Hi lupita! mostly I am way out of depth on these questions since I am not a teacher so any ideas I have are totally untested and theoretical.
Except for:
How do you handle a child who seems gifted, but is a discipline problem?
I can tell you what my teacher did to me. She gave me responsibilities! I was appalled. But then it was a challenge and then it was fun.
Here is what happened. We had a really tough, challenging history teacher, Miss A. She taught AP American History to the 10th grade, and AP European History to the 12th grade. During the year I took AP American, I was clinically depressed and spent most days cycling between exhausted fatigue and manic anxiety, crying jags, hopelessness. It was a bad time and I was mostly thinking about suicide, not US history - handed in all papers late, flubbed many assignments. The teacher marked me down as 'not a contender.' Then I got a high score on the AP test - a 4.
The European history class was only open to students who scored highly on the US history test. So I signed up for the European class, though I was afraid Miss A might not let me take it. One day, early in the year I said "Wouldn't it be a good and fun way to review what we have learned, if we created like a sort of Jeopardy game with topics and competitions?" And Miss A said, "Why Iphi that would be a good idea. I want you to put the game together and in 2 weeks on Tuesday, we will have that game and you will be Alex Trebec." Then she assigned the whole class that they would have to think up trivia questions and submit them to me.
She was so smart, lupita. Knowing my poor performance/motivation history, she involved me in the class, gave me extra tasks that held me personally accountable for the result because it was me who would be running the whole game, and also it was a task that would involve the entire class in a group exercise they would have to cooperate on, and took the onus off the teacher. And it was fun. There was grumbling, but we all got really into it and it was much more fun that lectures. The element of competition, knowing all questions were from our books, motivated everybody. Meanwhile, I was motivated to find tough stumper questions.
My classmate became a teacher in the same high school and she told me they still play the Jeopardy game - 20 years later. We all got high scores on that AP too.
Another thing she did was have activity booths and stations around the room. For example, in one corner were postcards of famous European artworks and quiz questions about them.
So thinking of Ms. A, I think her answer to you would be delegate responsibilities and activities to the kids, with clear goals and definite time schedules, making them cooperate with each other to accomplish the goals.
She always told us, "If you don't do your work, you won't be prepared. If you are not prepared, then you will fail - and
deservedly so." I still like to say "and deservedly so!"
There is a book I am planning to buy, that I have read articles about. Have you heard of Alan Kazdin? He is a professor at Yale who runs a clinic that studies and teaches about parenting and motivating defiant, oppositional kids. My son isn't defiant (yet) but Kazdin's clinic concentrates on motivating the child with goals that the child defines and achieves. It gives the kids a stake in the process. Some friends of ours are using a behavior/goals technique with their young daughter and it is working out really well. She chooses a goal and works toward accruing points all week. Heck, I think that process could motivate me as an adult at work right now, and don't see why it could't work for any age young person since they are the ones defining the goals.
Here's a main page link that has further links to FAQs and articles etc:
http://www.childconductclinic.yale.edu/
