Jill Williford Wurman is Grayson’s Director of Research, a position which requires her to be familiar with the most current understandings on gifted education topics relevant to the Grayson community, including academic performance, pedagogy, social-emotional development, longitudinal outcomes, and best practices in gifted education. She synthesizes research findings for Grayson’s administrators, faculty, and parents so that the school’s practices can continue to reflect the best practices in gifted education. She has presented at the World Council on Gifted and Talented Children’s biennial conferences as well as at NAGC, Supporting Emotional Needs of the Gifted (SENG), the Pennsylvania Association for Gifted Education (PAGE), at MIT’s SPARK and SPLASH programs, and at the American Psychological Association annual convention. Recently, she co-authored a chapter for the University of Denver’s Perspectives in Gifted Education series: Legal Issues (volume 7).
Ms. Wurman holds an M.A. in English Language & Literature from the University of Pennsylvania and an A.B. in English from Princeton University, whence she graduated Phi Beta Kappa; she has also studied literature at both Oxford and Cambridge Universities in England. She has worked as a publishing consultant and a literary agent, and leverages her personal passion for literature and books in her role as Grayson’s “Ersatz Librarian,” in which role she is responsible for the “care and feeding” of the more than 10,000 books in the school’s ever-growing collection.
Ms. Wurman has taught high school English and also a course of her own design for exceptionally gifted students at Duke University’s Talent Identification Program (Duke TIP). At Grayson, she teaches creative writing workshops and is delighted to be a weekly storytime reader for Pre-K and K-1 students in the library.
A self-professed “research nerd” who jumps at any opportunity to sit in a classroom and learn, Ms. Wurman lives with her husband, two children, and a raft of orange pens at the ready for editing in Bryn Mawr.
