Creating Curriculum
Developing advanced curriculum materials for gifted learners is our passion. When is the last time you found the perfect material for your students? For us, the answer is almost never. And to quote the old adage, almost doesn’t count! Finding materials for gifted students that hit standards, are challenging, and work the way our students’ brains work. While we have always been able to pick and piece, we have often been left longing for the ‘just right’ unit that we could pick up and run with, rather than having to sort and scrap.
As teachers, we want materials that are:
Easy to implement
Engaging for students
Challenging enough for gifted learners
Comprehensive in scope
Standards- and Research-based
Many widely available materials have great bones. They check off a few boxes. They might be easy to implement and challenging, but not engaging for our students. Or else they are comprehensive in scope and research-based but challenging to implement. Finding the perfect materials for gifted learners is elusive! Have you found this to be the case?
Why We Write: Gifted Learners
The bottom line: we need advanced curriculum materials for gifted learners. The longer we teach, the more we realize that finding comprehensive curricular materials that are challenging, engaging, and easy to implement can be a daunting task. As gifted educators and instructional coaches, we are tasked with finding rigorous and relevant resources for both gifted and general education groups. Gifted students simply need something different than other students in order to be respectfully challenged and continue to grow as learners, thinkers, and readers. Research shows that gifted learners require a curriculum that is global in scope, rigorous, and provides opportunities for depth and complexity.
Over the past five years, we have created units specifically targeted to meet the needs of our advanced learners. Each of our units is developed based on research-based frameworks, including:
Depth and Complexity
Content Imperatives
Jacob’s Ladder Reading Comprehension Program
Universal Themes
Socratic Inquiry Method
Creative Problem Solving
and others!
Our students have blossomed using these units, often asking us to create new units of study in subject areas of interest. We are so excited to be able to share these units with others and hopefully get challenging and engaging materials into the hands of more gifted teachers in order to directly benefit more gifted students.
Developing Advanced Materials
Our best-selling category is always novel studies. These units feature high-level question stems and require students to really dig beyond the surface. Students build an understanding of complex text structures, engage in analysis and evaluation skills, and connect on deeper levels with texts. We find that teachers also love working through novel studies with their students, and get a great deal of satisfaction out of re-reading favorite books with a new purpose. Some of our best-selling (and favorite!) novel studies include Esperanza Rising, The One and Only Ivan, The Mysterious Benedict Society, Chasing Vermeer, and The Phantom Tollbooth.
Beyond novel studies, we have also been developing some broader units. These include many modalities for learning, including:
Most of these are based upon some sort of literature (Greek Mythology, Fairy Tales, Just So Stories, Fables, etc.) and work to build an advanced understanding of concepts on a scaffolded foundation. These units are fun for us to write, and our students love them! In fact, we enjoy writing them so much that these units tend to end blossoming in scope, finishing with a broad range of awesome connected materials. This makes them great for differentiation and incorporating choice! We have also been working on social studies units incorporating Depth and Complexity and primary sources to really dive into historical concepts.
What’s Next?
We are passionate about making sure that gifted learners have the tools they need to be successful learners. In our eyes, a huge part of that is ensuring that they have respectful, challenging, and engaging learning materials. Creating these materials is so much fun for us. We use every single thing that we create in our own classrooms. Gifted education is not an area in which most teachers have extensive training. We hope that the materials we create make it easy for all teachers to differentiate for the unique needs of these students.
We would love to hear from you! What do you want to see us tackle next? What materials are hard for you to find? Where do you have holes in your curriculum? Is anything missing for your gifted learners? Some of our best ideas come from our students and fellow teachers, and we’d love to add you to that list!
In the meantime, check out some of our other posts on materials we use in our own classrooms!