Many teachers struggle with meeting the needs of their most talented science students. How can these gifted students be challenged and learn as fast as they are able, especially in a classroom with a wide variety of abilities and interest in science? Many excellent teachers have found the answers in differentiating instruction by adding the inquiry method to their repertoire of science teaching methods. Differentiation begins by recognizing that students start with diverse levels of readiness. Given this reality, the teacher plans instruction to vary content, the way it is learned, and student products. For example, in a chemistry unit focusing on mixtures and solutions, some advanced students might be ready to work with the concept of the mole, while most of the class learns about relative concentration and proportionality. Alternately, some students might be ready to design their own procedure for an experiment to measure relative concentration of solutions, while others use a teacher-generated procedure. Differentiation attempts to address the needs of each student, rather than assume that "one-size-fits-all." The inquiry method can be summarized as "learning science by doing science." Students employ progressively more sophisticated processes and technical skills as they learn increasingly more complicated scientific concepts and principles. It is essential that at every step, the learner be provided with not only a problem to solve but also with appropriate guidance. Direct instruction is generally defined as a method where the teacher presents the same content material to the whole class at once, sometimes with graphic aids like whiteboards or PowerPoint slides and sometimes with a demonstration to illustrate the concept. For gifted students, the pace of the instruction may move far too slowly, may ignore fascinating but difficult concepts, and may neglect entirely the opportunity to try out new or creative ideas. Effective direct instruction clearly has a role in science education, but in too many places direct instruction is used exclusively and perhaps exhaustively. In this article, the authors describe ways on how to switch from purely direct instruction to incorporating directed inquiry and discuss the "Cycle of Inquiry Lesson Model" which is well suited to inquiry science. (Contains 6 online resources.)