What I love about students who are gifted is that many of them can be so creative, and think much differently than their average learner peers. Sometimes that creativity doesn’t always work well with others. Sometimes due to their unique social and emotional needs such as perfectionism, multi-potentiality, and others can sometimes make working with a partner or a small group difficult.
As a teacher, and a believer in developing 21st century skills, I had to at times, nudge and prod my students who were gifted to work together. I would work to develop relationships with my students. I also created an environment where all of my students could get to know each other, and start to build safe relationships with each other. Once this started, my students would begin to talk about what they liked, and what they had in common.
What I liked most about my classes was once I had my students collaborating on projects the discussions my students had were so productive. It was great to see my students interacting with each other. They would learn from each other how they learn, think, and process problems.
What changed a lot of my teaching was a book titled Project-Based Learning for Gifted Students: A Handbook for the 21st-Century Classroom by Todd Stanley. His book helped shape my idea of collaboration with students who are gifted. If you haven’t read this book, I would suggest getting it.
After reading this book, I started to format some of my units in the same style as Todd Stanley described. Feel free to check the out in the link provided.
How do you foster collaboration in your gifted classroom? What can be gained from students who are gifted collaborating with each other in different projects? If you aren’t incorporating 21st century skills in your classroom, what is keeping you from it?
Ramblings of a Gifted Teacher 
I really appreciated your thoughts on this topic. I read the same book and found myself also changing the way in which I was instructing my gifted students. I would also look at the book Beautiful Risks: Having the Courage to Teach and Learn Creatively by Ronald A. Beghotte. As we transition in and out of teaching at a distance, finding ways to teach in a project-based system has become more complicated, but this book has helped open my ideas as to ways of engaging my gifted students. This seems to have promoted the social and emotional skills that “typical” project-based learning has supported in my classroom.