Dr. Austina De Bonte:
And so just changing the word doesn’t necessarily change everything about it, but I think it does make it a little bit easier to talk about, especially when you get away from this idea that kids are just sort of magically gifted. This, you know, this amazing gift. And actually, like, when you really understand our field, it’s not a gift in all cases, in a lot of cases, even for a kid who is kind of that unicorn and can, you know, do a lot of things.

Cyndi Burnett:
So, Austina, thank you so much for joining us today. So we want to start with your background, because this is not your first career. This is your second career. So can you tell us a little bit about your first career in tech and how you ended up in gifted education?

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
Well, I think I ended up in gifted education the way a lot of people end up in gifted education. You have really complex kids. You need to figure them out. And the more you learn, the more you realize there is to learn, you know? And how I kind of grew into gifted ed was really in realizing that once I kind of had gotten a grip on what was happening with my kids, I had uncovered so much interesting things that I knew other people needed. But, you know, my first career was in technology. My first degree was in computer science. I have a master’s degree and a bachelor’s degree from MIT. Worked at Microsoft for many years, 17, I think.

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
And that was a really great spot for me. Like, I learned a lot about how to work in organizations. I did a lot of leadership development work there. I ended up building a whole training program for engineers on how to think creatively, how to do sort of creative thinking in the context of an engineering workforce, which is an interesting problem because you’re explaining something that to some people is intuitive, but for that community largely is not intuitive. So how do you kind of sciencify customer focus and, you know, sort of creative approaches, design thinking, if you will. So anyway, I spent a bunch of time at Microsoft doing that work and leading teams through understanding how to become more customer-focused, which involved a lot of leadership development, et cetera. But over time, I spent more and more of my time in gifted education kind of in the nonprofit world here in Washington state. So I was the president of the Northwest Gifted Child Association for almost 10 years.

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
More recently, I still serve on that board, but no longer as president. Now I serve as president of the Washington Coalition for Gifted Education. That is our legislative advocacy group. So we actually have three organizations here in Washington. There’s a teacher group, a parent group, and a legislative advocacy group. So I’ve been part of these two. So anyway, that gives you kind of a sense as to who I am and where I’ve been. But as I’ve done more and more nonprofit work, you know, and have really had to dig into the research on, you know, the things that we’re working on with the nonprofits, eventually a buddy of mine kind of pulled me into a graduate program and so I just finished my doctoral degree.

Cyndi Burnett:
Oh, congratulations.

Matthew Worwood:
Congrats. Congrats. I do want to follow up on your work in Washington State because one of the things that I’m starting to become more aware of is the challenge of implementing gifted ed programs. Because we’ve been discussing schools, districts, well, have priorities, but not all of them are the same. And gifted ed is probably something that you have to prioritize if you are to make a success of it, particularly when it comes to addressing equity issues in education. So speaking with your experience, and I’m just curious to know whether or not you’ve been able to leverage some of your previous career to assist you. Imagine I’m coming from a state and we have no gifted ed program. And I’m trying to raise more awareness in schools and school districts and work toward a systematic program that can be implemented statewide or at least form some unity within the state.

Matthew Worwood:
What are some of the things that I should be thinking about? Where might I start? And again, how have you leveraged your previous career to support you in doing some of that work?

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
And how much time do we have? Like, that’s like a four hour question.

Matthew Worwood:
Well, do you know where it’s coming from? I’m not sure. I’m curious to know how many people have. Because it’s interesting because you have the parent. The parent. There’s lots of different elements that have to come together, particularly when it comes to developing legislation, which obviously is very important when it comes to actually mandating, I suppose, a program across the state.

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
But, you know, there’s legislation that is actually getting buy in on people to actually do the legislation. Right. I mean, I just came from an affiliate meeting where everybody was complaining about how we’ve got these laws, but the districts aren’t actually doing it right. You know, and Washington is no different. We have some districts that are doing a great job and others that aren’t. You know, we’re lucky in Washington in that we have pretty strong law base. You know, we’ve had mandatory, what we call highly capable programs, that is our Washington state for gifted education, we call it high cap for short. That has existed in Washington since 2014.

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
So we’re on a decade now. Required in grades K 12, required for districts to identify, required for districts to serve. It’s a lot of room for local control in terms of how districts actually do that. But they can, they are required to do something and they’re required to report back to the state on, you know, what they are doing. So there’s a lot of important pieces. But the thing that we’ve really been working on over the past number of years, about 5 ish now, is equitable identification and equity in practices. I mean, and there’s so many different flavors of equity. Like equitable identification is easy to talk about and I spent a ton of time there.

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
But also equity and quality of services is a whole nother ball of wax. Right. And you know, and there’s a big piece of that in getting educators on board. Right. With what needs to happen. Like the law says this, but are you actually doing it and are you doing it sort of in a way where you really understand why you’re doing it and you care and you’re doing it with reason or are you just kind of dot, you know, check in the box?

Cyndi Burnett:
But I do know that congratulations, you just finished your dissertation, that in your dissertation you looked at equitable identification methods. So can you tell us a little bit about what you did in your research and what you discovered?

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
Sure. So my dissertation was a pretty detailed case study of a school district here in Washington state, in a suburban school district where they had invested in equitable identification for about six or seven years, I mean, ongoing. But I was able to sort of capture that time period. I did a whole lot of interviews, views of administrators, principals and teachers, really sort of figured out and was able to capture like exactly what were their practices. Because this district is really interesting. What they did was over the course of that time period, they continually improved their methods and eventually got to a steady state that really worked to improve equitable identification. And like, just to get to the punchline, like over that time period, they are now identifying 16 times more kids in historically underrepresented groups. One, six, okay, that’s annual identification rate.

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
That’s not sort of an amortized year over year. And so if you look sort of before they did any universal screening and now that they’re doing universal screening, but not just universal screening, actually also using local norms, also being really thoughtful about how they use multiple pathways, also being really thoughtful about how they use combination rules, it turns out, or based rules are really essential for identifying, identifying twice exceptional kids in particular and so I was able to really sort of unpack that and look at it over time to track how that data changed and what the practices were and how those things changed. And then there’s a whole nother side of the study around the attitudes of all the players, the stakeholders at each level, at the teacher level, at the principal level, at the administrator level, on this whole system that had emerged. Right. And of course there were folks who were pro and folks who were con on everything. And what I was able to do was really show both sides of the argument for basically everything. I mean, it’s a beautiful little microcosm of what gifted education kind of looks like in practice in so many places. And all the tensions, like what are all those tensions that come up, and they come up everywhere.

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
I think they’re fairly universal. And so it ended up being quite long. Sorry.

Cyndi Burnett:
So. No, no. So can you give us a couple examples of these tensions?

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
You know, one major tension that shows up a lot is around test prep. Right? So if you’ve got, you know, sort of some communities of parents who really are very motivated to get their kids into a program, right. Often these are, you know, more affluent, often more white, often more Asian families, you know, not always, but there’s definitely a skew in that direction, you know, who are willing, interested and able to prep their kids. Right. And there are programs out there. I’m not a big fan, but whatever, it exists. Right. And then you’ve got, on the other side, teachers who are really concerned about kids who are sort of over prepping to get into a program that might not be in fact the right fit.

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
But it’s complex. It’s so complex. Right? Because you know, these teachers now are also get, they’re also getting a whole much wider range of kids into their classrooms identified as highly capable because of the equitable identification practices. Right. They’re getting more multilingual kids, they’re getting more low income kids. They’re also getting a lot more twice exceptional kids. Okay, So a twice exceptional kid that isn’t necessarily your quiet, compliant, studious sort from a teacher lens might look like a kid who doesn’t belong here, right? And they might say, well, was that kid prepped into this classroom? I mean, maybe sometimes, but I don’t, I actually don’t think that’s the major issue going on. I think that that kid needs some support and that teacher wasn’t fully supported yet.

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
And how to recognize that, how to see that, what kind of support does this kid need? Like all of our high cap Kids are not sort of academic high flyers and sort of independent. Right. Independently brilliant, I think, is sort of the stereotype that a lot of people have and, you know, can do all the things, can, you know, follow the directions, do their homework, have the executive function, all those pieces and like, yeah, we’ve got a few of those. Right. But they’re almost in this larger community, they’re almost the unicorns. Right. The much larger gifted community are kids who do have all flavors of neurodiversity. Right.

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
Our neurospicy kids. Right. Some times diagnosed, sometimes not diagnosed. Right. Where you’ve got dyslexia and dysgraphia and autism and ADHD and auditory sensory vision processing. Like there’s so many things going on, hardly ever that are even fully diagnosed. And so when you really put that in the soup and you’re really collecting all these kids who have the potential, yeah, those classrooms are going to look different. Right.

Dr. Austina De Bonte :
But it’s not because the kids don’t belong there. Right.

Matthew Worwood:
And because you’ve referenced twice exceptional a couple of times, I was wondering if one, you could just define that for our listeners and two, talk a little bit more about some of the identification strategies that you’ve identified as being particularly helpful for that particular population.

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
Great question. So a twice exceptional student is a student who is both, what we would say in Washington, highly capable and many other places would say gifted and talented or tagged, who has some kind of high capacity, high potential, high ability, maybe in a discrete area, maybe sort of globally, and also has some kind of a disability, a learning difference, a neurodiversity, a mental health challenge, something else going on that is going to interrelate. Right. With that ability. And so it’s really, it’s twice exceptional is a huge umbrella. Right. When you tell me a kid is twice exceptional, I’m like, great, tell me more. Because like, that doesn’t actually give me a whole lot of information.

Dr. Austina De Bonte :
Right. You really have to know a lot more about what’s really going on to have even a census to the profile of that student. Right. But it is sort of a helpful umbrella term to be able to say, okay, we have this class of kids who, yeah, they might have some real need and readiness for acceleration or depth in some area, but they need some support at the same time. Right. And in order to access that, they’re going to need that level of support. And if you don’t provide that support, they’re never really going to show you what they can do. Right.

Matthew Worwood:
That’s a perfect response. If you don’t mind, just expand a little bit more on the identification. Particularly, you know, is the most popular methods for identifying gifted students effective for that particular population? And if it isn’t, what advice would you have for other schools or school districts or practitioners to be better equipped to think about twice exceptional learners or the potential of twice exceptional learners within their student population?

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
Well, we can go back to my dissertation actually. That really one very key insight that came out of that is that they identified way more twice exceptional kids and they weren’t actually intending to. It was sort of a byproduct of the process that they ended up using. There’s some really good insights there. Because the key piece that really moved the needle for twice exceptional kids was using a form of combination rules called or based rules, where instead of saying a kid needs to qualify on this test and that test, you say the kid needs to qualify on this test or that test. Right? And actually even better if you’ve got multiple options, right? So a way to think about it is that you’re giving the kid multiple chances to demonstrate their readiness or their ability. Okay, actually the what, why they did it was purely for cost saving, right? To not have to test a kid multiple times, right. As soon as we have a qualifying score in something, we’re done, we’re not going to test this kid anymore.

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
We don’t need to see it twice. Right? But the impact of that was that they gave kids multiple chances, right? And if the kid after two or three chances on, you know, the way they had it set up different instruments depending on grade level, then okay, the kid doesn’t qualify. But as soon as the kid had a qualifying score, you’re in, we’re done and we’re not going to test you anymore. And the impact that that had was that it scooped in so many more twice exceptional students, which in retrospect makes perfect sense. Like it’s not even, that’s not even hard to understand, right? Because our twice exceptional students do have this like wonky up and down profile of test scores. Like that’s just what happens with them, right? Sometimes they’re in their A game and they can show what they know on this particular instrument. Sometimes because of the kid, because of the environment, because of the test, because of the match, whatever, right? It doesn’t go so well. And so when you require a twice exceptional kid to show us that you’re working at the 98th percentile here, here and here, they hardly ever can be that consistent, right? But if, but if you say no, no, no.

Dr. Austina De Bonte :
Once we see that you’re working at this level here, like, we’re going to believe that it comes down to believing. Believing high test scores can’t happen by accident, which they don’t. And not getting all wrapped up in low test scores. Right. Thinking that low test scores tell you something. Right. Because there’s a thousand reasons why a kid could have a low test score that doesn’t mean anything about the kid’s ability. Right.

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
And you have to be willing. That’s hard for administrators. It’s really hard for administrators to look at this kind of profile and to believe the ups but not the downs.

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Cyndi Burnett:
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Cyndi Burnett:
To learn more, check out curiositytocreate.org or check out the links in the show notes for this episode, I want to talk about twice exceptional. So this morning we met with a school here in Seattle and they talked about how they are a highly capable elementary, middle school and they assess students at the age of four with an IQ test and to assess whether or not they can get into the school. And I’m curious, from your perspective, is the IQ test the best way to go in terms of measuring for potential going in at that early age? Are there other methods? Do we lose those students who are twice exceptional in doing tests like IQ tests that early on? What would you recommend to a school like this? To really be able to look at a student holistically to measure for their intellectual and creative potential.

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
So, I mean, IQ tests certainly have their place, right? And when they tell us something, they usually tell us something that’s valid and interesting. But they are far from the only way to get good data. Right. And there’s also real bias issues. There are certain populations for whom we know it’s not sort of fully fair. Right. It’s not fully culturally fair and lots for lots of different reasons, language reasons, cultural reasons, et cetera. I am not a fan of using IQ as like, the 1 benchmark.

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
Right. I think it’s convenient for private schools. But they can also choose to be choosy, right? Yeah, they can. They can make their own rules I think when you’re thinking about public systems, it’s really hard to make an argument that IQ is the, is what public schools should be using. And really, if you go a little bit deeper and understand local norms. Right. I think local norms actually really helps us understand how to use things like achievement testing and group based ability testing much more effectively in the context of public schools. Because they, there is this concern like, okay, well, if we can’t use iq, then we’re like stuck with these other tests that we know also have issues.

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
Well, yes, that is true, but there are ways that you can interpret those test scores differently. And so let’s say, for instance, and again, my dissertation is another case study of this where they said, okay, we’re going to have this general criteria of the 95th percentile. Any kid who scores at the 95th percentile in math or reading, we’re going to scoop into this program and provide services in either math or reading. Okay? But they also said, but for our multilingual learners, our English learners and for our low income students, we’re going to create a different criteria. We’re going to say kids can need to score at the 88th percentile or higher. Okay? And so for those particular populations, there was a different criteria. That is a form of local norms. It’s a group based local norm.

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
Right. And it’s basically correcting for the fact that there is a difference in those groups in their relationship to the instrument, to the test. There’s test bias in some tests. Right. That are going to affect certain populations differently than others. Right. But there’s also a difference in what we call opportunity to learn, right? Have those kids all had the same opportunity to learn what is being assessed on the test? So when you have a lower score of say a multilingual student, is that because that kid is not as capable or is it because the kid has two languages and this is not their primary language? Right. And maybe hasn’t had all the same academic experiences that a sort of typical kid might have.

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
Right. So you use local norms almost as like a corrective factor, right. To make sure that you’re looking thoughtfully at, you know, all the things that could be going on with a particular kid. And so when you take that approach, you can use any test, it doesn’t matter, right. Use an achievement test, use an ability test, use the Naglieri, use the cogat. Use, use an Iowa, you use a smarter balance, use a map test like it doesn’t matter, right. The kids that are clearly high are going to be clearly High that that wasn’t the hard part to begin with. But in these under.

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
Historically underrepresented groups, I think particularly about multilingual and about free and reduced are sort of the really easy ones to think about. But I think we could probably spread a little broader there if we think a little harder. Right. In those groups, if you use a local norms approach, you can identify the kids who within that group are going to be sort of the highest performers within, say, the multilingual group or the highest performers within the local. The. The free and reduced group. Right. You know, the school district that I studied pulled those kids into a highly accelerated program.

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
They had these kids accelerated two to three grade levels in math, and they were doing just fine. Like, they even shared some data showing achievement scores of these kids a couple years later, and it was indistinguishable. The kids who are qualified using a local norm versus kids who qualified sort of via the traditional means. Two years later, they had the same achievement. So it really validates this idea that you really need to adjust how you look at these test scores. It’s not that the kids are not as capable. It’s that the test is not showing it fully clearly, and so you have to interpret it correctly. And local norms is a tool for how we do that.

Cyndi Burnett:
Okay. Austina.

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
Yeah.

Cyndi Burnett:
I know you’ve done a lot of parent work and parent outreach with gifted ed. So can you tell us. Imagine we are. We come to you, and we are parents of a child that we think is gifted or twice exceptional. What advice would you give to them if they say there’s just my. My child is not fitting in in school, my child doesn’t enjoy the classroom, and there’s no gifted programs in the area. What advice would you give me? Because that’s the question we hear a lot.

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
So I do a lot of that consulting work. Actually. I work with families quite often, and I’d say the number one issue is that families don’t fully appreciate their kids twice exceptionality. And they actually don’t have all the diagnosis dialed in. They think they know what’s going on. Often what they think they know is adhd. But actually, when you pick it apart and really understand what’s underneath there, there’s usually a lot more complexity. And the really.

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
I think the useful thing. Right. Is that when you understand what’s really going on with a kid, you have so many more tools to help and so much more understanding as to what’s really happening. There’s a whole lot of. It’s like a Dozen that I call the ADHD lookalikes, right? You know, things that look, smell, and act like adhd and even if you go to a neuropsychologist and get a full eval, would probably score as ADHD in most cases, but may or may not actually be a neurotransmitter issue that’s gonna respond to medication, right? Or maybe, yes, there’s that, but there’s also other pieces that are, you know, sort of exacerbating each other, right? So things that come up super, super common vision processing disorders where the two eyes are actually not working in concert with each other, right? And so if the two eyes are not moving together, that’s gonna create a whole lot more sort of stamina issues in vision. And we could talk for a long time just about vision, right? So there are vision processing issues, there are auditory processing issues, right. That make it hard. It’s basically a timing issue, effectively, between the two ears, right? Where the brain is sort of hearing things imbalanced and the timing is off.

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
Right. Again, it makes it really hard to understand in noise when a kid can’t understand well in noise and is really sort of struggling to understand what all these little noises mean, right? Our kids care, right? They all care, right? And they know that they’re missing something, and so they hear this little noise, and they hear that little noise, and they hear that little noise, and they’re saying, was that important? Was that important? Was that important? Is somebody calling my name? Was that an instruction I needed to listen to? Right. That just makes you hyper vigilant, right? That’s like a recipe for creating anxiety in a kid, right? Or. And some kids, they become impulsive, they become, you know, sort of dysregulated, right? They. A lot of the behavior that we might associate with ADHD look exactly the same, Right. I could go on and on, right? Auditory and vision are sort of the two biggies, but. But there’s a whole bunch of other ones, including a whole bunch of medical things that get overlooked, like sleep apnea, like when kids are not sleeping well at night, that 100% looks exactly like ADHD. 100%.

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
Right. It’s a medical issue. It needs to get chased down. And so when you understand all these different things that could be going on and you sort of look at it more deeply, you know, to really understand what I think of as, like, the root causes underneath twice exceptionality, you. You have so many more tools, right, to actually be able to help. Like if. Okay. If you understand it’s an auditory Issue, you’re not going to be spending a lot more energy thinking about, okay, what is this kid’s auditory environment? How can we support that? Is it worth getting some tools? There’s a great ear filter that you can get.

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
There are Logan hearing aids that you can get. Right. Is it important for this kid to have, you know, some head muffs that they can put on occasionally, you know, or just pay attention to how much auditory chaos they’re experiencing over the course of the day? They need quiet time to, to break. And if you provide that those accommodations, Those might help 10 times more than anything you would do for executive function issues. Right. Because that may not actually be the root problem. So, like when I talk with families, 98% of the time, you know, once I hear somebody’s story, it’s like, oh, well, have you ever looked into this? Have you ever looked into that? That kind of sounds like this, like. But most just don’t even know that those questions can be asked.

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
They don’t even know that those are things that exist that could be supported, that is even in the ether. But we could also talk about gifted education. I mean, like, you know, yes, in schools there isn’t enough gifted education. And I think there’s also a lot of debate around what gifted education actually is. You know, I’m a big fan of, you know, a fundamentally accelerated based approach. Right. If you’ve got a kid who is clearly scoring high in math, like, there’s a limit to how much going deeper and being more enriched is really going to move that kid forward. At some point you got to move on.

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
Right. And so, you know, I think we need to be providing more acceleration in schools, you know, with some good depth and complexity along the way, because you don’t want kids sort of racing along. But to actually produce that, to actually make that happen in the context of a public school system, there’s a lot of logistics to make that actually possible. Possible, Right. That’s where it really gets to be hard. But I think when we have school districts that they define their gifted programming as sort of purely enrichment based or purely creativity based, right. You actually get into some really sticky waters, right? Because how do you explain that a kid who is sort of high potential in math, for instance, right. Or high potential in, in reading or in, you know, sort of verbal skills, why would that kid need creativity skills any more than any other student in the school? Like, there’s a real sort of moral, ethical problem there, right? Like all of our kids deserve enrichment, creativity, flexible thinking skills, brainstorm like all that good stuff.

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
Stuff right there is. It is very hard for me to say, yeah, that’s only for our gifted kids. Like, why? That doesn’t make any sense to me. Like, I think all kids everywhere need that. And yet also we have these kids for whom the typical grade level, classroom stuff, they’ve already mastered those standards. They need to move on. And that’s largely going to be acceleration.

Cyndi Burnett:
Austina, I 100% agree with you on that. That’s something that I’ve always been curious about is why is it that, you know, we could sell. Not that we’re selling creativity, but we can advocate for creativity and gifted programs. We can be around educators who are gifted and say, yes, we need creativity. But you go to a standard teacher or a regular school district and they don’t seem like they’re like, oh, well, that’s for the gifted students. That’s for the gifted students. I’m like, okay.

Matthew Worwood:
So it’s actually since I’ve been here, that’s exactly what I’ve been thinking is, I mean, I understand there’s a historical relationship between gifted ed and creativity, but it seems crazy. I mean, if you look at how many creativity scholars are here at this conference. But we should be finding ways to infuse creativity throughout the curriculum and also throughout academic events such as this, right? Yeah.

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
Yeah. I mean, and there’s a role for creativity everywhere, including in advanced accelerated learning. Yes, Right. But it’s not like its own domain. Like, I’ve always pushed back again, like, why are we having like a creativity lesson? Like that seems kind of goofy to me. Like, it should be imbued in. In everything else and it shouldn’t be just for the gifted kids. Yeah, right.

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
Like that. I don’t get that. No.

Matthew Worwood:
So you’ve been using the word highly capable. Yeah, I’ve also. We know talented and gifted, sometimes gifted education. Could you tell us a little bit about these different names that exist within the field, why you have a particular preference and, you know, any concerns about using one name over another name?

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
Oh, nomenclature is that. That is the big hot topic right now. But there’s a real good reason why I use the word highly capable. Because that is the Washington state word. It’s. It’s what’s built into our Washington state laws. It’s actually just before my time, but only just so I was not there when that was decided. But I actually really support the decision because I think the word gifted carries a lot of baggage that, especially for folks not in the field, doesn’t fully make sense.

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
And it sort of creates these negative connotations that I think we fight with in all different places. And so moving to some different nomenclature, I think is probably healthy. I. I have found highly capable or high cap to be pretty effective in Washington state. In my mind, it’s a very similar concept. I. Conceptually, it’s the same thing. It’s not like there’s some other meaning, hidden meaning in there.

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
It’s just a different word. But that said, you know, at the end of the day, you can call it whatever you want. You can call it Philadelphia. It’s. It’s still a difficult concept for people to wrap their heads around. Right. And so just changing the word doesn’t necessarily change everything about it, but I think it does make it a little bit easier to. About.

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
Especially when you get away from this idea that kids are just sort of magically gifted, this, you know, this amazing gift. And actually, like, when you really understand our field, it’s not a gift in all cases. In a lot of cases, even for a kid who is kind of that unicorn and can, you know, do a lot of things, there’s still some heaviness that comes with that. Right. And just the being different in a world where that is not typical is heaviness. Right. Yeah. And so I think.

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
I think a different word is helpful. Is it the perfect word? I don’t know. You know, but I think it’s a step, perhaps in the right direction.

Matthew Worwood:
And we’ve really gravitated toward the, you know, Mark Runko talking about creative potential. But the idea of potential, I like highly capable because it speaks to a capability and the need to support someone maximizing their potential with that capability. Whereas as you referenced, the idea of being gifted something, it’s like, oh, they’re gifted on the piano. Right. Like, they’ve got this gift. They’re gifted at soccer. I think I’m gonna shift over to highly capable.

Cyndi Burnett:
I like that much more, too. And I haven’t heard that term until today when we were at the. At the school because we’re East Coast.

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
Well, welcome to Washington. Yeah, I like highly capable because it gets across both the idea that a kid could be high capacity and really achieving at that level, but it also gets that potential idea in there also. You could be highly capable and maybe not achieving there yet, but you’re capable of it. Right. And so it gets both. Both aspects, which I think is important. Right. We need to have both sides of that to really do a good job.

Cyndi Burnett:
Austina, this has been such an incredible conversation and for those of you listening, teachers and parents and administrators and emerging scholars, which is our target audience, we will send them the link to your website so they can learn more about your work. Because I think there’s a lot to dig into. Now, before we go, we wanna ask you a question. It’s a new question on our podcast that we’re going to start asking all of our interviewees. And the question is, can you share with us a creative educational experience that you’ve had in your life, either formal or informal, and the impact that it’s had on you?

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
Well, I think it’s an educational experience that I built and actually in my first career, so one of the things that I did in my first career was I built a training program for Microsoft engineers to teach them how to be more customer focused, how to sort of take the ideas of design thinking and really build them into engineering. Because, you know, the biggest problem in engineering teams is that they end up building a beautiful solution to the wrong problem. Right. I mean that to just put it simply, like that’s the issue, right? And so that was a real problem that needed to be solved. And so the way that we did it kind of broke all the norms, right? What we did was we brought entire teams into a training room together. We would have them in the same room together for a day, or sometimes two. We would bring in their live customers to do live customer interviews and have them like eye to eye with their customer. We would work their problem over the course of the day in a facilitated way where it was real workshop.

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
We would tell them how to do it. But then it was like, okay, and here’s your customer and now you really think through. And by the end of that day or the end of the two day sessions, we had two different flavors of workshops. They often had created new product ideas that they were going to go to market with a year later. You know, so that was really fun to innovate and to do, especially an adult education thing that really got everybody engaged and not just their eyes glazing over because they were really doing the work and doing their real work, their day job. Right. But just in a facilitated way where they’re learning a bunch of tools along the way. Fun.

Matthew Worwood:
Well, thank you so much. We really grateful for your time. And if you’re listening to the show, remember this is part of our series opening up season 10. We’re going to be putting all these conversations together on our website. You can Visit that@foldingcreativitypodcast.com My name is Dr. Matthew Worwood

Cindy Burnett:
and my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.

Dr. Austina De Bonte:
Foreign.

Cyndi Burnett:
You’ve been listening to the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast hosted by Matthew Worwood and Cindy Burnett. Our creative producer is Catherine Fu, and this episode was made possible thanks to our sponsor, curiosity to create.