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.

Grades 4-

Winner of NAGC's 2021 Book of the Year Award

This must-have resource:

• 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.

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Perspectives of Power explores the nature of power in literature, historical documents, poetry, and art.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.

Grades 6-8

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.

Grades 6-8

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.

Outlining a step-by-step guide for the coaching process, this valuable resource equips gifted and talented coaches with tools to support teachers to meet the needs and reveal talent among gifted and high-potential students through differentiation in the regular education classroom.

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.

Grades 6-8

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.

Grades 6-8

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.

Outlining a step-by-step guide for the coaching process, this valuable resource equips gifted and talented coaches with tools to support teachers to meet the needs and reveal talent among gifted and high-potential students through differentiation in the regular education classroom.