A Teacher's Guide to Curriculum Design for Gifted and Advanced Learners

Book excerpt: A Teacher’s Guide to Curriculum Design for Gifted and Advanced Learners provides educators with models and strategies they can easily use to create appropriately complex differentiated lessons, questions, tasks, and projects. This must-have resource for both gifted and regular education teachers: Includes specific thinking models for teaching English language arts, social studies, and STEM. Is ideal for teachers who are looking for ways to differentiate and design lessons for their highest achieving students. Provides multiple examples of how to embed complexity within standards-based lessons. Highlights units and models from Vanderbilt University's Programs for Talented Youth curriculum. Helps teachers provide the necessary challenge for advanced learners to thrive. The models have been vetted by content experts in the relevant disciplines and were designed to guide students to develop expertise within a discipline. Definitions of widely used terms, such as depth, complexity, and abstractness, are explained and linked to models within specific content areas to support common understanding and application of schoolwide differentiation strategies.