We can talk the RtI talk in our support of tiered services for gifted students. We can talk the 21st century learning talk through our support of critical and creative thinking, communication, and problem solving. In this session, participants rethink how to challenge gifted middle school learners by seeing how a new vision of curriculum for 21st century learners works with these initiatives. In this session, participants learn how complexity and rigor exists in the rigor/relevance/relatedness/recursion framework. This framework provides an organizational design and tools to challenge gifted middle school learners. Actual lesson plans demonstrate how this framework works.