Vertical Differentiation for Gifted, Advanced, and High-Potential Students

This the best seller by Dr. Emily Mofield.Vertical Differentiation for Gifted, Advanced, and High-Potential Students outlines 25 engaging tools and strategies to stretch student thinking, promote deep learning, and provide layers of challenge in the classroom and beyond.

Each strategy is expertly designed to foster deep inquiry and conceptual understanding by guiding students to justify conclusions, apply critical and creative thinking, develop solutions to real-world problems, and transfer learning across contexts. Packed with both “tried and true” thinking models and new, innovative ideas with concrete examples, this resource ensures that no matter where students are in their learning journey, they’ll find themselves challenged and engaged. This book is essential reading for educators looking to support and extend student thinking across content areas and grade levels.

Collaboration, Coteaching, and Coaching in Gifted Education: Sharing Strategies to Support Gifted Learners (1st Edition)

Winner of NAGC’s 2021 Book of the Year Award

• Provides gifted educators with methods and strategies for successful coplanning, coteaching, coaching, and collaboration.
• Enables effective management of differentiation.
• Increases educators’ understanding of gifted students’ needs.
• Features the tools and how to steps for facilitating and maintaining collaborative work in order to challenge and support gifted students all day, every day.
• Encourages professional learning and a focus on shared responsibility and reflection.

The book also includes considerations for working with special populations, including twice-exceptional students, underachievers, and culturally, linguistically, and economically diverse learners, as well as meeting students’ social-emotional needs, collaborating with families and communities, and advocating for gifted education.

Coaching in Gifted Education

Gifted students spend most of their time in the regular classroom, yet few general education teachers have the specialized training to address their unique needs. This book provides the structures, processes, and resources needed to facilitate GT (Gifted/Talented) coaching as a means of building capacity among classroom teachers to identify, serve, and teach gifted and high-potential learners. 

Guided by best practices and research in professional learning, this resource provides the steps, strategies, and tools needed to create and sustain effective coaching practices designed to maximize access to advanced learning and differentiation throughout a school. Bolstered by downloadable resources, chapters address how to support, stretch, and sustain teachers’ instructional practices through a sequence of co-thinking, co-planning, and reflection that emphasizes ongoing and sustainable professional learning.

A Teacher’s Guide to Curriculum Design for Gifted and Advanced Learners: Advanced Content Models for Differentiating Curriculum (1st Edition)

Provides educators with models and strategies they can easily use to create appropriately complex differentiated lessons, questions, tasks, and projects.

• 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.

Teaching Tenacity, Resilience, and a Drive for Excellence: Lessons for Social-Emotional Learning for Grades 4-8 (1st Edition)

How can we help students develop resilience to persevere in the face of setbacks? How can we ignite a drive that will inspire them to sustain effort even through difficulty? This book equips teachers to deliberately cultivate psychosocial skills, including self-awareness, problem solving to deal with setbacks, assertive interpersonal skills, and intellectual risk-taking. By teaching students to be aware of how their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors affect their pursuit of excellence, students can learn to tackle challenges and setbacks that they might experience as they reach to achieve. Lessons include engaging activities and curriculum connections, covering topics related to perfectionism, mindset, grit, stress, procrastination, social-emotional intelligence, and more. 

LEAP Guidebook for Curriculum Design for Teachers of Gifted and High-Potential Students

Provides an overview of the features of high-quality curriculum and how it is responsive and relevant to the needs of gifted students. With this guidebook, educators will learn to identify examples of evidence-based curriculum, plan meaningful learning experiences, and incorporate student voice, choice, interests, and agency into curriculum planning. The LEAP Guidebook for Curriculum Design for Teachers of Gifted and High-Potential Students is aligned to the NAGC Pre-K-Grade 12 Gifted Programming Standards (view alignment here).

As a bonus a 6-panel, 4-color, laminated Curriculum Design Quick Reference Guide is included as the cover! Also available in packs of 10 for PLCs or book studies!

Perspectives of Power: ELA Lessons for Gifted and Advanced Learners in Grades 6-8 (1st Edition)

Winner of the 2015 NAGC Curriculum Studies Award

Perspectives of Power explores the nature of power in literature, historical documents, poetry, and art. Lessons include a major focus on rigorous evidence-based discourse through the study of common themes and content-rich, challenging nonfiction and fictional texts. This unit, developed by Vanderbilt University’s Programs for Talented Youth and aligned to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), guides students to explore the power of oppression; the power of the past, present, and future; and the power of personal response by engaging in simulations, skits, creative projects, literary analyses, Socratic seminars, and debates.

Texts illuminate content extensions that interest many high-ability students including bystander effect, social class structure, game theory, the use and abuse of technology, cultural conflict, the butterfly effect, women’s suffrage, and surrealism as each relates to power. Lessons include close readings with text-dependent questions, choice-based differentiated products, rubrics, formative assessments, and ELA writing tasks that require students to analyze texts for rhetorical features, literary elements, and themes through argument, explanatory, and/or prose-constructed writing.

Ideal for pre-AP and honors courses, the unit features texts from Emily Dickinson, William B. Yeats, and Charles Perrault; art from Moyo Okediji and Salvador Dali; and speeches by Elie Wiesel, Susan B. Anthony, and John F. Kennedy. As a result from the learning in the unit, students will be able to examine powerful influences in their own lives and identify their own power in personal responsibility.

I, Me, You, We: Individuality Versus Conformity, ELA Lessons for Gifted and Advanced Learners in Grades 6-8 (1st Edition)

Winner of the 2016 NAGC Curriculum Studies Award

In I, Me, You, We: Individuality Versus Conformity, students explore essential questions such as “How does our environment shape our identity? What are the consequences of conforming to a group? When does social conformity go too far?” This unit, developed by Vanderbilt University’s Programs for Talented Youth and aligned to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), includes a major emphasis on rigorous evidence-based discourse through the study of common themes across rich, challenging nonfiction and fictional texts.

The unit guides students to examine the fine line of individuality versus conformity through the related concepts of belongingness, community, civil disobedience, questioning the status quo, and self-reliance by engaging in creative activities, Socratic seminars, literary analyses, and debates. Lessons include close-readings with text-dependent questions, choice-based differentiated products, rubrics, formative assessments, and ELA tasks that require students to analyze texts for rhetorical features, literary elements, and themes through argument, explanatory, and prose-constructed writing.

Ideal for pre-AP and honors courses, the unit features short stories from Kurt Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury, poetry from Emily Dickinson and Maya Angelou, art by M. C. Escher and Pablo Picasso, and primary source documents from Plato, Eleanor D. Roosevelt, William Bradford, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau.

In the Mind’s Eye (1st Edition)

Winner of the 2012 NAGC Curriculum Studies Award

In the Mind’s Eye: Truth Versus Perception invites students on a philosophical exploration of the themes of truth and perception. Lessons include a major emphasis on rigorous evidence-based discourse through the study of common themes and content-rich, challenging informational and fictional texts. This unit, developed by Vanderbilt University’s Programs for Talented Youth and aligned to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), applies concepts from Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” to guide students to discover how reality is presented and interpreted in fiction, nonfiction, art, and media.

Students engage in activities such as Socratic seminars, literary analyses, skits, and art projects, and creative writing to understand differing perceptions of reality. Lessons include close readings with text-dependent questions, choice-based differentiated products, rubrics, formative assessments, and ELA tasks that require students to analyze texts for rhetorical features, literary elements, and themes through argument, explanatory, and prose-constructed writing.

Ideal for pre-AP and honors courses, the unit features art from M.C. Escher and Vincent Van Gogh, short stories from Guy de Maupassant and Shirley Jackson, longer texts by Daniel Keyes and Ray Bradbury, and informational texts related to sociology, Nazi propaganda, and Christopher Columbus. This unit encourages students to translate learning to real-life contexts and problems by exploring themes of disillusionment, social deception, and the power of perception.

Finding Freedom (1st Edition)

Finding Freedom invites students to follow America’s journey toward finding freedom by examining multiple perspectives, conflicts, ideas, and challenges through seminal historical texts. This unit, developed by Vanderbilt University’s Programs for Talented Youth and aligned to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), features close readings of some of the most famous American political speeches from notable Americans, presidents, and minority voices.

To sharpen historical thinking, students analyze arguments for freedom, examine dissenting perspectives, and reason through multiple viewpoints of historical issues through debates and interactive activities. To develop advanced literacy skills, students evaluate effective rhetorical appeals, claims, supporting evidence, and techniques that advance arguments. Students synthesize their learning by comparing speeches to each other, relating texts to contemporary issues of today, and making interdisciplinary connections. Lessons include close readings with text-dependent questions, choice-based differentiated products, rubrics, formative assessments, social studies content connections, and ELA tasks that require argument and explanatory writing.

Ideal for pre-AP and honors courses, the unit features speeches from Patrick Henry, Frederick Douglass, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lincoln, Kennedy, Johnson, George W. Bush, Obama, and others.

Encounters with Archetypes (1st Edition)

Encounters With Archetypes integrates the study of archetypes with the concept of encounters. This unit, developed by Vanderbilt University’s Programs for Talented Youth, is aligned to the Common Core State Standards and features accelerated content, creative products, differentiated tasks, engaging activities, and the use of in-depth analysis models to develop sophisticated skills in the language arts.

Through the lens of encounter, students will examine the patterns, symbols, and motifs associated with common archetypes by analyzing fictional and informational texts, speeches, and visual media. Students will follow various archetype encounters with conflicts and challenges to explore questions such as “How do archetypes reflect the human experience?” and “How do archetypes reveal human strengths and weaknesses?”

Ideal for gifted classrooms or gifted pull-out groups, the unit features texts from Sandra Cisneros, Louis Untermeyer, Rudyard Kipling, Emily Dickinson, and Maya Angelou; biographies of Oprah Winfrey, Mother Teresa, Jackie Robinson, Sally Ride, and Lin-Manuel Miranda; a speech from President Ronald Reagan; a novel study featuring Wonder by R. J. Palacio and/or Counting by 7s by Holly Goldberg Sloan; and art from Pieter Bruegel.

Space, Structure, and Story: Integrated Science and ELA Lessons for Gifted and Advanced Learners in Grades 4-6 (Advanced Cirriculum From Vanderbilt University’s Program for Talented Youth) (1st Edition)

Winner of the 2017 NAGC Curriculum Studies Award

Space, Structure, and Story integrates Earth and space science with science fiction and nonfiction texts, poetry, and art. This unit, developed by Vanderbilt University’s Programs for Talented Youth, is aligned to the Common Core State Standards and Next Generation Science Standards. Students explore advanced science and ELA content through the lens of structure―its parts, purpose, and function.

Mobius strips, the hero’s journey, dystopian fiction, black holes, Einstein’s relativity, stars, and moons are just a few of the captivating in-depth topics explored through accelerated content, engaging activities, and differentiated tasks.

Ideal for gifted classrooms or gifted pull-out groups, the unit features poetry from Carl Sandburg, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and C. S. Lewis; art from M. C. Escher, Vincent Van Gogh, Claude Monet, and Salvador Dali; a novel study featuring A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle; short stories from Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury; speeches from President John F. Kennedy and President Barack Obama; and informational texts about gravity, orbits, and black holes.

Interactions in Ecology and Literature: Integrated Science and ELA Lessons for Gifted and Advanced Learners in Grades 2-3 (1st Edition)

Winner of the 2015 NAGC Curriculum Studies Award

Interactions in Ecology and Literature integrates ecology with the concept of interactions and the reading of fictional and informational texts. This unit, developed by Vanderbilt University’s Programs for Talented Youth, is aligned to the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Next Generation Science Standards.

Students will research questions such as “Should animals be kept in zoos?” and “Should humans intervene to control overpopulation of species?” They will examine relationships among living things and the environment as well as relationships between literary elements in texts through accelerated content, engaging activities, and differentiated tasks.

Ideal for gifted classrooms or gifted pull-out groups, the unit features fictional texts from Lynne Cherry, Katherine Applegate, and Jacqueline Woodson; art from Mark Rothko and Georges Seurat; informational texts about deforestation and a variety of animals; biographies about Michael Jordan, J. K. Rowling, and Walt Disney; and videos about food chains, food webs, and more.