A New Year’s Resolution: Include Gifted Students in Your Lesson Planning

During 2018, why not resolve to reach all learners in the classroom, despite where they fall in terms of academic ability?

Included in that resolution might be the goal to further challenge gifted students—a promise to help them learn something new everyday day, to provide enrichment and opportunities to develop their abilities, and not simply ask them to do more work or tutor classmates.

If you’re already challenging the gifted, I congratulate you! But you still might find this blog helpful as I’ll share free resources to help you accommodate the gifted.

Once you resolve to challenge gifted students in your classroom, the next question naturally becomes how do I do that?

In previous posts, I’ve shared many approaches and strategies for gifted education, however, in this blog I will share some of the best (in my opinion) and free resources, which you can use to build accommodations into your lesson plans.

The Renzulli Center for Creativity, Gifted Education & Talent Development at the University of Connecticut provides tons of online, free resources. For instance, the site provides articles that cover everything from identification of gifted students, using models such as enrichment clusters, teaching reading and math, and underachievement among the gifted.

Another fantastic online resource is from the Davidson Institute which provides articles on how to differentiate for gifted students.  For example: Differentiating curriculum for gifted students.

Finally, Susan Weinbrenner, author of Teaching Gifted Kids in the Regular Classroom, has shared some online resources, such as one on cluster grouping.

I realize teachers are extremely busy and generally overloaded with information, but perhaps this coming year you might glance over these resources, find one idea, and apply it.

Take just one strategy, one approach, one new resource, and incorporate it into your lesson planning to accommodate the gifted student or students in your classroom. It could make all the difference in the world for them.