Keeping the Landmarks in Sight: Challenging Advanced Learners with Meaning, Depth, and Rigor

Advanced curriculum and instruction serve as one of the essential pillars of services for high-ability learners. Through access to advanced learning opportunities, students have opportunities to grow and learn not only content, but also more about themselves as learners. But in our discussions of ensuring challenging experiences, what do we really mean by the terms we use, such as meaning, depth, and rigor? And how do we think about engaging advanced learners in a variety of settings with these emphases? In this session, we explore several core strategies for promoting depth in thinking, supporting rigorous exploration of the disciplines, and promoting opportunities for authentic, meaningful connections.

Tools for the Traveler: Inviting and Encouraging Student Inquiry

Inquiry-oriented learning provides spaces and supports for all learners to access challenge and pursue questions. Through embedded thinking skills and targeted engagement strategies, inquiry invites students to demonstrate potential that might not emerge in other learning approaches. Using a broadened application of the 5E inquiry model, this session explores ways of applying elements of inquiry across content areas to support learners in engagement with challenging tasks.

X Marks the Spot? Considering Goals and Different Types of Success

 High academic potential exists in students from all different backgrounds, but it is not always recognized or nurtured in the classroom, especially among students from traditionally underserved populations. Yet attention to high potential is critical for helping students access opportunities for advanced learning and the supports they need. Building a learning context that allows high potential to emerge and to grow requires high-quality curriculum and instruction and knowledgeable, perceptive teachers who seek and nurture advanced learning behaviors. This session focuses on key questions for reflection about finding and fostering high potential.

Questions and Answers and More Questions – Supporting Rich Discussion in the Classroom

Educators have long emphasized the importance of high-level and high-quality questioning and discussion as an approach to challenging advanced learners. Yet, what do we really mean when we talk about this type of questioning, and what does it look like in action? And how can we work on doing it as well as possible to promote high levels of student thinking? This session explores some of what we know about asking questions, listening to answers, and fostering more questions as key components of engaging strong thinking and discourse in the classroom. We will explore applications of questioning research from inside and outside the field of gifted education, and we will discuss ways of encouraging professional reflection related to questioning practices to differentiate instruction and add rigor to the curriculum.