Strategies that work with gifted students are just good teaching and work with all children. Included are 5 specific strategies that tend to engage and challenge students.

1. Five Simple Strategies for
Working with Gifted
Students
Todd Stanley
Gifted Services Coordinator

2. 1. Higher Level Thinking
 Use the levels of Bloom’s to guide you

 Higher Level

 Lower Level

Thinking


3. How do we “move it to the
next level”
 By having the questions or product be something in
which students either analyze, evaluate, or create.
 Do your assessments, classroom discussion, and/or
conversations require students to think at a higher level
 Do your products require students to think at this level
and challenge them to go deeper.
 A product can be anything from answering a one sentence
question to spending weeks physically creating something
that captures the skill of the standard.
 It is not the difficulty of the question/product that causes
students to grow, it is the level of thinking you are
asking them to do.

4. Applying Bloom’s
 Remember – List the items used by Goldilocks while she
was in the Bears’ house.
 Understand – Explain why Goldilocks liked Baby Bear’s
chair the best.
 Apply – Demonstrate what Goldilocks would use if she
came to your house.
 Analyze – Compare this story to reality. What events could
not really happen.
 Evaluate – Judge whether Goldilocks was good or bad.
Defend your opinion.
 Create – Propose how the story would be different if it
were Goldilocks and the Three Fish.
Using the story Goldilocks and the Three Bears

5. When to Use Higher Level
Thinking
Should be embedded in the day-to-day classroom
 Bell ringer
 Exit ticket
 Daily work
 Whole/small group discussion
 Seminar
 Assessments, both multiple choice and constructed response
 Group work
 Projects

7. 2. Flexible Grouping
 This is the idea of putting students in groups based
on ability for the specific skill you are teaching
 Could be performance-based
 Could be ability grouping
 Some buildings have already been cluster grouping
 Could use pre-assessment to determine the level of
their understanding (K-W-L chart)
 Need to stress the flexible part, these should not be
assigned for the entire year

8. Planning for Grouping:
Questions to Consider
 When does grouping benefit students?
 When does grouping facilitate instruction?
 Which activities lend themselves to group
work?
 How do you determine group membership?

9. Group Membership
Can be determined by:
• Readiness
• Interest
• Reading Level
• Skill Level
• Background Knowledge
• Social Skills

10. Keys to Grouping
 Provide variety
 Offer choices
 Create ground rules
 Evaluate students individually
 Compact the curriculum
 Incorporate creative thinking

11. 3. Differentiated Centers
 Teachers base differentiated stations on student
assessment data, whereas a traditional station is
based on whole-group instruction.
 In a differentiated station, students work within
multilevel resources, whereas traditional station
resources are not differentiated.
 Differentiated stations have tiered assignments,
which include varied student responses, whereas a
traditional learning station only has one level of
response for all.

12. Multilevel Center
Activities
 An open-ended activity is where all students in the group
tackle the same assignment, but the end product will differ for
beginner, intermediate, and advanced clusters.
 A tiered activity is when students are doing the same activity,
but it’s tiered according to their difficulty level.
 Learning menus, or choice boards, are varied activities that
give students options on how they want to learn a concept.
They often mimic a tic-tac-toe board where your classroom
would pick three activities to complete (one from each row) to
form a line. Differentiated instruction menus benefit all
students because you can tailor each board to students’
readiness, learning style, or interest, and kids think they are a
lot of fun.

14. Four Corners
 Having independent research projects for students
to work on should they choose upon completing
their work
 Can be connected to the standards, can just be
enrichment in the area of study, could be
completely created by the student
 Student could work on the project for months,
completing a little here and there

16. 4. Teach Interactively
 Allow the students to teach
 Allow them to choose the method of teaching
 Organize resources in order to free yourself to work
with individual students
 As an ancillary effect students have a greater
appreciation of how difficult it is to teach

18. Advantages to Cooperative
Learning
 It has the potential to produce a level of engagement that other forms of learning
cannot
 Students may explain things better to another student than a teacher to a class.
Students learn how to teach one another and explain material in their own words
 Interpersonal and collaboration skills can be learned in a cooperative learning
activity
 Cooperative learning has the potential to meet more learning style needs more of
the time than individualized direct instruction
 Sends the symbolic message that the class is egalitarian
 Higher ability students are in a position to be experts, leaders, models and teachers

19. Be cautious
 Don’t just put the gifted student with a student who is
struggling
 If gifted students already know the grade-level
standards, it may seem logical to have them teach others.
 This is faulty logic. It assumes that teaching struggling
students is something gifted kids innately know how to do.
Most gifted students do not know how to tutor others.
 They often are frustrated that struggling students don’t
understand what they perceive as easy.
 Peer tutoring using gifted students also takes away time
they should be using for more advanced work, more
rigor and more higher-level thinking.

20. 5. High
Expectations/Rigor
 Students have a funny way of jumping over
wherever you set the bar
 When a student receives an E, what does that mean
 Should not mean effort
 Should not be that the assignment requirements were
met, that is an M
 By pure definition of E = exceed, the student should
be exceeding what is expected from the assignment
 Even if you do give traditional letter grades, how
challenging is it for a students to earn an A

22. Examples of High
Expectations Techniques
 No opt out - a method of eliminating the possibility of muttering, “I don’t know,”
in response to a question
 Right Is Right - is about the difference between partially right and all-the-way right.
Should expect 100% correct
 Stretch It - the sequence of learning does not end with a right answer; reward right
answers with follow-up questions that extend knowledge and test for reliability
 Format Matters - prepare your students to succeed by requiring complete sentences
and proficient grammar every chance you get
 Without Apology - sometimes the way we talk about expectations inadvertently
lowers them. If we’re not on guard, we can unwittingly apologize for teaching
worthy content and even for the students themselves
- Taken from the book Teach Like a Champion

23. Increase rigor through
differentiation
Multiple Paths of Differentiation
 Content Differentiation
 Process Differentiation
 Product Differentiation
 Environmental Differentiation

24. Content
 Reading Partners/ Reading Buddies
 Read/Summarize
 Visual Organizer/Summarizer
 Choral Reading
 Note Taking Organizers
 Guided Notes

25. Process
 Tiered Tasks/Products
 Group Investigations
 Model/demonstrations by teacher
 Use part-to-whole and whole-to-part approaches
 Problem Based
 Inquiry
 Alternative Forms of Assessments

26. Product
 Diagram
 Article
 Timeline
 Scrapbook
 Debate
 Flow Chart
 Mock Trial

27. Environment
 Flexible learning spaces and options
 Whole Group (lecture, presentation, demonstration,
video, guest speaker)
 Work in a cooperative group
 Vary teacher mode of presentation (visual, auditory,
kinesthetic, concrete, abstract, multi-sensory)
 Adjust for gender, culture, language differences