So going carefully through the github pages documentation seeking for any solution using the offered functionalty it seems what you are looking for might have been nice but is not available, maybe the closest thing is to have two repositories for example username.github.io/production and another one that is forking it like username.github.io/development and working on it while pushing changes back to the production one using pull requests or any technique you would prefer
And if you like you can check out my post and see some techniques of altering your websites, as well jekyll has a _drafts directory which allows staging of a post and seeing it before being posted.