigate students’ temperament and background:  The more the student’s background and temperament are like the observer’s, the more accurate the observations will be; the less the observer is like the child, the more difficult the observer may find it to recognize the Brilliant Behaviours. Understanding the nature and extent of these differences beforehand will improve the ease and accuracy of the observations.  Find out as much as possible about the student before observing in order to reduce bias when attempting to understand what has been seen.

Individual differences:  Different children will exhibit the Brilliant Behaviours in different ways. This is due in part to differences in temperament, cultural background, gender and the domains of knowledge involved in the activity. As a result, each behaviour can have pleasant and unpleasant versions, culturally-specific versions, bold and subtle versions, subject-specific versions, and so on. For example, a shy student may demonstrate an extraordinary sense of humour by including sophisticated, subtle puns in written work, not spontaneous comedy routines performed for adoring classmates.

Observers must be open-minded, non-judgemental, and sensitive in their interpretation of students’ behaviours, and appreciating their unlikeable variations too. A sense of humour can become a vicious weapon when used by a brilliant, angry student to hurt classmates. In some cultures, humour is expressed in bold, entertaining ways, in others it is saved for special individuals.  It’s subtle but equally powerful, expressed by making eye contact. It is the observer’s responsibility to become sensitive to the range of possibilities within and across individuals.

Select or prepare thought-full activities:  Base your assessments on rich, spiralling activities that invite interactions with peers, have high ceilings and can be completed in a variety of ways.  Spiralling tasks consist of a series of similar tasks that gradually increase in difficulty.  Each version increases in complexity which creates opportunities for students to apply their learning from early to later versions the difficulty and challenge increases.  Spiralling tasks are good for all students, however you’ll notice highly able learners enjoy greater leaps in difficulty from one activity to the next.

A sample activity, Diffy (Wills, 1971), is included in English and French in the collection of Resources on this website (click to download). This single-digit subtraction activity looks very simple, and it can be, but for minds hungry for complexity, it won’t be.  Other materials that provide thought-full activities include:

• Black, H., & Black, S.  (1990).  Book II: Organizing Thinking – Graphic organizers.  Pacific Grove: Critical Thinking Press and Software. (Grades 4-8;  ISBN 0-89455-355-0; http://www. criticalthinking.com)
• Blizzard, G. S.  (1992).  Come look with me: Exploring landscape art with children.  Charlottesville: Thomasson-Grant.  (ISBN 0-934738-95-5)
• Bower, B., Lobdell, J., & Swenson, L. (1994).  History alive! Menlo Park, CA: Addison-Wesley.  (ISBN 0-201-81837-X)
• Boyd, H. (1987).  Experiments with patterns in mathematics.  Palo Alto, CA: Dale Seymour Publications.  (ISBN 0-86651-346-9; http://www.cuisenaire-dsp.com)
• Easterday, K. E., Henry, L. L., & Simpson, F. M. (Eds.) (1981). Activities for junior high school and middle school mathematics: Readings from the Arithmetic Teacher and the Mathematics Teacher.  Reston: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.  (ISBN 0-87353-188-4; http://www.nctm.org/catalog/)
• Meyers, D. M., & Casteel, J. D. (1999). Dealing with dilemmas: Coaching students in decision making (grades 4-8). Glenview, IL: Good Year Books. (ISBN 0-673-36369-4)
• Parks, S., & Black, H. (1992).  Book I: Organizing Thinking – Graphic organizers.  Pacific Grove: Critical Thinking Press and Software. (Grades 2-5;  ISBN 0-89455-354-2; http://www. criticalthinking.com)
• Ruef, K. (1992). The Private Eye.  Seattle, WA: The Private Eye Project. (ISBN 0-9605434-1-4; website:  http://www.the-private-eye.com/ruef/)
• Smith, S. E., & Backman, C. A. (Eds.).  (1975).  Games and puzzles for elementary and middle school mathematics: Readings from the Arithmetic Teacher.  Reston: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. (ISBN 0-87353-054-3)
• Van Allsburg, C. (1984).  The mysteries of Harris Burdick.  Boston, MA: Houghton-Mifflin.  (ISBN 0-395-35393-9)
• Zuckerman, S. (1989).  My mind works in different ways.  Unpublished teaching materials (included in the Appendices).

They can be offered to all students in the regular classroom without frustrating or intimidating anyone because they have low floors and high ceilings.  In other words, they require minimal background skills and knowledge, and at the same time, they are open-ended, offering opportunities for complex, creative and critical thinking–to provoke and stimulate Brilliant Behaviours.  This enables students with diverse skills and abilities to successfully engage in them and there are no limits on where high potential learners might take them.  Drills involving accurately recalling basic facts are not going to do this.

Many of the materials mentioned above are appropriate for all ages.  Observers will need to adjust their expectations to suit the age of the group or individuals being observed.

The activity as well as the observer’s behaviour must encourage students to aim high, take risks, reason and come up with new ideas. This doesn’t have to be done with constant verbal encouragement.  It can be silent, through simple eye contact or a slight smile.  Or it can be built in to the assessment criterial by including risk-taking or at least one dimension of creative thinking (fluency, flexibility, originality and elaboration).  In doing so, students with extraordinary potential are more likely to show one or more of their Brilliant Behaviours.

Challenge:  Observations should only be made while the student is engaged in a challenging task of interest to him or her. If it is not challenging and interesting, the Brilliant Behaviours are unlikely to appear. Some learning addicts will create complexity by generating personal challenges beyond those they’ve been assigned. This is apparent when they turn drills into games and stories, or create wild adventures to facilitate memorizing facts (Kanevsky, 1992). This craving for difficulty was evident in a study by Neitzke and Rohr-Sendlmeier (1992). They found students with high IQs invested less effort and achieved significantly lower scores on the age-appropriate version of an intelligence test than they did on a version of the test with a ceiling high enough for adults. This research evidence demonstrates the need for challenging tasks when attempting to assess and find bright and gifted students.

Number of activities and observations:  It may take more than one activity and observation to gain a clear sense of the students’ Brilliant Behaviours. It is wise to tap more than one type of content (for example, social issues and theoretical principles) and type of processing (inquiry-based versus creative or analytical).  If possible, offer students an assortment of two or three activities from each content area.  You may not need to use them all right away.  Primary and elementary level students should be offered a few activities within and across subjects.

Prepare the learning environment:  Arrange the room and the activity so students feel comfortable working alone or in groups; discussing and thinking out loud or working silently. Make it clear in the directions for the activity that how and where they learn is up to them.  As mentioned above, encourage risk-taking, reasoning and creativity by ensuring opportunities for them are built in to the activity and atmosphere.  This includes the observers behaviour while introducing and observing the activity.

Resource and support teachers:  When distributing the form to colleagues who will be doing the observations you may want to distribute the Descriptions and some of the activities recommended to stimulate Brilliant Behaviours along with it. Offer them as options and examples of the types of low-floor/high-ceiling, open-ended activities that provide contexts suitable for observations. Teachers may have favourites of their own. If they do, ask for copies and add them to your collection.

During the Activity

Complete the form while the students are working on the activity:  Assess the student’s or students’ behaviour while they are in the midst of the task, don’t wait to complete the form after the activity is over. Relying on recalled impressions contributes to inaccuracies in the ratings.

Look and listen: While observing, what the teacher says to the students is relatively less important than what students say to themselves and others. Listen carefully, non-judgmentally, and unobtrusively.  Circulate silently.  Perfect your eavesdropping skills.  The students may ‘look’ different when using the Brilliant Behaviours as a lens on their learning and interactions.  For example, an “efficiency expert” may recruit members and assign parts of the task to peers according to their strengths.  Then the expert monitors, encourages and adjusts these assignments.  This will earn a √ for sensitivity.  And there may be a child who needs to announce, “This sucks! I did this with my dad a long time ago and we figured it was way cooler when you think about it in three dimensions instead of two.”  Pursuing this briefly it becomes clear how cool it really is and why.  That fascination earns this student a √ for reasoning ability (and perhaps an invitation for the student to think about it in four dimensions?).

Frequency, Intensity and Duration (FID):  As indicated in the directions with most versions of the Brilliant Behaviours, a student only deserves a √ for a behaviour if it appears more frequently, more intensely and for a longer duration than for their agemates. These three criteria are borrowed from the literature on behaviour disorders (American Psychological Association, 2013). Keeping ‘FID’ in mind when observing will improve the consistency of ratings within and across observers.

Be conservative with √s. Assessments can be redone and revised as often as you wish. Students often demonstrate an increasing number of these behaviours as they are offered more and more challenging curriculum. This means the Brilliant Behaviours can be updated every month or two. This gives the teacher and the student an opportunity to acknowledge and discuss (and celebrate?) any changes in behaviour.

Encourage risk-taking:  The teacher/observer should remember to encourage students to take risks, to think creatively and critically. Students should feel free to seek and pose challenges for themselves and their peers. If they ask for permission to test a strategy or idea, just say “Try it!”.

Encourage students to take think time:  Students engaged in challenging tasks need time to think. Ideally they should be offered time to think alone or in groups. Some will think silently, others think out loud. Some need to be alone and should be offered places in the room where that need will be respected.

Fast finishers:  Students who announce, “I’m finished!” can be encouraged to try to find another way to do it, to make it easier or harder, or to create their own version of the same sort of activity.

Time:  Allow an extended period of uninterrupted time (20-45 minutes) for each observation session. Students will need time to consider alternatives, to plan, design, explore complexities, develop and test ideas, seek patterns, to abstract and synthesize. Bright and gifted students sometimes need more time rather than less to prepare a response when they are truly challenged and invested in an activity (Greenes, 1981).

Debriefing and reflection:  When students have been working in new ways with new ideas, its the best time to ask them to explain what they’ve been doing.

• What worked?
• What didn’t?
• When did you know?
• What worked best?
• What did it feel like?
• Have you done things like this before?
• What was the same? Different?
• What did you like about it? What didn’t you like?

Please note the lack of “how” and “why” questions in this list.  “Why” and “how” questions have been avoided as they tend to evoke shorter more superficial responses than those beginning with “what” and “which”. In practice however, students will likely share the why’s and how’s although ‘what’ and ‘which’ questions were posed (Blank, 1975). Encourage students to justify their answers, explain their reasoning, and extend each other’s ideas. Value everything; judge nothing: and keep your eyes and ears open for brilliant behaviour(s).

Devote approximately one-third of the time devoted to introducing and doing the activity to debriefing. Debriefing and reflection can be done in conversation, writing, drawing or movement. You will find a debriefing-by-drawing activity in the Resources on this website called How My Mind Works. In it, students draw an image representing a metaphor for the way their mind worked during an activity they just completed–perhaps a type of weather.  It provides a valuable window on individual differences in the ways students feel, learning and think, as well as the differences between high ability students students and their peers (Sheppard & Kanevsky, 1999).

After the Observation

Directions for analyzing and interpreting each version of the Brilliant Behaviours are included in the material describing each form. Any number of observed behaviours is significant and useful, even if its only one.

Act promptly after 2-3 observations. Don’t delay your efforts to differentiate due to lingering doubts about the accuracy of the information. This information can be reviewed and updated on a regular basis. Act on what you have. All efforts to differentiate curricula should be monitored and evaluated and revised. When changes need to be made, you’ll have a better understanding of what doesn’t work.

If more than one observer participated, different perceptions of a student may emerge. This is not surprising as a student may behave quite differently in different contexts, and different observers interpretations of the same student’s behaviour may arise.  Both may be true.  This may indicate a need for the observers to discuss the meaning of each behaviour to resolve any inconsistencies.  The best course of action would be to have an open discussion including all observers. The differences in perceptions of students are real and they are rich sources of information. It is not necessary or desirable to achieve consensus. Understanding potential explanations for the differences can be a valuable investment of time and energy.

For Resource or Support teachers who distribute the Brilliant Behaviours to classroom teachers, allow at least a week, then follow up with a reminder to teachers who have not returned the form(s).

Keep the Brilliant Behaviours visible as a reminder that they may emerge at any time in any student.