The Parallel Curriculum: A Design to Develop High Potential and Challenge High-Ability Learners

Plan high-quality curriculum so all students reach their full potential!

Offering a new perspective on developing curriculum and instruction, the Parallel Curriculum Model is meant for use in both heterogeneous and homogeneous classroom settings. Whether students are working at a basic level of skill and understanding or at the highest ability ready for more complex learning, teachers can use this model with confidence.

The Parallel Curriculum Model offers four parallel approaches to curriculum development to ensure rich curriculum for all learners, and illustrates Ascending Intellectual Demand as a means of extending the intensity of challenge as students develop along a continuum toward expertise in learning. Clearly, education benefits from a variety of models from which teachers and schools can select to most appropriately address the learning needs of students. Here, the authors illustrate how use of the parallels shape curriculum for students and the ongoing professional growth of educators themselves.

With major contributions from Deborah E. Burns, Jann H. Leppien, and Jeanne H. Purcell, The Parallel Curriculum delivers the guidelines needed for developing and implementing effective, valuable curriculum for all classrooms.

See also: The Parallel Curriculum (Multimedia Kit)

Carol Ann Tomlinson‘s career as an educator includes 21 years as a public school teacher. She taught in high school, preschool, and middle school, and worked with heterogeneous classes as well as special classes for students identified as gifted and students with learning difficulties. Her public school career also included 12 years as a program administrator of special services for advanced and struggling learners. She was Virginia’s Teacher of the Year in 1974. She is professor of educational leadership, foundations, and pol­icy at the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education; a researcher for the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented; a codirec­tor of the University of Virginia’s Summer Institute on Academic Diversity; and president of the National Association for Gifted Children. Special interests through­out her career have included curriculum and instruction for advanced learners and struggling learners, effective instruction in heterogeneous settings, and bridging the fields of general education and gifted education. She is author of over 100 articles, book chapters, books, and other professional development materials, including How to Differentiate Instruction in Mixed-Ability Classrooms, The Differentiated Classroom: Responding to the Needs of All Learners, Leadership for Differentiated Schools and Classrooms, the facilitator’s guide for the video staff development sets called Differentiating Instruction, and At Work in the Differentiated Classroom, as well as a professional inquiry kit on differentiation. She works throughout the United States and abroad with teachers whose goal is to develop more responsive heterogeneous classrooms.

Sandra N. Kaplan has been a teacher and administrator of gifted programs in an urban school district in California. Currently, she is clinical professor in learning and instruction at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education. She has authored articles and books on the nature and scope of differenti­ated curriculum for gifted students. Her primary area of concern is modifying the core and differentiated curriculum to meet the needs of inner-city, urban, gifted learners. She is a past president of the California Association for the Gifted (CAG) and the National Asso­ciation for Gifted Children (NAGC). She has been nationally recognized for her con­tributions to gifted education.

Joseph S. Renzulli is professor of educational psychology at the University of Connecticut, where he also serves as director of the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented. His research has focused on the identification and development of creativity and giftedness in young people and on organizational models and curricular strategies for total school improvement. A focus of his work has been on applying the strategies of gifted education to the improvement of learning for all students. He is a fellow in the American Psychological Association and was a consultant to the White House Task Force on Education of the Gifted and Talented. He was recently designated a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor at the University of Con­necticut. Although he has obtained more than $20 million in research grants, he lists as his proudest professional accomplishments the UConn Mentor Connection program for gifted young students and the summer Confratute program at UConn, which began in 1978 and has served thousands of teachers and administrators from around the world.

Jeanne H. Purcell is the consultant to the Connecticut State Depart­ment of Education for gifted and talented education. She is also director of UConn Mentor Connection, a nationally recognized summer mentorship program for talented teenagers that is part of the NEAG Center for Talent Development at the University of Con­necticut. Prior to her work at the State Department of Connecticut, she was an administrator for Rocky Hill Public Schools (CT); a pro­gram specialist with the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented, where she worked collaboratively with other researchers on national issues related to high-achieving young people; an instructor of Teaching the Talented, a graduate-level program in gifted education; and a staff developer to school districts across the country and Canada. She has been an En­glish teacher, community service coordinator, and teacher of the gifted, K-12, for 18 years in Connecticut school districts and has published many articles that have appeared in Educational Leadership, Gifted Child Quarterly, Roeper Review, Educa­tional and Psychological Measurement, National Association of Secondary School Principals’ Bulletin, Our Children: The National PTA Magazine, Parenting for High Potential, and Journal for the Education of the Gifted. She is active in the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) and serves on the Awards Committee and the Curriculum Committee of NAGC, for which she is the co-chair for the annual Curriculum Awards Competition.

Jann Leppien served as a gifted and talented coordinator in Montana prior to attending the University of Connecticut, where she earned her doctorate in gifted education and worked as a research assistant at the National Research Center for the Gifted and Talented. She has been a teacher for 24 years, spending 14 of those years working as a classroom teacher, enrichment specialist, and coordinator of the Schoolwide Enrichment Model in Montana. She is past president of the Montana Association for Gifted and Tal­ented Education. Currently, she is an associate professor in the School of Education at the University of Great Falls in Montana. Leppien teaches graduate and under­graduate courses in gifted education, educational research, curriculum and assess­ment, creativity, and methods courses in math, science, and social studies. Her research interests include teacher collaboration, curriculum design, underachievement, and planning instruction for advanced learners. Leppien works as a consultant to teachers in the field of gifted education and as a national trainer for the Talents Unlimited Program. She is coauthor of The Multiple Menu Model: A Par­allel Guide for Developing Differentiated Curriculum. She is active in the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC), serving as a board member and newsletter editor of the Curriculum Division, and a board member of the Association for the Education of Gifted Underachieving Students.