What is Culturally-sustaining pedagogy

Most gifted students today receive their education in the general education environment through differentiation (NAGC, 2020). With the push for standards-based education, many experts worry that gifted learners unintentionally fail to advance in their learning. Gifted students need to be taught in an environment that pushes them to interact with content in complex ways and motivates them to show their learning through engaging activities and tasks. One-way teachers can meet the needs of gifted learners is through using differentiation. Teachers can differentiate how they group students and the time they allocate to certain portions of a lesson. Content can be differentiated by asking gifted students to examine topics through categories of depth and complexity. Overall, gifted students should have opportunities for further learning and challenging curriculum in areas of interest, time to work independently on passion projects, accelerated learning, homogenous collaboration, and instructional delivery that encourages critical and deep thinking.