The Parallel Curriculum (Multimedia Kit): A Multimedia Kit for Professional Development

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.

Deborah E. Burns began her teaching career in 1973 as a Title I reading and mathematics teacher in a rural K-8 school in Michigan. She has worked as a K-8 classroom teacher, as a middle school language arts specialist, and as a program coordinator for a seven-district consortium. She has taught in preschool, summer, and Saturday programs, in resource rooms, a psychiatric ward, an orphanage, and at the university level. She has written grants, professional development modules, journal articles, assessments, program evaluations, curriculum units, and three books. She has also designed and implemented classroom-based research studies and conducted program and teacher evaluations. For the past 15 years, she has been employed by the University of Connecticut’s NEAG School of Education as a program director, an assistant professor, a research scientist, associate professor in residence, and most recently in Cheshire as curriculum coordinator for the district. She is an active member of the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) and has been a board member for the past five years. She is a member of the Curriculum Division and is co-chair of the annual Curriculum Awards Competition. Burns earned her bachelor’s degree in elementary education from Michigan State University in 1973. She pursued her graduate studies at Western Michigan University in clinical reading instruction and received her MEd from Ashland College in 1978 in remedial reading, administration, and supervision. She pursued additional graduate studies at Ohio State University involving administration, special education, and gifted education and received her PhD in educational psychology and gifted education from the University of Connecticut in 1987.

Cindy A. Strickland has been a teacher for twenty-five years and has worked with students of all ages, from kindergarten to master’s degree. A member of the ASCD Differentiation Faculty Cadre, Cindy works closely with Carol Ann Tomlinson and has coauthored several books and articles with her. In the past eight years, Cindy’s consulting work has taken her to forty-six states, five provinces, and three continents where she has provided workshops on topics relating to differentiation, the Parallel Curriculum Model (PCM), and gifted education.
Cindy’s publications include Staff Development Guide for the Parallel Curriculum; The Parallel Curriculum Model, 2nd edition; The Parallel Curriculum Model in the Classroom: Applications Across the Content Areas; and In Search of the Dream: Designing Schools and Classrooms That Work for High Potential Students from Diverse Cultural Backgrounds.

Publications in differentiation include Professional Development for Differentiated Instruction: An ASCD Toolkit, Exploring Differentiated Instruction, Tools for High-Quality Differentiated Instruction: An ASCD Toolkit, the ASCD online course Success with Differentiation, the book Differentiation in Practice: A Resource Guide for Differentiating Curriculum, Grades 9–12, and a unit in the book Differentiation in Practice: A Resource Guide for Differentiating Curriculum, Grades 5–9.