giftedstudents
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Gifted Students Need Gifted Peers: It’s About More Than Academics
Beth Smith, M. Ed. |#smithingifted | Gifted Education | Learning & Innovation When we talk about meeting the needs of gifted students, the conversation often focuses on curriculum, acceleration, differentiation, and academic challenge. But there is another important component of gifted education that sometimes gets overlooked. Gifted students need opportunities to interact with other gifted…
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🕵️ Why I Love the Detective Badge in My Gifted Classroom
In the #smithingifted classroom, Detective Badges aren’t just for fun—they represent a mindset of curiosity, investigation, and evidence-based thinking. Students learn to look closer, ask better questions, analyze evidence, solve problems, and defend their conclusions across reading, STEM, coding, history, and more. The badge may be small, but its message is powerful: Don’t just answer—investigate,…
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#smithingifted Teacher Lab: Where Teaching Ideas Get Tested
The #smithingifted Teacher Lab is a place where teaching ideas move from theory into real classrooms. I’ll share the successes, challenges, surprises, and adjustments that come from using gifted education, STEM, robotics, technology, and creative-thinking strategies with real students. But the Teacher Lab isn’t just about my classroom—teachers who use #smithingifted curriculum can share their…
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✍️ When Messy Handwriting Meets a Gifted Brain: Why Cursive May Help
Gifted students often have ideas that move faster than their handwriting. For some students, cursive can help by making writing feel smoother, more rhythmic, and more automatic because letters connect instead of being formed one at a time. Cursive may also encourage students to slow down, notice patterns, and pay closer attention to letter formation.…
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The Goal Is Not the Marble: How Turing Tumble Builds Productive Struggle
By Beth Smith, M. Ed.. | #smithingifted A student releases the first marble. It rolls down the board, hits a ramp, changes direction—and completely misses the path the student expected it to take. The student looks at the board. Then at me. Then back at the board. “It didn’t work.” This is the moment when…
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🤖 AI Detectives: Teaching Gifted Students to Think With AI—Not Surrender Their Thinking to It
By Beth Smith, M. Ed. | #smithingifted Artificial intelligence is quickly becoming part of the world our students live in. They can ask AI to explain a math problem, generate a story, brainstorm a science project, summarize information, create an image, or answer a research question in seconds. But there is one enormous problem: AI…
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🧠 #smithingifted Socratic Seminar: Step by Step
Beth Smith, M. Ed. | #smithingifted STEP 1: Choose a Question Worth Arguing About This is the most important step. Do not start with a question that has one obvious answer. Avoid: What did the character do? Instead, ask something like: Was the character’s decision justified? Is progress always an improvement? Which is more important:…
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Helping Gifted Learners Become Better Thinkers: SEL, Productive Struggle, and Real-World Problem Solving
By Beth Smith, M. Ed. | #smithingufted Gifted students need more than harder assignments. They need opportunities to understand how they think, recognize what happens when learning becomes difficult, manage frustration, make mistakes, consider different perspectives, and keep going when the answer is not immediately obvious. That is exactly what I wanted this curriculum to…