“Bright kids go to school and never encounter anything that makes them extend effort. They grow up thinking being smart means they don’t have to work very hard. The first time they encounter something difficult they think they are not smart anymore.” - Sally Reis Renzulli

This website is intended for the teachers at Central Lee. It relies heavily on The Multi Tiered Systems of Support for Advanced Learners written by experts at the Iowa Department of Education in 2018. This document outlines methods to meet the needs of advanced and gifted learners.

Australia: Free Education Kit - Modules for Gifted Education

Belin-Blank, University of Iowa: Educator Programs

Brian Housand, Gifted 360, Increasing Student Engagement and Designing Personalized Learning Experiences, Inexpensive ($59 each course)

-- The ways content, process, and product are modified.

While extensions are great, our differentiation should be embedded in the core lesson and not an "add-on".

• Start with iReady.

• Use tiered lesson planning - Template

  • Begin with the Highest Learner in Mind

  • Gifted Guru Example

• Change the levels of learning within the tiers using:

  • The Hess Cognitive Rigor Matrices

  • Bloom's Taxonomy

  • Depth and Complexity Framework

  • Webb's Depth of Knowledge

  • Project Zero's Thinking Routine Toolbox

-- How students are grouped for instruction.

1. Cluster Grouping

2. Cooperative Learning Groups - Intentionally group students for activities for the purpose of developing academic and peer interaction skills.

3. Flexible Skills Groups - Grouping children by their achievement level or readiness in a subject area.

-- How students need to be taught.

1. Accelerated Pace - Students progress faster as the teacher speeds up rate of presentation of information in order to match the significantly faster learning rate of high ability/high potential learners. (ie. Competitions)

2. Flexible Deadlines - Students negotiate for more or less time to complete a learning experience and its associated product or performance. (ie. Flexible tasks with student voice and choice, Learning contracts)

3. Higher Order Responses - Students are required to use higher order thinking (application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation, strategic or extended thinking) in their learning responses. (ie. Independent study, Learning contracts)

4. Inquiry - Students respond to teacher- or student-led questioning, problems, or scenarios in order to learn new concepts or draw conclusions and make generalizations during the learning process. (ie. Mentor utilization)

5. Open-Endedness, Creative Thinking - Students are encouraged to brainstorm or think divergently in order to produce more than one idea, answer, or solution. (ie. Problem-based learning)

6. Question Typology - Students engage with curriculum utilizing varied question types including informational, interpretive, explanatory, procedural, relational, verificational, heuristic, evaluational; questions may be content-directed, student-directed, rhetorical, or ambiguous.
   (For more detailed explanation, see http://www2.phy.ilstu.edu/pte/311content/questioning/typology.html.)