About PosseVygotsky
or How I Got Here

My name is Tom Shaff. I started PosseVygotsky to help Gifted Emerging Adults (GEA) find their voices and figure out what they want out of life. I have studied giftedness for 27 years. Like many parents I knew nothing about giftedness until we received a letter from the school district saying our older son scored at the top of a test. He qualified for the gifted magnet school. We looked at each other and wondered what it meant. 

It was supposed to be good news, but sorry, this year there are not enough seats for your son. Huh? How can they advertise this program and when a kid qualifies for it say, better luck next year?

That year we enrolled him in another school and forgot about it. In the second week of first grade his teacher told him to go next door and take math with the second graders. They left him there. It was an unofficial subject acceleration-a term I learned later. He was ok with it and, hey, if it better meets his level of math ability, fine by us! Then we received another letter saying a seat opened up at the magnet. The deadline for acceptance was in two days.

Lucky for us, a teacher at the GT magnet preferred to talk to us rather than attend a meeting and took an hour to explain the school’s program. We asked our son if he was interested and he said he’d try it. So, off he went. And I went to a meeting of a group known as the Gifted Services Advisory Council. Karen Rogers gave a presentation and it was all over for me. I joined. I stayed until the group was disbanded years later. We made policy recommendations directly to the school board. Lesson one was never stop advocating for ALL gifted kids. We miss or underserve far too many. Lesson two was read the scholarly work and don’t back down.

A few years after I joined GSAC the district offered an MA program in Gifted, Creative and Talented Education. They asked me if I was interested and would pay half my tuition. The program lasted two and a half years. Those were great years.

But the research bug bit me. Hard. My work on GSAC and at the design firm where I was the Creative Director and Curriculum Publisher offered an opportunity to run studies on our remedial reading and math software and I needed to know a lot more. So I took the GRE-which is not designed for late 40-somethings and found a PhD program to learn how to do research and continue studying giftedness.

Over time my interests shifted from elementary to secondary, then postsecondary to emerging adulthood. However, there was a small problem. Emerging Adulthood and Giftedness are scholarly disciplines in their own right but have never met for coffee let alone a hot date. Connecting the two disciplines meant teasing out the role of ability by itself, or the interactions it contributes to.

As I dug into it I discovered the Quarter Life Crisis and that a lot of GEAs at our elite universities were in deep trouble. They were highly qualified for school, but utterly unprepared for life. My second year project and a small longitudinal study revealed the need for coaching for some of these people. Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) was a model of how the process works. By herself, a GEA may be having difficulty coming into her own, but with a coach she could more clearly see how to master the tasks of becoming a talented adult.

I started PosseVygotsky, named for the Russian Educational Psychologist Lev Vygotsky, to apply the principles of the ZPD and take his idea that language as the basis for thinking and reasoning could also be applied to messy matters of life outside of school. The stories I heard from parents about 20-somethings in trouble convinced me it was not a minor issue. Parents want to know what to do. They care. And so do I.

Get in touch

Finding the right person to help a son or daughter who is lost or unprepared for life is important. They must be experts, but also savvy to the world our kids live in. This is all I do. This is my day job. If your son or daughter is having trouble coming of age, please call me. The first conversation is always free.

651 283-0242

About Thomas Shaff

I was 49, days away from 50 and had just begun my MA program in Gifted, Creative and Talented Education. I had enjoyed a long career as a Creative Director at a design firm creating web sites and instructional software. I had also been an elementary teacher, a studio painter and written a lot of poetry. My wife and I were out for a walk on a dazzling early autumn evening. I was quite animated going on about what I was learning and how excited I was to learn everything about giftedness. As I went on, she had this curious expression somewhere between a smirk and a smile. Finally I demanded to know what was so funny. She laughed and said, “When are you going to realize you’re one of them?” My goal for your son or your daughter is to make coming of age a positive and exciting experience.

Qualifications

PhD., Educational Psychology, University of Iowa
MA., Gifted, Creative and Talented Education, University of St. Thomas
BA., Psychology, University of Iowa

I have two talented adult sons.