While educators in gifted education and general education appear to share many goals, there are inadequacies in the implementation of complex educational practices that meet the needs of gifted students in general education classrooms and the goals of educational reform. This paper presents a theoretical framework, Teaching for Intellectual and Emotional Learning (TIEL), that connects intellectual and social-emotional elements from the conceptual foundations of both gifted and general education and scaffolds the learning of complex teaching practices. The paper includes historical contexts of both fields, a review of literature that indicates the need for a unifying framework in general teacher education, a description of the theoretical foundations of the TIEL model, and examples of classroom implementation. (Contains 2 figures.)