By Susan Kovalik, Did you know?

While teaching science at a large elementary school, I was approached by a custodian who commented that there was a job posting for a teacher for the gifted, and that I should “try out.”

The posting indicated that a major consideration for the job was the teaching must be “qualitatively different.” I asked for an explanation of qualitatively different, and was told if I could teach without a textbook or worksheets in a weekly pullout program with grades four, five and six together, they would interview me.

After teaching science for 1,200 students, this seemed like a perfect match. I got the job, and little did I know that over the next 10 years, it would change my life.

In California during the late 1970s, scoring 132 on a one-hour IQ test qualified you as gifted, or if your standardized test scores were in the top 10 percent of your class, or if there was noticeable creativity in what you regularly produced in class.

Of my three children, two had been identified as gifted — one by the IQ test, the other through creativity. The third child did not qualify as his score was a strong average.

I began to research the concept of giftedness and the variety of differentiated programs meant to support them. I began my “qualitatively different” teaching with 110 students a week spread out in three schools. Included in this definition of teaching, you were expected to organize frequent field trips to enhance their conceptual understanding of content. As the years passed, I became a national advocate for the gifted, traveling throughout the country and modeling weeklong classroom experiences for teachers to observe what “qualitatively different” looked like.

Two experiences in 1983 changed my view and redefined my mission. First was when my “average” son traveled with me one summer — he was 15 — and observed me teach and present during these weeklong classes.

At the close of the second week, he asked why he couldn’t have this type of learning in his classrooms. His actual comment was that his brother and sister got all the great teachers with something exciting to learn, and he got the leftovers. At this time, I still thought the tests were an accurate representation of intelligence.

Sometimes the obvious needs to be brought to our attention by someone’s voice we can hear.

The second “a-ha” came at the end of the summer, when I found the book that would change my life’s work and influence educators and the lives of thousands of students in the ensuing 23 years.

“Human Brain and Human Learning” by Leslie Hart, published in 1983, was the first book to bring information in a non-scientific way from the field of neuroscience as to how the brain learned. It was a breakthrough moment. The major point is that we are not born intelligent — only with a capacity to be so. Since then, we have been flooded with information regarding the biology of learning. Some of the latest information says we are not our genes, we are our experiences.

The nature-nurture debate has gone on for years, and it is accurate to say we are influenced by both. However, an eye-opening point is that we are not born intelligent, but with a capacity to be so. This capacity spans the spectrum of intellectual, social and emotional behaviors. Each and every day, what we do, who we are with, what we watch — in other words, all our experiences — contribute to who we are.

The gifted got field trips while my youngest got textbooks and the struggling student got worksheets. If what Hart said was true, then capacity was highly influenced by how we identified our learners and the things we asked them to do.

If capacity is being affected daily, and what we are exposing them to is meaningful, it stands to reason that all students would be moving toward being capable, competent, curious learners.

I started thinking about the labels we give students. While I was in high school, our service club made monthly visits to Down syndrome children who lived at the county hospital. They were always pleasant, but they didn’t talk, read, write or have exposure to meaningful content. We had parties and played games or made crafts with the children.

Today, children with Down syndrome graduate from high school, hold jobs and have a social life. Clearly, the environment expanded their capacity when they became part of a regular school system.

Capacity building isn’t just about schools. Building capacity occurs every day in all our lives.

Think about the variety of interactions you have daily: Work, home, relatives, friends, television, the Internet. How do these interactions affect your intellectual, social or emotional capacity? How have we been enhanced, stifled or diminished in our lifetime?

Chances are we can name those events that positively influenced our lives, and also remember clearly those diminishing moments at school or at work when we were made to feel less competent. How was your day today?

Think about it.

Susan J. Kovalik is an educator, international consultant and author in Federal Way. She is founder of The Center for Effective Learning in Federal Way who can be reached at skovalik@kovalik.com.